The World Is Waking Up to the Harms of Surrogacy

For more than two decades, the Center for Bioethics and Culture has warned that surrogacy is not simply another way to “build a family.” It is a practice that turns pregnancy into a service, places women’s bodies under contract, separates children from their birth mothers by design, and has created a global industry that profits from human reproduction.

For years, those concerns were dismissed as alarmist.

Today, they are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls Reem Alsalem recently addressed the In the Name of the Child conference in Melbourne, Australia, where she challenged what she called the “myths” that allow the surrogacy industry to flourish. Drawing upon her 2025 report to the UN General Assembly, Alsalem addressed exploitation, informed consent, bodily autonomy, the rights of children, and the enormous financial interests surrounding international surrogacy.

For the CBC, her conclusions sound remarkably familiar.

What the CBC Has Been Saying for Years

In 2014, the CBC released Breeders: A Subclass of Women?, a documentary examining precisely the questions now receiving international attention: What happens to women when pregnancy becomes a contractual service? What happens to children deliberately conceived with the expectation that they will be separated from the women who carry them? And what happens when money enters into these profoundly human relationships?

Four years later, the CBC released #BigFertility: It’s All About the Money. The film told the story of Kelly Martinez, who served as a surrogate for three couples and nearly lost her life during her third surrogacy. Her experience exposed the enormous disparity of power between the women assuming the physical risks of pregnancy and the agencies, attorneys, clinics, brokers, and others profiting from the fertility industry.

These films were never merely about individual bad experiences. They exposed a system.

Surrogacy requires us to accept something we should find deeply troubling: that a woman’s reproductive capacity can become the subject of a contract and that a child can be commissioned, gestated, relinquished, and transferred according to an agreement made before that child even exists.

The Myth of “Choice”

Alsalem directly confronted one of the industry’s most powerful defenses: consent.

Surrogacy is routinely framed as an expression of female autonomy. If a woman chooses to become a surrogate, proponents argue, who are we to interfere?

But the CBC has long insisted that this question is far too simple.

Choice does not exist in a vacuum. Alsalem pointed particularly to women driven toward surrogacy by poverty and vulnerability and questioned whether genuine informed consent is possible when women do not fully understand the medical, emotional, and contractual consequences they may face. She also described contracts that can exert extraordinary control over women’s lives during pregnancy.

When money, economic inequality, medical risk, contractual obligations, and enormous disparities in power are involved, simply calling something a “choice” does not make it ethical.

And paying a woman does not make exploitation disappear.

Children Are Not Products

The other person too often missing from discussions about surrogacy is the child.

Surrogacy debates usually begin with adults who desperately want children. Their longing can be real and heartbreaking. But compassion for infertility cannot prevent us from asking what adults are entitled to do in order to satisfy that longing.

Alsalem emphasized that surrogacy intentionally plans for the transfer of a child from the woman who carries and gives birth to that child. She also raised concerns about children’s origins, vulnerability, and best interests.

The CBC has asked these same questions repeatedly.

A child is not something to which an adult has a right.

A child cannot ethically be reduced to the object of a contract.

And pregnancy cannot be reduced to a commercial service without changing how we understand women, motherhood, and children themselves.

From Warning to Reckoning

The CBC’s work on surrogacy has never stopped with documentary filmmaking. We have educated the public, worked with women harmed by the fertility industry, testified before lawmakers, submitted evidence to policymakers, and advocated internationally for protections for women and children. Most recently, the CBC has continued challenging attempts to normalize and expand surrogacy, including through legislative testimony in the United States and a submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission.

Now the international conversation is beginning to shift.

Alsalem has supported an abolitionist approach to surrogacy and highlighted a 2026 international initiative calling for a moratorium while governments investigate the human-rights implications of the practice. She has urged the international community to treat surrogacy as a serious transnational human-rights concern.

We welcome that scrutiny.

For decades, reproductive technology has advanced under the assumption that if something can be done – and someone is willing to pay for it – it should be permitted.

Surrogacy demonstrates where that logic leads.

Women are not wombs for hire.

Pregnancy is not a service.

Children are not commodities.

And human dignity must never be subordinated to adult desire or commercial profit.

The world is finally beginning to confront what the CBC has documented for years. We welcome the UN Special Rapporteur’s willingness to expose these harms, and we will continue working alongside advocates around the world until women and children are protected from an industry that should never have been allowed to treat human reproduction as a marketplace.