Surrogacy Under Scrutiny
By Wang Hairong,
Bejing Review
| 02. 27. 2012
With its soft pink background and the picture of a happy, healthy baby, at first sight, Ymdaiyun.com looks no different from any other website that caters to the needs of expecting mothers.
But the website doesn't sell nappies, or formula milk, strollers or any of the other products usually associated with motherhood. Rather a cursory skim of its text reveals that it is in fact a surrogacy intermediary website.
Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. At present, doctors in China are banned from performing surrogacy procedures, according to a 2001 regulation on assisted reproductive technology released by the Ministry of Health.
The regulation also prohibits the trading of any human gamete, zygote or embryo.
Despite this regulation, an illegal surrogacy black market continues to thrive in China. At the end of 2011, surrogacy was brought to the public's attention by a wealthy couple in south China's Guangdong Province, who had surrogate mothers give birth to five of their eight children.
The rich couple had failed to conceive a...
Related Articles
By Mackenzie Mays, Los Angeles Times | 10.29.2024
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Sunday that requires large health insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization — a win for reproductive health advocates amid nationwide concerns about the future of access to fertility treatments.
The bill also...
Reproductive rights have been a flashpoint in national politics for decades, with the stakes surging after the Supreme Court shredded the right to an abortion. In the current presidential campaign, the battle over abortion has swelled and morphed to encompass in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has now moved rapidly from widely accepted to partisan hot button.
This dramatic shift was highlighted by the February decision of the Alabama Supreme Court that granted personhood rights to frozen IVF embryos, signaling that...
By Deirdre Walsh , NPR | 09.17.2024
Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic bill to provide a nationwide right to IVF treatments. It was the second time Senate Democrats tried and failed to advance the measure.
Reproductive freedom has remained a central issue in several Senate contests that...
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...