They Answered an Ad for Surrogates, and Found Themselves in a Nightmare
Eve was one of dozens of Thai women who traveled 4,000 miles — only to be trapped by the dark side of the global fertility industry.
By Sarah A. Topol
The market the industry has evolved to serve is colossal: Infertility is believed to affect almost 200 million people of reproductive age worldwide, but some estimates range as high as one in six adults. Some women are born missing ova, while up to 3.7 percent lose ovarian function before 40 because of genetic abnormalities or cancer treatments. As many as one in 4,000 women is born without a uterus, while others have congenital problems or go on to develop conditions that can affect their ability to carry a baby, like excessive fibroids, hysterectomies, severe endometriosis, heart conditions, autoimmune disorders, complications from previous C-sections and more. Half the couples who struggle to conceive are affected by male infertility, which can result from testicular trauma, very poor sperm quality or many other causes.
And most statistics on infertility don’t include those characterized as “socially infertile,” like same-sex couples, or single people who need medical assistance to become parents. One growing segment of the market is those who see fertility treatment as a way to unshackle women from the biological expectations put on their bodies.
People facing infertility are rarely told having a child is impossible; instead, they are offered a variety of assisted reproductive technologies (ART), whose efficacy is often limited at best. As far as medical treatments go, the success rate of in vitro fertilization is abysmal — roughly one in four I.V.F. cycles globally results in a live birth...
Over time, clear global hubs have emerged for particular parts of the trade — the United States is the hub for white-glove commercial surrogacy, Denmark for sperm, Spain for eggs. The industry’s development has always been global. In 1978, the birth in Britain of the first I.V.F. baby showed that embryos created outside the body could be carried to term, opening up the possibility of “gestational surrogacy,” in which a third party bears a child to whom she is genetically unrelated. The first live birth from a donated egg took place in Australia in 1983, while the first reported case of gestational surrogacy happened in Ohio in 1985...
After the Russian market closed, the influx adapted again, flowing into Ukraine, which had already attracted intended parents from America and Europe after it legalized the practice in 2002. Ukraine, home to a population of 41 million rife with blue-eyed blondes — the ultimate stereotypically desired phenotype — quickly became a hub of both eggs and surrogacy, with nearly 3,000 donor cycles and more than 2,000 children born to surrogates each year before the war. Unlike many other countries, Ukraine amended its regulations in 2013 to prohibit women from selling eggs or being a surrogate unless they already had one healthy child. The change was primarily a marketing gimmick guaranteeing the donors’ or surrogates’ “proven” fertility, but it also happened to protect against some of the medical and ethical concerns tied to participating in these markets, including future infertility.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in the middle of the night in February 2022, leaving foreign parents stranded far from their infants, the tiny former Soviet state of Georgia experienced an avalanche of interest. The rush was overwhelming. The country simply did not have enough wombs, so clinics and agencies began importing them. On any night in Tbilisi, it’s possible to see clusters of heavily pregnant women — from Kenya, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Ukraine — treating themselves to a meal from their regional restaurant or going to the supermarket. The industry calls them “traveling surrogates.”...
Eve often visited the room of a Thai woman who explained that she ended up at this job entirely by mistake. She had answered an online ad about a restaurant cook. But when she arrived in Tbilisi, her agent told her that the position had been filled and that the only way she could earn money to pay back her debt was to be a surrogate. The woman who recruited her warned her that if she tried to run away, the bosses would catch her and cut off her fingers. It had happened to her, said the agent, who held up her hand. Two of her fingers were gone...
“They don’t see us as human,” Eve told me. “They don’t think about whether the medication will damage our bodies or not. They just put everything into our body without thinking about our health for the baby to survive.” The other women nodded, silently.
For the complete article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/magazine/fertility-surrogates-trafficking.html
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/they-answered-ad-surrogates-and-found-themselves-nightmare