Surrogacy=a system of violence
Reem Alsalem steps up again.
UN expert calls for recognition of surrogacy as system of violence, exploitation and abuse, urges abolition
GENEVA (10 October 2025) – A UN expert today called for the recognition of surrogacy as a system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women, and called for the practice to be abolished globally.
“Surrogacy reduces women and children including girls to mere commodities, stripping them of their equality and dignity and encouraging their exploitation and abuse,” said Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in a report to the United Nations General Assembly.
The report examines the different manifestations of violence against women and girls related to surrogacy, focusing on drivers like patriarchal norms, sex and gender inequalities, economic disparities, and globalisation.
“Surrogacy is the result of commodification and commercialisation of women’s reproductive capacities, and it preys on and exploits women, particularly those from marginalised and impoverished backgrounds,” Alsalem said.
Her report highlighted physical, psychological, and economic violence faced by surrogate mothers and argued that this practice results in severe human rights violations including of their right to health, privacy, family and physical safety and increases the risk of enslavement, torture, inhumane and degrading treatment.
The Special Rapporteur said that emerging, available evidence points to serious risks for children born through surrogacy, including negative physical and mental health and development outcomes resulting from separation at birth from their mothers. Others include identity struggles, increased risk of statelessness, trafficking, and abandonment, and the arbitrary and forceful termination of their lives in utero at the discretion of the commissioning parents.
“Despite these harmful consequences, several State and non-State actors remain complicit in enabling surrogacy, including by downplaying the accompanying abuses and risks, and sanitising the practice, which is gravely concerning,” the expert said.
Alsalem stressed that a human rights-based, sex and gender-responsive approach to surrogacy requires the adoption of a global abolitionist framework that would end demand by penalising the commissioning of children via surrogacy or its facilitation by intermediaries. She also called for the decriminalisation of surrogate mothers, recognising them as victims and providing them with comprehensive assistance, protection, access to justice and reparations, and end their economic dependence on involvement in surrogacy arrangements. The report flagged the importance of raising public awareness, including through education campaigns on the harmful consequences of surrogacy.
Alsalem recommended ensuring recognition of the birth mother as the legal mother, with any transfer of parental rights permitted only through judicial adoption processes that safeguard the child’s best interests.
Other key recommendations include guaranteeing equal rights and access to services for children born through surrogacy arrangements, improving data collection, and strengthening international cooperation with a view to developing effective strategies to assist and protect victims.
There is plenty of existing children who need permanent homes and families without manufacturing made-to-order children, who wouldn’t otherwise be there if not for the exploitation of the surrogacy trade. And many of the existing children who need homes are likewise victims of economic, criminal, or physical exploitation; there’s no need to multiply the misery that already exists. Sometimes, people just have to live with the cards they are dealt, including perhaps their own inability to procreate.
It’s one of those traps, where progressives thought they were doing a kindness, but it went too far. In this case, they were trying to be kind to adoptees and foster kids at first. It started with, adoptive parents and foster parents can be as good as biological parents. So far, so sympathetic. But then it went too far: If biological parents are *literally, completely, 100%* no more ideal than any other kinds of legal guardians, if we’re *really really* gonna level the playing field here between adoptive parents and biological ones…
(And that’s what good progressives do: work to sand down all the differences, because differences can turn into disadvantages between what should be equals in a utopian world)
…then (so the overly-logical logic overflows…) we need to downgrade the value of biological motherhood, in terms of her relationship to her offspring. And, hey, look here! What a coincidence! This view happens to be very convenient to the multi-billion-dollar market of womb brokers. And, conveniently, both sides — the vulnerable women who rent their wombs as well as the renters of the vulnerable women’s wombs — are all in a state of emotional sensitivity. Certainly nobody rents out their womb, and very probably nobody opts to rent one out, unless they’re in, shall we say, a heightened emotional state.
It’s not exactly rational.
It was exacerbated when gay male couples, newly able to marry, suddenly found that adopting Puggles and Cockapoos wasn’t enough, and neither was fostering or adopting children in need, to satisfy their instinctual urges to nurture and to raise offspring. If *everything was supposed to be equal* between gays and straights, then the fact that two dudes can’t generate an actual child while going about their newly-legal hanky-panky, even though straight couples doing more-or-less the same thing *can* spark a new life while doing so… this became (supposedly) a *social injustice*. This view further erased the bond between biological motherhood and child-rearing. It all served to make reproduction more and more abstract in the eyes of the progressives… and more commercialized, along with the rest of gay rights, after that movement went sour and took a wrong turn.
The shape of it is the shape I see everywhere. Good intentions, gone too far, because lefties have no mechanism for moderating themselves, and they keep getting carried away with preposterous, utopian, mutant ideas. They always always always collapse into extremism. It always ends in a purity spiral.
Ugh! I’m still on the left, but dammit, what’s the way we can innoculate ourselves from going from a small community of well-intentioned intellectuals with good persuasion skills, trying to steer society to a more rational place… to a horrifying mob. Stalin, Mao, East Germany, trans… it keeps happening! We need to figure out the way to prevent leftism going into meltdown all the fucking time…
Or, as Stephen Hawking said on The Simpsons, “I wanted to see your utopia, but it’s more of a Fruitopia!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjlQZh-JHtc
(“Let’s make litter out of these literati!” said Karl. To which Lenny replied, “That’s too clever, YOU’RE ONE OF THEM!” And a Springfield-wide donnybrook ensued.)
Another reason things like this happen is the assumption that there is a right to have children, and that right also extends to having children of your own. The desire to spread one’s DNA is understandable; it’s evolution, after all. But when you enshrine a right like this, someone else’s rights become negotiable.
That’s like the idea that somehow incels have a right to sex. The minute you accept that, you begin bargaining away the rights of women not to have sex, and the right not to have sex with a partner who is not your choice.
Is there a right to have children? I would put it up there with the right to happiness (misinterpreted by many people as being in the Constitution). It isn’t really a right to happiness that exists (if such a right exists at all), but the right to the pursuit of happiness. Likewise the pursuit of children = within limits, like whether you can have children or not – would be perhaps a reasonable right.
Yeh. They didn’t make it “pursuit of happiness” for no reason. They had their wits about them. The idea of a right to happiness should instantly slam into the wall of reality, unless thought is completely absent. “Yes and we should add a right to happiness – no wait, that can’t be a thing, because shit happens – make it the attempt at happiness, instead – or the pursuit, yeah, that’s it: the pursuit of happiness. Next item?”
Note that the original wording in the Declaration was “right to property”. So it could’ve been worse.
And it’s noteworthy that it’s relatively easy for a lesbian couple to reproduce with a quick trip to a sperm bank. I suspect that played a lot into the pro-surrogacy position for gay couples, since it was unthinkable for women to have an easier time with something compared to male counterparts.
I’m not sure this is a problem with the left specifically. Although it might not have as much of an intellectual façade for it, I think the right has the exact same problem. I’d suggest they need to speak to each other more, but then that encourages a dichotomic framing that has disastrous effects when both sides are wrong.
Freemage, right to property is actually in the Constitution. It isn’t strictly a ‘right’ to own property, though, it’s a right not to have your property confiscated or destroyed without due process of law. Of course, due process of law has meant different things to different people, depending on sex, color of skin, or socioeconomic status.
I know it was alluded to earlier, but the “rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, and thus are simply aspirational, rather than law of the land. This is an important distinction.
I was once part of a small atheist protest at a religious rally at the State Capitol, a handful of us across the street from the rally holding signs. A couple from the religious rally crossed the street to talk to us. They were initially outwardly friendly. The man started talking about the rights “endowed by [the] Creator”, clear evidence in his view of the religious basis of American laws. I pointed out the section he was quoting was from the Declaration, not the Constitution. He took strong exception to that line of argument, and started acting threatening, so I backed away, physically and verbally.
Thinking about that, it strikes me that the aspirational nature of the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness makes it more significant rather than less. Legal rights can come to see more mundane (maybe because we hear about them in cop shows and courtroom dramas) while the endowed kind are…I dunno, higher up the chain. I’m trying to figure out how to say it without sounding religious. I guess it’s just that it’s on us rather than that external thing, the law.
I think the distinction could be phrased as moral versus legal.