What Foreign Correspondent showed in 2014

ABC’s The Baby Makers offered a rare inside look at India’s booming commercial surrogacy industry. It followed Australian and British couples who travelled to India in search of family, often after years of IVF failure or medical complications that made pregnancy impossible.

The documentary captured both joy and unease: the miracle of birth alongside the stark realities of poverty and profit. Surrogates, many from rural backgrounds, earned around A$7,000 — life-changing money for families who otherwise survived on a few dollars a day.

At the time, India was home to around 1,500 surrogacy centres, and one of its most well-known doctors, Dr Nayana Patel, ran a facility in Anand where around 100 women lived together during their pregnancies.

Patel described it as a place of safety and opportunity:

“This is definitely an opportunity. A poor lady who has a dream of living in a house of her own or educating her children and she cannot do anything else. She cannot earn this kind of money and if she gets this opportunity to help some other female and bring a beautiful baby in this earth, for them this is a wonderful arrangement.”

Critics, meanwhile, described the system as exploitative, with little oversight, patchy medical care, and reports of women pressured into surrogacy by husbands or agents.

What happened to the women who carried the world’s babies

Subsequent studies in Anand and similar regions found that many of the women who once lived in surrogacy hostels have returned to quiet lives in their villages. Some used their earnings to buy homes, pay school fees or start small businesses. Others were left with little more than memories and, in some cases, lingering stigma.

Researchers who revisited former surrogacy hubs reported that while some women described the experience as empowering, others spoke of loneliness and shame, especially when neighbours questioned how they had earned their money. Without legal recognition or long-term support, most drifted back into the economic precarity they had briefly escaped.

The lesson from their stories is not that surrogacy should never happen, but that it must happen with protection, consent and dignity. When handled transparently and with care, it can be transformative. When driven by profit and secrecy, it risks exploitation.

As Dr Patel said at the time, surrogacy gave women “an exposure to the outside world.” What we have learnt, ten years on, is that exposure must come with rights, not risk.

India

Since 2014, India has completely transformed its approach. The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 banned commercial surrogacy nationwide. Only altruistic arrangements are now permitted, and even those are tightly limited.

Only Indian heterosexual married couples who have been married for at least five years and are medically proven to be infertile can pursue surrogacy.

Single parents, LGBTQ+ couples and foreigners are excluded.

Surrogates must be close relatives, have previously given birth, and can only act as a surrogate once in their lifetime. Payments are restricted to medical and insurance costs. While some clinics test the boundaries quietly, cross-border and commercial arrangements are no longer lawful.

Thailand

Thailand once attracted large numbers of foreign clients after India’s restrictions, but its own 2015 ban on commercial and foreign surrogacy closed the door to most international couples.

After years of lobbying, minor reforms introduced in 2024 now allow married heterosexual couples where one partner holds Thai nationality to access regulated altruistic surrogacy under state supervision. Commercial payments, agency involvement, and foreign-only arrangements remain prohibited.

Cambodia

Following India and Thailand’s bans, surrogacy agencies shifted operations to Cambodia until 2016, when the government abruptly outlawed the practice. Since then, authorities have pursued several criminal prosecutions against agency operators, intermediaries, and pregnant surrogates.

In some cases, women carrying babies for foreign couples were detained and charged with human trafficking, prompting strong criticism from human rights groups. Cambodia continues to enforce a full ban on both commercial and altruistic surrogacy, and there is still no formal path for intended parents to claim parentage.

The arguments that shaped the early debate

At the height of India’s commercial surrogacy boom, supporters such as Dr Patel defended the system as a partnership between people in need: couples longing for a child and women seeking financial independence.

“They do not know what a bank is, how to deposit money, what is the importance of cheque book. Here they get an exposure to the outside world. They gain confidence when they come over here.”

And most memorably:

“If you are just a critic, who feels that a childless should live a life of misery and stay childless throughout their life or the poor is meant to remain poor all throughout and should remain poor throughout their life, then you will consider this as something wrong, as something immoral, a farm, a baby-making factory.”

For Patel and others, surrogacy was a route out of poverty and an ethical way to help the childless. For critics, it blurred the line between empowerment and exploitation.

10 years on

What began as a booming international business is now almost entirely shut down across South and Southeast Asia. Where once hundreds of foreign couples travelled to India, Thailand and Cambodia each year, the focus has shifted towards domestic, altruistic models or regulated arrangements in countries such as the United States, Canada and Ukraine (before the war).

The question remains whether bans protect women or simply push the practice underground. The lesson from a decade of reform is clear: the best surrogacy systems do not ban women from helping others; they trust them to do it safely, with support, transparency and protection.

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