The surrogacy industry is celebrated in the West as a triumphant technological response to infertility — and as a method of delivering made-to-order children for LGBT couples. Indeed, the press presented Italy’s surrogacy ban as a direct attack on “same-sex families.” But the truth about the surrogacy industry is that it is a truly horrific form of human trafficking that treats women as commercial objects and children as products to be bought and sold.
The most recent scandal, which has escaped the attention of much of the Western press, comes out of China. The Starreported recently that a surrogacy operation was uncovered earlier this month in Hunan province, central China, by anti-trafficking activist Shangguan Zhengyi. A police raid on a three-story residential building with covered windows uncovered 16 hospital beds and nine women who were being used as surrogate mothers and egg donors.
One of the women was a 41-year-old deaf woman from the northwestern province of Shaanxi, who “used sign language” to tell Shangguan “that she had undergone an embryo transfer for which she was paid 280,000 yuan,” or US $39,000. The woman “said intermediaries had brought her to the facility, though she could not recall how long she had been there.” A 29-year-old from Sichuan province was given 190,000 yuan, or US $26,000.
According to one woman, the embryo transfers were carried out without anesthesia; the surrogacy facility featured the first floor as “the main operational hub,” replete with “an operating room, a laboratory, and patient wards.” The operating room was stocked with medical equipment, including devices used for both “egg retrieval” and embryo transfers. The nine rescued women were taken to Changsha Women and Children Health Care Hospital and subsequently “released into the care of government officials and their families.”
While China does not have a nationwide ban on surrogacy, The Star reported that “various government regulations prohibit the practice” and that 18 individuals associated with the surrogacy ring were arrested and would be charged, including a nurse, anesthesiologist, and the ringleader. Zhengyi stated that he had “received a call from a man claiming to be in charge of the surrogacy operation who offered to meet him, saying, ‘Whatever requests you have, I will fulfil them.’” The activist’s furious response: “How dare you exploit disabled people? Do you have any humanity left?”
The truth is that surrogacy is a profoundly unhuman and inhumane form of human trafficking — and this latest scandal is only the latest evidence of that fact. Ukraine’s surrogacy “baby factories” are well-known and much-covered. Women in Georgia were found to have been held hostage and had their eggs forcibly harvested in Tbilisi. California’s “underground baby farm industry” was exposed earlier this year. In Nigeria, young women are frequently kidnapped and forced into slavery as surrogate mothers for paying customers. As one news outlet put it, this is “the systematic sale of human infants, commonly referred to as “child harvesting.” Scarcely a month goes by without similar stories being published.
The truth is that we do not have to tolerate these horrors — and we shouldn’t. Italy has banned surrogacy. So has Spain, Greece, and Argentina. Children are not commodities. The bodies of women are not commodities. Human beings should not be bought, sold, or rented — and the fact that LGBT activists oppose bans on these practices as an attack on their “right” to procure children at any cost is simply shameful. This is not hyperbole: In Thailand, the legalization of same-sex “marriage” came with a loosening of surrogacy restrictions to permit these couples to purchase children.
Western countries cannot stop these practices in developing nations, but we can cut the demand off at its source — and make it illegal for the wealthy people to exploit the poor.
