Surrogacy is comparable to prostitution and should be banned, the UN’s most senior expert on violence against women and girls has urged.
Reem Alsalem, a United Nations special rapporteur, submitted a report to the body on Friday calling for an end to the practice, calling it a “system of exploitation and violence”.
“I see a lot of similarities between the system of prostitution and the system of surrogacy,” Ms Alsalem told The Telegraph. “[Surrogacy] is clearly responsible for inflicting large-scale violence, abuse and exploitation on women and children.”
Ms Alsalem argued that there had been a “rush to normalise” surrogacy arrangements in recent years, driven by powerful lobbying groups that have created a false impression of the practice.
“There’s a very embellished view that it’s altruistic, that it’s a sign of love, that you’re doing something amazing because you’re providing an opportunity for others that don’t have the chance to become parents, but there’s very little talk about the dark side of surrogacy,” she said.
“Humans do not have a human right to have children. This argument that you have a right to form a family, and therefore you have a right to rent out a womb and then remove a child from their mother, it’s just insane how this has been allowed to happen.”
The global surrogacy market is booming. It was valued at $14.4bn in 2023 and is expected to rise to $96.6bn by 2033. However, as little as 10 per cent of the profits go to mothers who bear the physical and emotional risks of surrogacy, the report found, while intermediaries line their pockets. First-time surrogates typically earn around $50,000 (£37,000), according to Circle Surrogacy.
Mothers also often experience “immense psychological suffering that they didn’t anticipate,” she said, recalling speaking to women about “how dehumanised they felt, how invisible their own needs and well-being became, and how trapped they felt also in this surrogacy arrangement”.
At the same time, she said, surrogates are sometimes referred to as “ovens” and “gestational carriers”. “Mothers are presented as vessels that don’t matter, giving birth to children who are also commodified,” she said.
Ms Alsalem insists the only viable solution is an international ban on so-called “reproductive tourism”, where couples enlist surrogates from foreign countries with lax rules and where poverty is sometimes a key driver.
The report outlines examples of women in Cambodia reportedly being detained and forced to give birth in handcuffs, and of around 100 women in Georgia kept in confinement and having their eggs forcibly removed.
[C]ountries such as Australia, France and Spain have recently discussed relaxing their surrogacy laws, Ms Alsalem said, prompting concern about the practice being fast-tracked without proper consultation.
It’s a bit like bio slavery too.
Simply grotesque really. This is not a sister bearing a child for her infertile sibling where she will be an aunt and still in the child’s life. This is akin to the NAZI SS breeding sites and the concept of ‘Lebensborn’.