World Day Against Trafficking: Surrogacy violates international laws. No government acts on it.
Every 30 July, the United Nations marks the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. Statements are issued, reports are published, and one industry is reliably absent from all of them. Since 2024, European and international laws have named surrogacy-related exploitation as a form of human trafficking. Almost no member state has acted as though it did.
The omission is harder to defend each year, and the UN’s own machinery makes it harder still. In October 2025, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls described surrogacy as a system of violence, exploitation and abuse, and called for a binding international instrument aimed at its abolition (A/80/158). That is the same institution whose day this is.
The legal definition was never the obstacle. The Palermo Protocol describes trafficking as the recruitment, transport or harbouring of persons through coercion, deception or abuse of a position of vulnerability, for the purpose of exploitation. Directive 2024/1712 then applied that framing to surrogacy explicitly. The instrument exists. It is not being used.
Consider what is already documented. In Crete, a criminal trial is expected this autumn concerning the Mediterranean Fertility Institute: 98 surrogate mothers and 71 egg donors exploited, 26 defendants, 17 charges. In Georgia, RFE/RL documented women recruited in Thailand, moved across a border and subjected to egg extraction under the control of an organised criminal network, with 70 foreign nationals interviewed by Georgian authorities. In Nigeria, surrogacy including reproductive tourism continues to grow. The country has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the world, with women dying from childbirth every seven minutes, now, including surrogate mothers. Many of the surrogates who survive lament exploitation and depression, yet no legal framework exists to address surrogacy and the babies produced from these arrangements and taken across borders.
Set that aside, the same governments regulate adoption, and the double standard becomes difficult to explain away. To adopt a child from Nigeria, a European family faces background checks, home studies and years of post-placement oversight. The United Kingdom maintains a restricted list of countries from which adoption is barred entirely, over trafficking, corruption and commodification concerns. Nigeria is on it. To commission a child through a surrogate mother in the same country, no equivalent screening applies, no restricted list exists, and no post-placement monitoring is required. The child arrives by the route with the fewest safeguards, and that route is the lawful one.
The standard objection is that these are criminal abuses distinct from lawful surrogacy. That objection does not survive contact with how the industry works. Surrogacy depends on recruiting women whose economic circumstances constrain their options, on cross-border movement in a significant share of arrangements, and on contracts drafted by agencies and clients that the woman carrying the pregnancy did not write and often cannot meaningfully renegotiate. Those are not the conditions under which exploitation occurs by accident.
The medical cost is documented and goes in one direction. A 2024 cohort study in Annals of Internal Medicine found that gestational surrogates face approximately three times the risk of severe maternal morbidity, corroborated by a nine-year Canadian study of more than 863,000 births. She takes the risk. The contract assigns the child to someone else.
Where the absence of law is presented as neutrality, it is not. Argentina has no surrogacy-specific legislation; Colombia relies on a single 2009 Constitutional Court ruling. Both are marketed as accessible destinations, and trafficking cases have been documented in both. It is also worth noting where demand originates, since trafficking analysis so rarely does. In October 2024, two Italian nationals were arrested at Buenos Aires airport attempting to leave with a child born to an 18-year-old surrogate mother.
Some states have chosen differently. Italy has criminalised surrogacy undertaken abroad by its own citizens, the first extraterritorial model of its kind in Europe. Spain prohibits the practice outright under Article 10 of Law 14/2006. Prohibition is a legislative choice, available to any government that wants it.
We should be equally clear about what we are not doing. Any legal win against surrogacy that arrives with an anti-abortion agenda is not one we endorse. Our opposition to reproductive exploitation is inseparable from our commitment to bodily autonomy, abortion rights included. No natalist, conservative or anti-choice movement speaks for us, under any circumstance.
Two questions, then, for decision-makers in policy, law or human rights today. Does your government treat surrogacy as trafficking under the Palermo Protocol, and does its transposition of Directive 2024/1712 carve out an exception for arrangements labelled “altruistic”? And if you defend the altruistic model, would you accept a rule barring every intermediary, agency, clinic and lawyer alike, from making a profit on the arrangement?
Altruism has only ever been asked of the woman.
Co-signed by ICASM/CIAMS (60 organisations across 20 countries), Naija Feminists Media (Nigeria), and Stop Surrogacy Now (UK).
abolition-ms.org · naijafeministsmedia.org.ng. stopsurrogacynowuk.org
