An Industry on the Defensive
Presented to the UN General Assembly in October 2025 by Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, the report also recommends that, pending abolition, a legal and political framework for surrogacy should be created.
The industry appears nervous in the face of calls to abolish a reproductive method that is not only a global multibillion-dollar business, from which the experts involved also profit substantially, but also helps secure access to human eggs and embryos for research around the world.
In practice, the spread of surrogacy is helping to erode existing national bans on egg and embryo donation. At the same time, the targeted overproduction of eggs and embryos during surrogacy procedures ensures a steady supply for research laboratories. All these sources of human genetic material could dry up or slip into illegality if a global ban on the practice were introduced.
The initiative by ASPIRE and its allies is clearly aimed at whitewashing surrogacy in order to blunt momentum toward a ban. By formulating minimum standards, the sector hopes to defuse the main accusations against it.
The wording was correspondingly grand. With these “truly landmark guidelines”, the groups said they wanted to promote awareness and avoidance of human trafficking, consider the welfare of children born through surrogacy and examine the consent and support arrangements for surrogate mothers, including their physical and psychosocial well-being. They also said they wanted to discuss the physical and psychological condition of intended parents and their ability to raise children born through surrogacy into adulthood.
The list reveals, quite unintentionally, the risks and side effects that the sector has so far largely ignored. Almost everything now presented as requiring regulation has, in fact, been left largely unregulated until now. The industry simply had no scruples about doing business anyway, while knowing perfectly well how many unanswered questions, problems and rights violations its own practices were causing.
Only now, with the business as a whole under threat, is the fate of the women and children involved to be tied to ethical standards. The new maxim is evidently this: better to simulate ethical standards and voluntary commitments than to have the entire trade shut down. So far, so bad.
Attempts to regulate surrogacy rather than abolish it are not new, but they have consistently failed. There are several reasons for this. For many years, legal experts have published repeated initiatives and proposals on how the practice might be regulated even on a global market, so that the accusation of human rights violations can be neutralized.
Here, a fundamental dilemma emerges that cannot be resolved. Can human trafficking be made ethically acceptable by securing it through contracts and laws that improve the working conditions and medical care of exploited women, as well as the legal status of the children produced in the process? Cynically, one might object that the same question surely mattered to every slave market.
Is it really enough to pay a woman better for the child taken from her, give her health insurance and house her in a pleasant apartment? Is the practice made decent if the child is guaranteed a passport and citizenship, regardless of who buys the child and where the child was produced? Would it have been enough to paint the walls of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in bright colors, so that slavery would have been only half as bad?
That is why all previous attempts, including well-intentioned ones, to standardize the legally chaotic conditions of the global surrogacy business have rightly failed.
Poisoned Solutions
Years ago, an expert group at the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) produced an extensive analysis of how the surrogacy business could be regulated not only in Europe, but worldwide. It is the same institution that drafted the globally recognized standards on cross-border child adoptions in the 1990s, thereby making a major contribution to curbing illegal adoptions. The proposed surrogacy standards were expected by the end of 2024. To this day, no final agreement has been reached.
What looks honorable and well intentioned at first glance turns out, on closer inspection, to be a poisoned solution for several reasons. First, it would create an international regulatory framework that simply bypasses national legislation. The sovereignty of individual nation states would be undermined on an ethically explosive issue.
The second reason is even more explosive. Any regulation of surrogacy would also amount to a blank check, an endorsement and tolerance of a practice that always ignores the rights of women and children. It bears repeating: there are no human rights lite and no small human rights for small human beings. Adapting to the international standards of influential states or supranational institutions generally means accepting the most progressive countries as the benchmark and sweeping aside all concerns.
That can quickly land you on the wrong side of history. There were times when more than a few representatives of enlightened humanity considered slavery and human trafficking entirely acceptable. Where would we be today if that had been recognized as an “international standard” rather than clearly and unequivocally condemned?
The Illusion of Feasibility
Even experts criticize the HCCH proposals for mainly clarifying the legal relationship between the clients and their home countries and strengthening the rights of those clients, rather than the legal position of the women used in the process. It would also mean recognizing contracts that treat the child as an object, not as a human being.
To prevent real abuse of human genetic material worldwide, reliable central genetic databases for egg, sperm and embryo donations would also be needed across the globe, with rogue states required to submit their data as well.
Free legal representation would also be needed for surrogate mothers worldwide, so that they could enforce their rights against agencies or clients across borders. Even with a great deal of good will, it is illusory to believe that this dirty business could ever be washed clean with “ethical standards”. This is especially true because the evident entanglement of human trafficking, prostitution and organ trafficking would not be eliminated and might even be reinforced. All that is needed is a clever use of the cloak of legality.
The attempt to “heal” an injustice by declaring it legal changes nothing about the facts. A woman is used as an incubator and a child is sold. Even if all the harmful side effects of the market could be removed in practice, which is impossible, the ethical dilemma would remain: a child is still taken from its mother, the woman’s health and in some cases her life are put at risk, and a child is sold into the hands of strangers like an object.
Trapped in the Adult Perspective
In 2021, International Social Service (ISS) also tried to present a regulatory proposal with stronger women’s rights and, above all, stronger children’s rights through the so-called Verona Principles. It worked with experts from UNICEF and the HCCH and emphasized legally sound and altruistic arrangements.
This attempt, too, was immediately criticized by other experts, international initiatives such as the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (ICASM) and the Casablanca Declaration, as well as feminist groups such as FiLiA.
All the proposals and papers produced so far remain trapped in the adult perspective and discuss only the design of a non-existent right to a child. In all these considerations, however, the consent of one essential person is missing: the child. That consent is always silently assumed.
Child trafficking does not become acceptable because a child is handed a passport on the pillow and a registry extract listing the real names of the sperm donor, the genetic mother and the birth mother.
