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Naija Feminists Media (Nigeria), alongside four other women’s organisations Stop Surrogacy Now UK (United Kingdom), FINRRAGE Australia and ABSA (Australia), Women’s Right Plus of Korea (South Korea), and SOS-GPA (Canada)- who are members of the International Coalition to Abolish Surrogacy (ICASM), have urged the Chilean Congress to abolish surrogacy.
They addressed an open letter to the House of Representatives and the Senate regarding Bill 17.337-07, which prohibits “surrogacy” without distinguishing between its commercial and so-called altruistic forms.
The ICASM members write from their respective countries whose models are cited in the Chilean debate. They all answer the same question: when the agreement went wrong, what protection did the legal framework actually provide to the woman who had gestated the child?
In Nigeria, where there is no legislation on surrogacy, a single woman has successfully brought a case to court, and a ruling is pending. In the United Kingdom, where the practice has been regulated since 1985, international surrogacy currently accounts for the majority of applications for parental orders in England and Wales, which are granted after the child has been born. In South Korea, maternity is determined by childbirth, and the Supreme Court reaffirmed on April 24, 2025, that surrogacy contracts are invalid.
In Australia, where altruistic surrogacy is permitted in all six states and both territories, two surrogate mothers—who carried pregnancies to term for a friend and a cousin, respectively—told a national conference in Melbourne in August 2026 that they had not seen their children in ten years, as the courts had left the decision to the commissioning parents; one of them still owes sixty thousand dollars in unpaid bills.
In Canada, a surrogate mother in Ontario seeking ten thousand dollars in unreimbursed pregnancy expenses took her case to Small Claims Court, only to discover that her contract stipulated arbitration, so her claim was never resolved in court. Quebec, which had declared all surrogacy contracts null and void since 1991, repealed that provision in June 2023 to regulate the practice. Three years later, the residency requirement was circumvented in neighbouring Ontario, and in 2025, its courts recognised parentage established in states that its own legislature had expressly excluded.
The ICASM member organisations, which work collaboratively to abolish surrogacy, conclude that neither payment, nor agency authorisation, nor the existence of a law alters what happens at that precise moment: the child is born, the handover takes place, and the woman who gave birth is left without any recourse. They do not see this as a drafting error that could be remedied with better safeguards, but rather as inherent to the very structure of the agreement.
The International Coalition to Abolish Surrogacy (ICASM) coordinated the letter. María Elena Abarca, WDI Chile contact, distributed it in Chile. Read the full letter here.
