Article Three long reads about the dark side of surrogacy
Article Three long reads about the dark side of surrogacy
Describes human trafficking of young women from impoverished backgrounds to work as surrogates, the inhumane way they are treated by doctors & international surrogacy companies, and how the companies carefully choose their location to get away with it. Shows the classist & racist attitudes of the surrogacy industry.
The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of US-Born Babies Via Surrogates (WSJ, archived)
Ultra-rich Chinese men want to have huge numbers of children for the same reasons as nasty Western billionaires like Elon Musk (muh legacy). Sons are to take over the family business, and daughters are to be married off to world leaders.
The Men That Take Babies Away From Their Mother (Julie Bindel)
Julie describes court cases in the UK about surrogacy arrangements for gay couples. Even with increased regulation and scrutiny in a developed, rich country, surrogacy arrangements can still go wrong. She also criticises the attitude of commissioning parents towards the surrogate mother - they view her as a birthing machine who can be erased from the child's life once her job is done, ignoring the emotional bonds that are created during pregnancy and birth. (This article is not an argument against gay couples becoming parents - it's about the pitfalls of surrogacy in particular)
I had never given much thought to surrogacy until I began to read about radical feminism. My uninformed stance was that it was a positive thing, allowing infertile couples to have children in the same way IVF does. Deep down, I also sympathised with women who didn't want to go through the process of pregnancy and birth - something I am scared of, myself. These articles have given me a lot to think about. There are a lot of similarities between surrogacy and prostitution as they both involve the dehumanization and sale of womens' bodies. But the women interviewed in the first article described surrogacy as even worse than sex trafficking - because what prostitution involves is "self-explanatory", easy to understand, whereas surrogacy involves the medical horror of never knowing exactly what the doctors are doing to you.
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Dec 16 2025, 4:20 AM #1They Answered An Ad for Surrogates And Found Themselves In A Nightmare (NYT)
Describes human trafficking of young women from impoverished backgrounds to work as surrogates, the inhumane way they are treated by doctors & international surrogacy companies, and how the companies carefully choose their location to get away with it. Shows the classist & racist attitudes of the surrogacy industry.
The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of US-Born Babies Via Surrogates (WSJ, archived)
Ultra-rich Chinese men want to have huge numbers of children for the same reasons as nasty Western billionaires like Elon Musk (muh legacy). Sons are to take over the family business, and daughters are to be married off to world leaders.
The Men That Take Babies Away From Their Mother (Julie Bindel)
Julie describes court cases in the UK about surrogacy arrangements for gay couples. Even with increased regulation and scrutiny in a developed, rich country, surrogacy arrangements can still go wrong. She also criticises the attitude of commissioning parents towards the surrogate mother - they view her as a birthing machine who can be erased from the child's life once her job is done, ignoring the emotional bonds that are created during pregnancy and birth. (This article is not an argument against gay couples becoming parents - it's about the pitfalls of surrogacy in particular)
I had never given much thought to surrogacy until I began to read about radical feminism. My uninformed stance was that it was a positive thing, allowing infertile couples to have children in the same way IVF does. Deep down, I also sympathised with women who didn't want to go through the process of pregnancy and birth - something I am scared of, myself. These articles have given me a lot to think about. There are a lot of similarities between surrogacy and prostitution as they both involve the dehumanization and sale of womens' bodies. But the women interviewed in the first article described surrogacy as even worse than sex trafficking - because what prostitution involves is "self-explanatory", easy to understand, whereas surrogacy involves the medical horror of never knowing exactly what the doctors are doing to you.