New surrogacy route: Chinese couples travelling to the USA for surrogacy

Check out this article  discussing Chinese couples who travel to the USA for surrogacy. This is an interesting addition to the increasingly complex network of transnational commercial surrogacy routes. In this case, the legal status of commercial surrogacy in the USA and trust in a well established system are important factors drawing IPs from China to the US, and US citizenship for children born via a surrogate mother in the US is an added bonus. It is interesting that the IPs highlighted in this article have also become entrepreneurs of this novel connection between China and the USA. Jiang, like other IPs through transnational surrogacy, acts a facilitator between surrogacy agencies in one country, in this case the US and IPs in his home country, in this case China:

He now consults with eight surrogacy agencies, connecting them with Chinese clients, the vast majority of whom suffer from infertility, Jiang says. Others clients have included gay men and heterosexual couples barred from having a second child in China.

Transnational commercial surrogacy seems to be a new space for entrepreneurship: new forms of facilitation, agencies, consultants, ‘match making’…. in all of this surrogate mothers are central, yet make the least profit (or even find themselves out of pocket in domestic altruistic surrogacy arrangements).

A worst case scenario in altruistic surrogacy arrangments

There are not many cases of surrogacy arrangements going wrong for the IPs, but when an arrangement does go wrong popular mainstream media tends to shine a light on it. There are, broadly speaking, three ways an altruistic surrogacy arrangement can go wrong: the surrogate wanting to keep the baby, the surrogate holding the intending parents to ransom for example threatening to abort or keep the child if the intended parents do not pay more and the last case is when a surrogate arrangement is fraudulent. This latter scenario has recently been reported in the British news. A couple from North Yorkshire who had been trying to have children for years, and turned to surrogacy as their last option. The couples found a surrogate who appeared to have a proven track record and asked the couples for 2000 GBP to cover her travel and legal fees. The surrogate’s intentions and her track record were fraudulent. The couple took the surrogate to court and won. According to the article in the in the Daily Mail, after hearing that the accused woman had suffered mental illness after loosing her 4 month old child to cot death she was spared a prison sentence.

It is always sad to come across cases such as these where vulnerable people are taken advantage of, but it is important to emphasize that these cases are rare.