Surrogacy is an exercise of unequal power. Those with money, status, and education control the actions of women with lower economic status, who often consent to the arrangement out of financial need.
When a woman agrees to be a surrogate, she surrenders control over her life for the next nine months. The baby buyers (and their agents and doctors) decide what she eats and drinks, who she has sex with and how often, how many medical tests she has to agree to in order to make sure the baby she carries has no “defects,” and more. If this “quality control” reveals imperfections, she can be forced to undergo an abortion. Likewise, if more than one embryo was implanted and develops, fetal reduction can be mandated.
Surrogacy also profoundly violates the rights of the child. Article 1 of the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and pornography prohibits the sale of children, and Article 35 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that “States Parties shall take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the abduction of, the sale of or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form” [emphasis added]. In surrogacy, children are clearly sold, even if, as in “altruistic” surrogacy, only pregnancy expenses and legal fees are paid.
Proponents of surrogacy say that the birthmother is paid for her “services,” but this is blatantly untrue. If she miscarries or has an abortion, she will most likely not be paid. It is the product—namely, the child—that she is paid for.
In short, surrogacy is a practice of exploitation that violates a number of UN conventions and other international treaties. It is already common in many countries. Now, pro-surrogacy advocates are working to change the law in my own country of Australia, seeking to make it a hub of commercial surrogacy.
The Situation in Australia
In Australia, we are currently sitting on a powder keg. On September 11th, 2026, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) submitted the Final Report of its review of surrogacy laws to the Attorney-General, the Honorable Michelle Rowland. Unless someone leaks a copy of the report, we won’t know what’s in it until November 18th, when the report will become public.
The question is: what will happen next? The ruling Labor Party could indicate which recommendations it intends to accept, which would then start a parliamentary debate. This would eventually lead to discussions with the six Australian states and two territories, for it is they who regulate surrogacy. Alternatively, the report could be shelved. That’s what happened to a similar tome by the Law Commission in the United Kingdom, which has been in limbo since 2023.
It’s not that we have no idea what the final report will contain. During its two-year inquiry, the ALRC published an Issues and a Discussion paper that provided ample cues about its direction. The advisory committee was stacked with well-known surrogacy advocates. Not a single critic was included on the committee.
The ALRC wants “barriers” to surrogacy removed, including the prohibition against paying women to be surrogates. It also wants to encourage the development of a new “boutique industry” of “surrogacy support organisations” (SSOs) throughout the country. These would act as a one-stop checkpoint to vet surrogates and commissioning parents and to get legal and medical checks done before a contract is signed and an embryo created (all for a fee, of course).
What is more, the ALRC wants to change Australian law so that the names of the commissioning parents would appear on the birth certificate at the time the baby is born, saving themselves time and money and avoiding the current requirement to get a parentage order in court. Put differently: they want to erase any legal record of the woman who grew the baby from her own blood and bones over nine months and gave birth to the child. Nor will there be any indication of who the genetic mother—the egg “donor”—was. This means that a child born of surrogacy will not be able to find out about her or his genetic parentage and who their birthmother is, unless the commissioning parents tell them, and many don’t.
Needless to say, for those of us who seek the abolition of surrogacy, these proposals are extremely unwelcome. Until now, the only kind of surrogacy allowed in Australia, so-called “altruistic surrogacy,” is a low-key affair, with about 100 babies born each year. We would like it to stay that way. We hope for a gradual reduction in those numbers as we expose surrogacy for what it is: a human rights violation that can never be made “ethical.”
Fighting Back
Abolitionists have a powerful ally in the current UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem. In 2025, she conducted her own inquiry into surrogacy and found that it was a form of violence against women. She delivered an important paper at a surrogacy conference in Melbourne in August 2026.
The conference, “In the Name of the Child: The Perils of Surrogate Motherhood for Mother and Baby,” brought together all those excluded from the ALRC’s deliberations: surrogate mothers; mothers separated from their children by adoption; adults born through surrogacy or donor conception; adopted people; and feminist critics. For two days, we met to discuss the social, ethical, and human-rights consequences of surrogacy for women and children. At the end of the conference, the delegates issued a pivotal new statement, known as the Melbourne Declaration to Abolish Surrogacy. The delegates call on federal, state and territory governments to:
Abolish all forms of surrogacy, recognizing that no woman should be recruited, induced, pressured, coerced, or enabled to carry a child for transfer to others, and that no person should be permitted to commission or acquire a child through a surrogacy arrangement.
Conference delegates also urged the Australian federal government to join international efforts to abolish all forms of surrogacy, including the joint initiative led by Italy, Chile, Argentina, Cameroon and the Holy See to adopt immediate interim measures, such as a moratorium on new surrogacy arrangements; and work towards an international legal instrument prohibiting surrogacy, while recognising and upholding the legal rights of women and individuals already affected by surrogacy arrangements.
We will find out whether any of this matters when the ALRC’s report becomes public and a parliamentary debate ensues.
Public Opinion
There has never been a public survey conducted about what ordinary Australians think about surrogacy. The pro-surrogacy campaign—spearheaded by gay men—has lots of money and political influence behind it. The legacy media has spread its gospel. Throughout 2026, we have been exposed to a constant stream of positive talks and articles on surrogacy on radio, in the print media, on TV programs including Married at First Sight (MAFS), and directly via email.
The stories are all similar: rich (mostly gay) couples are forced to go to Colombia (or another poor country, like Argentina or Ghana) to acquire babies via surrogacy, because they haven’t found a willing woman in Australia, or believe Australian surrogacy laws are too restrictive. In spite of spending up to AU$200,000 on their successful surrogacy “journey,” these “commissioning parents” often complain about difficulties they encounter overseas with their agency and surrogate. Upon coming back to Australia with the babies, they complain that there is too much red tape and more money to be paid to be recognised as parents. This could all be so much simpler and cheaper, they say.
They are particularly dismissive about the role of the surrogate mother. She is just a “carrier,” an oven to bake the bun. In one May 2026 broadcast, for example, a presenter on ABC Sydney Local Radio asked a gay man who had just returned home with “his” surrogate baby from the USA what to call the woman who had given birth to the child. “Surrogate mother… is the correct term mother?” “No,” he was sternly reprimanded, “not mother—surrogate or carrier.” “Carrier,” said the presenter. “My apologies.” The baby, who has known only this mother from her or his nine months in her womb, might have screamed in protest.
There Is No Right to a Child
What the pro-surrogacy public relations campaigns never mention is this: no one has a right to a child. It doesn’t matter if that person is heterosexual, gay, in a couple, or single. Article 16 in The Human Rights Declaration from 1948 does mention the right to “Marry and found a family,” but this was written to make sure oppressed minorities (e.g. the Roma) would not be discriminated against in marriage laws or forcibly sterilized. Article 16 does not imply the exploitative use of the bodies of two women (the egg “donor” and surrogate mother) so that gay or trans people’s desire for a part-biological child can be fulfilled.
Similarly, the frequently quoted Yogyakarta Principles have never been ratified by the UN or any other national or international body. They remain nothing more than a list of human rights demands written up in 2006 (updated in 2017) by a private meeting of some transgender people and human rights activists.
The general public is also ignorant of the fact that growing a foreign embryo in her body leads to a much riskier pregnancy and birth for a surrogate mother. As a large 2024 Canadian study concluded: “Hypertensive disorders and various placental pathologies are more likely in young and healthy carriers of unrelated embryos.”
The problem we have as abolitionists is that the babies born from surrogacy look cute, and many people are reluctant to criticize gay men for embarking on this route to acquire children as they think this amounts to homophobia. But the truth is this: every cute baby is a stolen baby that leaves an abandoned mother behind, and gay men claiming that they are “socially infertile” should be advised to go back and study Biology 101. Two sperm have never created a human being… an egg cell and a female body are always needed!
In April 2026, abolitionists had a big win when the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), a global intergovernmental organisation, closed down a working group on parentage that had been meeting since 2015. First, the idea had been to establish a Convention on Surrogacy, but when it became clear that member states would not agree to this, the meetings were scaled down to craft a “Parentage Certificate,” supposedly for the children’s benefit. Such a certificate would have forced countries in which all surrogacies are illegal to accept children bought overseas by their own citizens. In the end, members of the HCCH working group could not agree on what such a Certificate would look like.
The closing down of the HCCH group was a great victory, but we must remain vigilant. The pro-surrogacy crowd does not give up that quickly because there is serious money to be made from the surrogacy trade. A September 2026 article by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic suggested the United Nations had estimated that the global worth of the industry is almost fifteen billion American dollars.
A Growing Global Network
For now, Australian abolitionists wait for what the release of the ALRC report will bring. We remain vigilant and are prepared to fight.
We are aware that many pro-surrogacy groups say that they act in the name of the child. Because they believe that surrogacy is here to stay, they argue that the resulting children have a right to a smooth transition to parentage and citizenship. Among them are well-known groups such as Child Identity Protection (CHIP) and the International Social Service Network (ISS) and their 2021 Verona Principles to protect and give rights to children born of surrogacy. Yet the reality is that no regulation, however well-intentioned, can ever make surrogacy ethical or erase its harms.
Thankfully, Australian abolitionists have powerful international allies, such as Stop Surrogacy Now in the USA, founded by Fairer Disputations Featured Author Jennifer Lahl in 2015. I was an original co-signatory of their statement, and before we knew it, we had thousands of signatures. Several European groups started around the same time, such as Stoppt Leihmutterschaft in Austria. The International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood in France and Surrogacy Concerns and Stop Surrogacy Now UK started a bit later.
These organisations have joined forces with the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE), founded in 1985, of which I am the co-ordinator, and with Abolish Surrogacy Australia (ABSA), which Catherine Lynch and I co-founded in 2019. In 2023, the Declaration of Casablanca joined our resistance, powerfully represented by its spokeswoman and now Director General, Olivia Maurel, who was born of surrogacy. Her memoir, In Search of My Mother, should be mandatory reading for anyone who is not sure what to think about surrogacy.
Together, we are a powerful global network. It is my strong belief that a world without surrogacy is possible. We have to keep working towards this goal and not lose hope. Too much is at stake for women and children.
