From 'Surrogacy Capital' to Ban: India's Womb Economy

India was once the world's surrogacy capital — a destination for wealthy foreigners seeking to hire Indian women to gestate their children. The industry was estimated at $2.3 billion annually, concentrated in clinics in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Delhi. Then, in 2021, India banned commercial surrogacy through the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, restricting the practice to "altruistic" arrangements for Indian couples only. The ban was celebrated as a protection of vulnerable women. But the reality is more complicated.

"They called it rent. They said I was renting my womb. But you cannot rent something that is part of your body. You can only sell it."

The Commodification Argument

The case for banning commercial surrogacy rested on a simple moral claim: reproductive labor should not be bought and sold. Surrogacy, critics argued, reduces women's bodies to instruments of production, treating pregnancy as a service and children as commodities. The imagery was powerful — wealthy Western couples shopping for Indian wombs, clinics advertising "guaranteed" pregnancies, women in poverty making reproductive decisions under economic duress.

**Kamala Chandrakirani**, former general secretary of the Women's Indian Organisation, described surrogacy as "a new form of reproductive exploitation" that preyed on women who had no other economic options. The **Indian Council of Medical Research** had been attempting to regulate the industry for years, but the lack of comprehensive legislation led to a patchwork of guidelines that were routinely ignored.

The ban seemed like a straightforward feminist victory. But many feminists were uneasy with the framing — and with the assumptions underlying it.

The Agency Question

The commodification argument assumes that women who become surrogates are incapable of making informed decisions about their own bodies. This assumption is paternalistic and historically familiar — it is the same reasoning that has been used to justify restrictions on sex work, contraception, and abortion. In each case, the argument goes: women cannot truly consent to this practice because their choices are constrained by poverty, patriarchy, or both.

But **surrogates themselves** — when consulted, which is rarely — often describe their participation in terms of economic agency. A surrogate in Anand, Gujarat, who earns more from one surrogacy pregnancy than she would in five years of domestic work, is making a rational economic decision within a constrained system. The question is not whether her choice is "truly free" — no choice is, in a world structured by inequality — but whether the alternative to surrogacy is autonomy or deprivation.

The ban does not eliminate the economic conditions that drive women to surrogacy. It simply eliminates the one relatively lucrative option they had. Women who would have been surrogates are now domestic workers, construction laborers, or garment workers — earning less, at greater physical risk, with no legal protections. The ban protected them from one form of exploitation while leaving them exposed to all the others.

The Regulatory Loophole

The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act permits "altruistic" surrogacy — arrangements in which a surrogate receives no payment beyond medical expenses. In practice, this creates a system in which surrogacy is available only to wealthy Indian couples who can afford to persuade a relative or friend to carry their child. The "altruism" requirement is a fiction — no woman carries a pregnancy for nine months out of pure generosity for a stranger. What it actually does is ensure that surrogacy is available to the privileged and unavailable to the poor.

Meanwhile, the ban has not eliminated commercial surrogacy — it has driven it underground. Reports from across India indicate that clandestine surrogacy arrangements continue, mediated by brokers, conducted in unlicensed clinics, and entirely unregulated. Women in these arrangements have no legal protections, no medical oversight, and no recourse if something goes wrong. The ban created a black market where none was needed.

"Before the ban, I was a surrogate in a clinic that had doctors and lawyers. After the ban, I am a surrogate in someone's house with a midwife and a prayer."

The Global Market

India's surrogacy ban has not ended the global market for reproductive labor — it has simply redirected it. Countries like Ukraine, Georgia, Colombia, and parts of Mexico have emerged as surrogacy destinations, often with fewer regulations than India had before its ban. Wealthy intended parents from the United States, Europe, and China continue to seek surrogates in countries where poverty makes reproductive labor cheap and legal protections are minimal.

The global surrogacy market reveals the fundamental tension in surrogacy regulation: the demand is international, but the supply is local. Wealthy countries restrict surrogacy within their own borders, citing exploitation concerns, while their citizens travel to poorer countries to hire surrogates who face the very exploitation that the wealthy countries claim to abhor. This is not protection — it is moral outsourcing.

**Janet Dolgin**, a law professor who has studied surrogacy extensively, argues that the solution is not prohibition but regulation — establishing minimum standards for surrogate compensation, medical care, legal representation, and informed consent. This approach treats surrogates as workers with rights, not as victims in need of rescue.

Reproductive Justice and Economic Justice

The surrogacy debate cannot be separated from the broader question of reproductive justice. Reproductive justice — a framework developed by women of color in the United States — holds that reproductive rights include not only the right not to have children, but the right to have children and to raise them in safe, healthy conditions. For surrogates, this means the right to make informed choices about their reproductive labor, with full knowledge of the risks, and with economic alternatives that are not themselves exploitative.

The real feminist response to surrogacy exploitation is not to ban surrogacy. It is to address the poverty, lack of education, and absence of economic opportunity that make women vulnerable to exploitation in the first place. It is to establish legal frameworks that protect surrogates' rights, health, and autonomy. And it is to confront the global inequality that allows wealthy countries to treat reproductive labor as an import commodity while denying the laborers basic rights.

Until these conditions change, the ban on commercial surrogacy is not a protection for women — it is a denial of their agency, their labor, and their right to participate in the economy on terms that the law refuses to acknowledge.