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Summary
UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, condemned surrogacy during a high-level event co-hosted by the Italian Government and ADF International ahead of her report presentation to the UN General Assembly on Oct 10, 2025.
Reem Alsalem, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, condemned the practice of surrogacy during the UN General Assembly event ahead of her report presentation to the UN General Assembly on October 08, 2025.
Speaking at the UN event, co-hosted by the Government of Italy and ADF International, Reem said surrogacy is responsible for inflicting large-scale violence, abuse, and exploitation on women and children.
Reem’s report, which she presented before the General Assembly on Oct 10, called for a global ban on all forms of surrogacy and urged States to adopt a legally binding international instrument prohibiting the practice.
The report also recommended criminalising the commissioning of children, banning surrogacy advertisements, and providing legal and psychosocial support to women already engaged in surrogacy arrangements. It further urged governments to uphold children’s rights to identity, care, and protection.
Hosted by the Italian Government, the event took place amid growing international momentum to ban surrogacy. In 2024, Italy became the first country to ban surrogacy both within and outside its borders, while Slovakia followed in 2025 with a constitutional amendment prohibiting the practice.
Italy’s Minister for Family, Natality, and Equal Opportunities, Eugenia Rocella, said the Italian Government believed that surrogacy should not only be prohibited domestically but also addressed internationally.
“Existing international treaties on the protection of women and children’s rights should be updated to explicitly include surrogacy as a practice of undermining dignity and entailing exploitation,” Rocella said.
Reem’s report detailed how surrogacy intentionally separates children from their mothers, severing natural maternal bonds and undermining their rights to identity, care, and protection from violence. It also emphasised that even so-called altruistic surrogacy arrangements harm both women and children by treating human life as a product.
“An inherent concern in surrogacy lies in the contractual programming of separation between a woman and the child that she carries, which risks treating the child as a passive object of an agreement between adults or as a commodity,” the report stated.
At the event, ADF International welcomed Reem’s position, describing it as a landmark moment for the global movement to end surrogacy.
The organisation’s Director of UN Advocacy, Giorgio Mazzoli, said, “Surrogacy rests on a system of violence that dehumanises women and children alike. States need to develop a coordinated international response to end the grave human rights violations inherent in this practice.”
He commended the Special Rapporteur for exposing the harms of what he described as an exploitative industry and called on governments to unite in adopting a UN treaty banning the practice globally.
Over 200 NGO, including Naija Feminists Media, have also supported the call for the global ban of surrogacy.
