The baby business is booming. Yet, this boom of the 21st century does not reflect spiking birth rates, but rather the flourishing business of surrogacy. And while we often see celebrities endorse this medical procedure, commercial surrogacy is far different from what we know from the limelight of Chrissy Teigen or Khloe Kardashian. What was initially a modern development for family formation is now spiraling into a disorderly business that resembles a dystopian spawned straight out of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Surrogacy, the practice where a woman carries a baby intended for prospective parents, is longstanding. With increasing demand from infertile and same-sex couples in recent decades, surrogacy is rapidly growing as a transnational business with modern developments of insemination, air travel, and online marketing. By 2032, this global industry is projected to be worth $129 billion compared to its worth of $14 billion in 2022.
For an industry as fast-growing as surrogacy, it’s difficult for developing market regulations to keep up — let alone global policing. In countries like China, Germany and France where commercial surrogacy is illegal, the demand from prospective parents extends abroad to foreign surrogacy hubs. Before the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine served as one of only a handful of international surrogacy hubs permitting foreign clients, with over half of their demand from China. Other countries like India and Thailand also served as international hubs before the government prohibited foreign clients from entering the market.
As seen with other industries, illegalization often leads to underground operations. Gray markets with loose laws see just as concerning consequences. In countries like Guatemala, Laos and Kenya, commercialized surrogacy is neither banned nor permitted. This weak system edges on the border of exploitation, as surrogates receive little to no medical or legal protection. In Kenya for example, low-cost surrogacy agencies recruit women to be surrogates in exchange for monetary payment, but many women undergo this procedure without the promised amount. This unregulated business is just rubbing salt in the wound of a country in which 530 women die for every 100,000 births.
In parts of the world where commercialized surrogacy is a dystopian reality, women and girls are trafficked into the business and aren’t even compensated. And as global demand increases, it calls into the question of regulating a growing market in which the womb is the workplace. With healthcare and human rights all tangled up in this industry, regulation is a heavy challenge that demands global cooperation. It doesn’t do any good to strictly prohibit commercialized surrogacy entirely, given its inevitability. Rather, a clear global policing system over the surrogacy market is vital to ensure that rights are respected for both the surrogate and intended parents. The tightening and creation of surrogacy laws are by no means a simple task, but they are necessary to prevent a real-life spinoff of Margaret Atwood’s cautionary tale.
