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Surrogacy’s $15 Billion Boom Raises Hard Moral Questions

Surrogacy’s $15 Billion Boom Raises Hard Moral Questions

Last updated on: September 25, 2026 at 1:21 pm by Richard Ostling

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Surrogacy’s $15 Billion Boom Raises Hard Moral Questions 2026-09-25T13:21:37-04:00 Richard Ostling

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Ethical quandaries with both “white-glove” America and foreign trafficking / Juan Encalada @ unsplash.com

The current surrogacy situation is confusing and fast-evolving. Most of Europe still outlaws hiring women to give birth on behalf of clients, while this practice expands in the U.S. and other nations. Continual newspaper items report on disputes that result, and recent journalism has explored in depth the moral, legal, and practical issues.

Last December, the distinguished foreign correspondent Sarah A. Topol produced an award-winning New York Times Magazine exposé about international trade that can amount to sordid trafficking and abuse of women. Her article, “The Women of House 3,” focused on surrogate mothers recruited in Thailand to produce babies in the nation of Georgia.

Surrogate Motherhood: Bane or Blessing?

Contemporary surrogacy involves so-called “birth tourism.” Topol observed that “intended parents from China can import Ukrainian eggs or semen from Denmark, create embryos in Tblisi [Georgia’s capital city] and use Thai wombs to bear and birth babies before bringing a child home to Shanghai.” Chinese clients predominate in Georgia due to the Communist nation’s disastrous and now abandoned law limiting couples to one child.

A $15 Billion Global Industry

Now the October issue of The Atlantic magazine offers a broad-ranging and rather skeptical survey by British staff writer Helen Lewis, headlined “Mothers For Sale.” She reports “industry” revenues are $15 billion a year globally. Typifying the growing activity, clinics in America’s Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology transferred 8,461 embryos in 2021 and 11,821 by 2024. Celebrities who’ve openly employed surrogacy include Alec Baldwin, Anderson Cooper, Kim Kardashian, Chrissy Teigen, and Meghan Trainor.

When Contracts Collide With Conscience

Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against reviewing surrogate mother McKenna West’s petition to block a lower court order so she can gain legal conservatorship with the child she gave birth to instead of the couple who hired her to do so. The child was diagnosed in the womb with a life-threatening heart condition that will require several operations. The couple wanted West to obtain an abortion, but she refused and moved to Texas, where abortion is largely illegal.

The West case led to an August column by New York Times Opinion writer Jessica Grose headlined “America Has a Surrogacy Problem.” She thinks feminist “bodily autonomy” should give surrogates the right to reject abortion even if required under the original pregnancy contract. Her other concerns include a dangerous “patchwork free-for-all” with clinics less regulated than beauty salons, neglect of true “informed consent” for surrogates, sketchy health insurance, and poor screening of those applying for babies.

Proponents of ART (assisted reproductive technologies) say surrogacy is a win-win that serves infertile couples, gay couples, and singles who deeply desire children, and provides income that especially helps surrogates who are needy. America’s “white-glove” care for the mothers hired by affluent would-be parents contrasts greatly with numerous sketchy international venues. America’s Jewish Surrogacy enlists women, who must be and Jewish and unwed, to visit San Diego for impregnation. It says they “help a Jewish couple or individual fulfill their dream of starting a family, while earning a minimum of $100,000.” California fees are often far higher.

From Test Tubes to Hired Wombs

Surrogacy results from historic biological experiments on Homo sapiens. In 1978, Britain saw the first successful birth of a “test-tube baby” (actually, a petri dish) through “in vitro fertilization” (IVF) using parents’ gametes to create an embryo produced outside a womb and implanted. The first known case of “gestational surrogacy,” where the child has no genetic link to the mother or father who contracted for the pregnancy, was reported in Ohio in 1985.

These processes make possible a phenomenon featured last December in The Wall Street Journal. Pavel Durov, a Russian plutocrat living in Dubai, runs advertisements that offer his sperm for free to interested single women, resulting in 100 or more offspring in a dozen nations. He sees this as charity due to his supposedly high-quality genes. With similar thinking, U.S. billionaire Elon Musk has fathered at least 14 children, but apparently the old-fashioned way. A California couple caused a public furor by raising 21 children, mostly resulting from surrogacy. In another case, the clients simply proved too old to raise the baby they purchased.

Secular and Religious Objections

Surrogacy rouses two types of opposition, either from religious or moral beliefs that all such procedures are immoral in principle, often with demands it be made illegal, or from practical secular concerns such as those posed by Grose. Though surrogacy proponents say accurately that most surrogacy arrangements go smoothly, various journalists other than the three above have raised the following concerns.

ART inevitably raises the risk of mistakes, such as a Jacksonville lawsuit over a clinic’s sperm mix-up that’s in the news this week. Unknown parentage raises difficulties in treating an offspring’s later diseases. Some are offended by the gap between wealthy clients and impoverished surrogates, who are sometimes defrauded. Costly IVF succeeds far less often than marketers indicate. There are legal conundrums about birth defects and what’s done with leftover embryos and gametes. Medical research has shown surrogates have more later problems than mothers with their own offspring. Criminals and sexual predators have been known to acquire children via surrogacy.

Georgia’s predominant Orthodox Church opposes surrogacy and IVF, and the Catholic Church has well-known moral teachings against all artificial methods of human reproduction. In addition to birth control pills and devices, the authoritative Catholic Catechism (#2376 and #2377) denounces the “gravely immoral” techniques that introduce a third person into the union between a husband and wife, involving an outsider’s sperm or egg or a “surrogate uterus.” This is believed to “infringe on the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage.” Such techniques using a married couple’s own gametes “are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable” because technology dominates “the origin and destiny of the human person.”

Destiny of the Human Person

A notably prescient analysis of such issues was “Fabricated Man,” written in 1970 and still in print. It appeared a decade after the U.S. approved the sale of contraceptive pills when IVF procedures were rare. The author was prominent Princeton University ethicist Paul Ramsey, a Methodist layman. Unlike Catholicism, he favored birth control with certain qualifications, but rejected births by artificial insemination as a technological imposition upon humanity. Ramsey predicted a coming ethical “apocalypse” with human “hatcheries” that would “assault the nature of human parentage by putting the bodily transmission of life completely asunder from bodily love-making.”

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