Commercial Surrogacy Across Borders: Rights, Exploitation, and Regulatory Gaps

Abstract

Commercial surrogacy has developed into a transnational market in which intended parents from restrictive,
wealthy jurisdictions contract with surrogates in countries offering fewer legal protections and lower cost,
producing a persistent asymmetry between the parties that anchors most of the field's ethical debate.
This review examines the central disagreement over whether compensated surrogacy reflects genuine
reproductive autonomy or exploitation shaped by economic need, drawing on empirical accounts from the
industry's major historical hubs.
It then traces what happened when several of those hubs -- India, Cambodia, Thailand, and Nepal --
restricted or banned commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals, and finds a consistent pattern of
displacement to less-regulated jurisdictions rather than resolution of the underlying practice.
A further section considers the resulting harm to children born of cross-border arrangements whose
citizenship and legal parentage fall into the gaps between national laws, sometimes leaving them
functionally stateless, and reviews the Hague Conference's ongoing effort to draft an international protocol
addressing parentage recognition.
We conclude that neither unilateral prohibition nor an unregulated market adequately protects surrogates or
children, and that a defensible path forward combines enforceable surrogate protections where the practice
remains legal with binding international recognition rules for parentage established abroad.