The big entertainment circle melon of “actress Zheng Shuang abandoned her surrogate” and the recent incident of “surrogate mother bounced for syphilis” have focused the public’s attention on “Surrogacy“, an industry that is clearly illegal in China but still has a huge underground market.
Surrogacy proponents claim that “surrogacy is a voluntary transaction that allows women who cannot have children and poor women to take what they want”, but is it really a voluntary choice for women to rent out their wombs to others? What awaits them the moment the embryo is implanted?
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Who is a surrogate mother?
Although “surrogacy” is a medical term that emerged only with the development of human reproductive technology, it has been a common social practice in the old days, namely “wife parenthood”.
The “pawn wife” was first prevalent in the Song and Yuan dynasties, meaning that one’s wife was rented out as an object to people who could not have children for them in order to get monetary compensation. The women who were pawned usually had sons and could not return to their husbands’ homes until after they had given birth to children. These women who have given birth to children are considered to be “spoiled” and have a lower status in the Family, and are treated with disdain by their husbands.
So, what do surrogate mothers experience today?
Surrogate mothers are usually married women between the ages of 21-45 (some studies say 18-35) who have at least one child. However, the number of births should not be excessive, usually less than 5 natural births and less than 2 cesarean sections.
They generally come from poorer areas (except for a few states in the U.S.) where surrogacy is legal or the legislation is vague, giving capital a lot of opportunity to take advantage of it.
If they pass a medical examination, sign a contract and become pregnant, they are not far from losing their personal freedom and irreparable pain.
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Is it as simple as “having a baby”?
According to public information from the WHO, in 2017, 295,000 women worldwide died during pregnancy and childbirth due to hemorrhaging, High blood pressure, infections and more. Even with medical advances, today humans still cannot completely bypass the risks associated with childbirth.
Compared to high-income countries, women in less economically developed countries have 130 times higher lifetime risk of dying from childbirth-related causes due to medical and economic constraints. For women deeply involved in the surrogacy industry, their wombs are reduced to a commodity, and the various tactics used by agencies to attract clients and maximize profits, such as multiple pregnancies and cutting back on necessary care, leave them in an equally bad situation.
In order to ensure success rates and provide “customized” services to their clients, surrogate mothers are often implanted with multiple embryos, and multiple pregnancies increase their risk of complications and accidents during pregnancy, such as high blood pressure, stroke, placental abruption, perinatal death, in utero fetal death, and neonatal death ……
Surrogacy is a dangerous path, but money-oriented agencies do not take good care of the “money tree”. According to a young Ukrainian surrogate mother interviewed by BBC, after the embryo transfer, the surrogacy clinic immediately reduced her daily medical care, and some other surrogate mothers who had health problems were not diagnosed and treated in a timely and correct manner, resulting in various complications. In addition, there are various rumors circulating in the Ukrainian surrogacy market and among surrogate mothers about the poor performance of some clinics, such as embryo trading, lack of health supervision, and over-solicitation of clients.
In addition to the huge health risks, the plight of surrogate mothers goes far beyond that.
Since ancient times, “borrowing a belly” has not been a glamorous practice, and women have to endure not only physical pain, but also great psychological torture and social pressure. In fact, the social plight of these surrogate mothers may have been predetermined from the very beginning.
First, the women who decide to become surrogates for others are themselves living in dire straits. They are often situated in a highly patriarchal social structure, where their low Education and social status exclude them from the traditional labor market and leave them with no choice but to sell their wombs to supplement their families.
In the BBC documentary on surrogacy in India, when interviewed about why they wanted to become surrogates, the young girls mostly responded with such desperate motives as “to build a house”, “to send the child to English school”, and “to beat their husbands if they don’t pay”.
If selected by the client, they live in shame and fear during the long process of transplantation to pregnancy. The shame comes from the social disapproval of selling one’s womb for money. They can’t explain everything to those around them: “No one knows I rented out my womb except my mother and sister, but I had to do it because my husband was having financial problems.” “My daughter is very bright and she often asks if I will give her a brother or a sister, and I don’t know how to explain it to her.” So responded some surrogate mothers in an interview for an academic paper.
The fear, in turn, stems from loneliness and worry. As we all know, during the surrogacy process, the pregnant mother can only live in a house arranged by the agency, she cannot live with her family, she needs daily injections and medication, and her freedom of movement is restricted for up to 10 months. In such a lonely and depressing environment, they also need to worry about the health of the fetus in their bellies and what to do if they are “bounced” ……
Even after a successful surrogacy, some mothers suffer from potential trauma. Research in the journal Frontiers in Human Reproduction confirms that most mothers want to keep in touch with their children. Even the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice reports that approximately 25 surrogates each year do not wish to hand over their surrogate babies to their clients.
With the end of the surrogacy process, most of them are cut off from contact with their child, and a significant number of surrogate families even choose not to disclose facts about their surrogacy to their child.
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Who is getting rich off the womb business?
In the mouths of some surrogacy supporters, surrogacy often becomes a win-win deal in which “the person who loves the child gets the child and the surrogate mother improves her Life“. As some surrogate mothers say, they need money to support their families, but in reality, it is feared that there are other people in the womb rental industry chain who are getting rich off of their wombs.
In Ukraine, known as the “baby factory,” surrogate mothers may be promised up to $20,000, but the reality is that surrogacy agencies are showing their greedy faces. In addition to withholding daily medical resources, some surrogate mothers have even been paid as little as $350 (about 2265 RMB), which is less than 1% of what surrogacy agencies charge their buyers.
It has also been reported that some surrogacy agencies promise to pay surrogate mothers in stages, but in practice, the agencies set various strict requirements for the surrogate mothers, and if they do not comply, they do not get a single penny. If the result is not to the buyer’s liking, the agency will also treat them more harshly.
As the upper end of the surrogacy market, the U.S. has a higher level of medical services and fees, but that doesn’t mean it’s a “win-win” situation for surrogate mothers. In the cases reported by the New York Times, surrogate mothers were paid more than in places like Ukraine, but they were paid at most 13 percent of the international surrogacy price of at least $150,000 or more.
For even prettier sales, some surrogacy agencies have even envisioned globalization models to further squeeze profit margins. According to the Guardian, when there were just rumors of a ban on international surrogacy in India, some agencies tried to get around regulations by running surrogacy businesses in different regions or using legal means to transfer surrogate mothers between destinations.
In one business plan, for example, future surrogate mothers would be bounced between low-income countries, conceived by embryo transfer in India and later delivered in Africa, to maximize the value of their fertility. The program is ambitiously described by its planners as “creating the world of tomorrow.
But no amount of rhetoric can conceal the endless exploitation of poor women by capital. Ukrainian law has reported that the surrogacy market generates $1.5 billion annually, and the huge amount of money and financial gain has led to resistance to regulating the surrogacy industry. Surrogacy agencies appear to celebrate the love of surrogate mothers and sympathize with their destitute situation, but in reality they use their wombs for a small sweetener to pave their own path to wealth and freedom.
In this situation, if a surrogate mother feels she can only change something by renting out her womb, is she doing it voluntarily? Or is she being coerced by capital to fall into a honey-coated trap?
Now the syphilis surrogate mother and Zheng Shuang surrogate abandonment incident have once again exposed the bloody side of the surrogacy industry to the public. No matter how beautiful the whitewash is, baby factories are treating people as commodities and keep creating a tragedy of human nature.
Surrogacy has always been explicitly banned in China, but various egg sales and surrogacy agencies are still around, so public opinion has called for greater punishment of surrogacy-related industries in addition to the explicit ban. Some well-known overseas surrogacy countries, such as India, Thailand and Nepal, introduced regulations to ban commercial surrogacy around 2015. In addition to strict laws, it is the duty of a healthy society to help the poor rather than persuade them to sell their bodies.
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