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In the 1990s, India became the undisputed hub of commercial surrogacy; the country legalized the practice in 2002, as parents also flocked there for low-cost I.V.F. packages. But over time, scandals mounted — reports of abused and unpaid surrogates, sick or abandoned babies and mixed-up embryos — and in 2012, India began to regulate the practice. So, the industry adapted, hopscotching to Thailand, Mexico and Nepal, all of which soon experienced their own controversies. After a 2015 earthquake stranded dozens of Indian surrogates and newborns in Nepal, Israel airlifted 26 babies, leaving the surrogates behind; Nepal banned the practice soon afterward. India and Thailand banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners in 2015. In 2016, Cambodia followed, as did the sole state in Mexico that had allowed it, completely cutting off the trade.
The market reconstituted in Russia, which became popular with intended parents, particularly from China. In 2015, the Chinese Communist Party amended its one-child policy to allow all married couples to have two children, while the collapse of the Russian ruble, coupled with the rising incomes of China’s growing middle class, made Russia an attractive destination. The demand for Asian eggs there grew so great, women were often stimulated locally — in Thailand, Taiwan, China or Kyrgyzstan — flown to cities in Russia, operated on and then sent back on a plane. After a surrogate-born baby died of unknown causes, Russia banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners in 2022, leaning heavily on tropes of “traditional values.” That same year, the country banned egg donations in surrogate pregnancies for its own citizens, pushing Russians to join the throngs of couples seeking treatment abroad.
After the Russian market closed, the influx adapted again, flowing into Ukraine, which had already attracted intended parents from America and Europe after it legalized the practice in 2002. Ukraine, home to a population of 41 million rife with blue-eyed blondes — the ultimate stereotypically desired phenotype — quickly became a hub of both eggs and surrogacy, with nearly 3,000 donor cycles and more than 2,000 children born to surrogates each year before the war. Unlike many other countries, Ukraine amended its regulations in 2013 to prohibit women from selling eggs or being a surrogate unless they already had one healthy child. The change was primarily a marketing gimmick guaranteeing the donors’ or surrogates’ “proven” fertility, but it also happened to protect against some of the medical and ethical concerns tied to participating in these markets, including future infertility.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in the middle of the night in February 2022, leaving foreign parents stranded far from their infants, the tiny former Soviet state of Georgia experienced an avalanche of interest. The rush was overwhelming. The country simply did not have enough wombs, so clinics and agencies began importing them.
In general, surrogates spoke about their own situations almost as if they were property. I sat with two Kenyan surrogates who explained their understanding of the system — that they would be “sold” from recruiter to agency to clinic. When I asked them how they would be OK with this, they said it was better than being abused as housemaids in Dubai. From a surrogate’s perspective of her rights in this process, once she arrives in Georgia, she can expect to undergo three embryo transfers before the agency will send her home. If a surrogate arrives and a clinic disqualifies her in the initial health check, or after one transfer, the agency might send her home, but more likely it would try to find a different clinic to accept her. This is foremost a business, and it costs the agency money to bring her over, house her and feed her, after all.
Most of the 30 women I spoke with who had become or tried to become surrogates in Georgia had trouble communicating or advocating for themselves.
As I was leaving their apartment, a coordinator called and threatened the women for what they had told me. One of the other surrogates in the apartment had reported on them. Days later, they said the clinic warned them it would withhold payment to any surrogate who spoke to me if anything negative about them were published.
Surrogates had their horror stories, while intended parents had theirs. There were important facts that agencies had failed to disclose to them — like that their surrogate was a teenager. Or the couple who showed up at the hospital to discover that their surrogate had no teeth. There were children born with birth defects that the intended parents believed were covered up by the clinics, or babies who died soon after birth. I heard stories about the wrong donor eggs being used, surrogates inducing early labor to speed up the process or even aborting embryo transfers so they could move from clinic to clinic, collecting payment for each transfer without going through with the pregnancy.
The Georgian Parliament was poised to regulate the industry in 2023, but the draft law mysteriously died.
“This is a multimillion-dollar business,” Baia Pataraia, the director of Georgia’s leading women’s NGO, Sapari, which represented the women, told me. “Somebody is making lots of money, and that’s why commercial surrogacy with very few regulations and nonexistent monitoring remains. If they wanted to regulate it, they could.”
An agent who worked in Tbilisi until recently, and who requested anonymity because of her ongoing involvement in the industry worldwide, told me she was “99.9 percent” certain that some women in Georgia were having eggs retrieved without their consent. Egg theft happens all over the world — whether it’s unauthorized retrievals or misuse of the eggs retrieved with consent.
It’s not unusual for survivors of trafficking to be trafficked again. I asked Eve and Eye whether they would compare their experience in Georgia with the one they had in Bahrain, where promises of massage work led to forced prostitution.
They immediately declared that Georgia was worse than Bahrain: It was so isolating, as they didn’t know who was their friend and who was secretly reporting on them.
But worse, in Georgia they really had no idea what had been done to their bodies. Sex work was self-explanatory, but white pills, injections and suppositories could be anything.
Source: The Dark Side of the Global Surrogacy and Fertility Industry – The New York Times
