Crackdown on China’s surrogate mum industry

Surrogate mothers are more in demand than ever in China, as wealthy infertile couples look to others to bear them babies. Officials have largely turned a blind eye to this underground womb-for-rent industry that defies the country's strict childbirth laws. But now, there are signs the authorities are starting to crack down by forcing some surrogate mothers to have abortions.

Three young first-time surrogate mothers were found by authorities hiding in a communal flat in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Soon after, family planning and security officers broke in, bundled them into a van and drove them to a district hospital where they were manhandled into a maternity ward, the mothers told Reuters news agency. “I was crying ‘I don't want to do this’,” said a young woman called Xiao Hong, who was pregnant with four-month-old twins. “But they still dragged me in and injected my belly with a needle,” said the 20-year-old of her ordeal which happened in late February. Men had forced her thumbprint onto a consent form before carrying out the abortion, she said.

Another of the surrogates, who said she'd come from a village in Sichuan province, told how officers made her take pills then surgically removed her three-month-old foetus while she was unconscious. “I was terrified,” the 23-year-old said. China’s official Guangzhou Daily newspaper quoted district family planning officials as saying the women were all unmarried and acting as “illegal” surrogates. It added the three had “agreed” to undergo “remedial measures” in accordance with the law. But the head of the surrogacy agency caring for the mothers, "China Surrogate Mother" website (www.aa69.com) Lu Jinfeng, said "It's an absolute crime." "By forcefully dragging people away like this to undergo an abortion is a savage illegal act that violates human rights," said the founder of the five-year-old company.

Underground networks of surrogacy agents, hospitals, and doctors have spread in recent years as infertile Chinese couples with money hire surrogates to produce babies for them. The surrogates are often confined to secret flats for most of their pregnancy to avoid detection, while fertility, obstetrics and childbirth procedures for the mothers are often carried out discreetly by medical staff at public hospitals and health clinics with links to agents. With around one in six couples in the US now estimated to be infertile and with similar rates in China, surrogacy agencies have been recruiting girls, often from poor villages, to have babies on behalf of prospective parents, in ever greater numbers.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children