For much of the past decade, the global expansion of the surrogacy industry has proceeded largely unchecked, insulated from serious scrutiny by carefully curated narratives of mutual benefit and altruistic intent. That is finally changing: governments, international bodies and public opinion alike are increasingly awake to the grave moral and practical dangers the practice entails.
This shift found its most consequential expression yet last week, when a coalition of states launched a political declaration calling for an international moratorium on surrogacy and affirmed their commitment to working towards its global abolition. For the first time, a coordinated intergovernmental voice is articulating what a growing body of evidence and human rights analysis indicates: that surrogacy, in all its forms, is irreconcilable with human dignity.
The initiative builds on a landmark 2025 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls – the first comprehensive assessment of surrogacy’s complex human rights implications. The UN report’s conclusions are unambiguous: surrogacy is “characterised by exploitation and violence against women and children”, and steps must be taken to abolish it worldwide.
The Special Rapporteur’s findings confirm what many experts and advocates have long warned. Surrogacy disproportionately involves women under significant economic or social pressure, rendering them acutely vulnerable to coercion, exploitation and the stripping of basic freedoms – including surveillance, forced abortion at the commissioning parties’ orders and, in some cases, conditions amounting to slavery.
These vulnerabilities are compounded in cross-border commercial arrangements, which constitute an increasingly overwhelming share of the global surrogacy business. Because legal frameworks remain fragmented, with many countries caught in a legal vacuum the surrogacy industry is aggressively exploiting, demand moves freely to circumvent protective regimes, flowing towards poorer countries where women’s vulnerability feeds the industry’s supply.
Far from democratising parenthood, surrogacy perpetuates the very inequalities – among and within countries – that international human rights law, at its best, exists to address and whose eradication Western nations have championed as a defining commitment.
The consequences of surrogacy are equally grave for children, whose fundamental human rights – to identity, to know and be cared for by their parents, and to life itself – are sacrificed to the wishes of adults. Beyond the effects on their early development, and the long-term health and wellbeing implications of separation from the women who gave birth to them, they face risks of statelessness, trafficking and abandonment.
During the high-level UN event, which I had the honour of moderating, a representative from Chile noted just how many children already waiting for a family still await the fulfilment of their rights through adoption – a pointed reminder that the desire for parenthood does not itself create a right to bring new children into existence through surrogacy. More powerful still is the testimony of those who have lived the consequences of surrogacy firsthand. Among those is Olivia Maurel, herself born through the practice and now a leading advocate for its abolition, who has spoken harrowingly of the deep wounds and lifelong questions of identity and belonging it left her with.
In recent years, several states have taken decisive steps at the domestic level to address these concerns. Italy broke new ground in 2024 by becoming the first country to enact legislation specifically prohibiting its citizens from commissioning surrogacy arrangements abroad. Slovakia enshrined a prohibition in its constitution in 2025. Chile’s National Congress advanced significant draft legislation earlier this year that, if adopted, would have a similar effect.
Significant as they are, however, national measures alone cannot resolve a problem that is structural and transnational in character. The political declaration launched at the UN last week does not shy away from this: an international moratorium would effectively suspend the serious and ongoing human rights violations and abuses inherent in surrogacy, while states work to strengthen domestic protections and move towards the ultimate aim of an international legal instrument banning the practice in all its forms.
A coordinated international response to surrogacy is not simply a practical necessity; it represents a commitment to upholding universal human rights and to a shared understanding of what it means to be human.
The government officials, human rights experts, academics and politicians who spoke in support of the political declaration all emphasised the inviolable principle of human dignity, and the inescapable truth that surrogacy effectively turns human beings – their bodies and their very existence – into commodities.
The voice of the Holy See carries particular weight on this question. Speaking at the event, Pope Leo XIV’s envoy to the UN in Geneva, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, cited the Pontiff’s recent condemnation of surrogacy as a practice that reduces the most intimate human bond to the terms of an agreement, “distorting the original relational calling of the family”. Archbishop Balestrero also identified the “logic of commodification” at the heart of surrogacy, which goes hand in hand with the “culture of discard” that Pope Francis often warned against – the same attitude that allows children to be ordered on demand and, in some cases, contractually discarded like goods that fail to meet specification.
The international community has both the means and the responsibility to refuse this logic. The declaration launched last week is an important signal that the political will to do so may finally be coalescing. The task now is to translate that signal into the international response this injustice demands.
Giorgio Mazzoli serves as Director of UN Advocacy, leading ADF International’s legal advocacy work at the United Nations in New York and Geneva.
