thefederalist.com
2025-08-29
Anew United Nations report detailing the harms the rent-a-womb industry wreaks on women and children says the answer to preventing further harm is "eradicating surrogacy in all its forms."
Several countries such as Spain, Italy, and China already outlaw surrogacy. According to the 23-page report's author Reem Alsalem, however, there needs to be a global effort to reduce the demand for surrogacy by criminalizing the people and institutes who promote and facilitate it.
"Surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery, as they place surrogate mothers in a position in which any or all of the attributes of the right of ownership are exercised over them," the report declares.
Surrogacy is often marketed to the masses as a generous and celebratory practice that helps wannabe parents' dreams come true. From start to finish, however, the report outlines how the rent-a-womb process turns the sacred and dignified processes of babymaking and gestation into a legal and monetary transaction that harms the surrogate mothers, the children who are commissioned, and the people who commission them.