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| (Photo: shanghaidaily.com.cn/Zhou Tao) |
BEIJING, Aug. 17 (Xinhuanet) -- More than four years after sparking a nationwide debate over its ethical and legal propriety, China's surrogate mother industry seems to have found acceptability -- if not respectability.
In fact, wombs-for-rent businesses are thriving in the world's most populous country, where some studies indicate an estimated one in eight couples face fertility problems.
Reports of a secretive surrogate pregnancy service, operating in a legal "gray area," were widespread in early 2006 and intermediary websites were recruiting volunteers despite a government crackdown.
The industry in China is based on gestational surrogacy, whereby a woman agrees to become pregnant via embryo transfer. She is not the biological mother of the child and relinquishes it to its biological mother or father after its birth.
No official statistics are available on the number of surrogate pregnancy agencies in China, but the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Weekly newspaper estimated in April last year that around 25,000 surrogate children had been born in China in the past three decades.
Jiang Lei, who has been introducing childless couples to surrogate volunteers for two years, estimates surrogate mothers give birth to about 500 to 600 babies on the Chinese mainland annually. He reckons no more than 50 such agencies exist on the Chinese mainland, mostly in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou and the country's northern Hebei Province.
A surrogate costs about 300,000 yuan (US$44,320) to hire in Beijing, says Jiang, who claims his agency, accounts for about more than 80 percent of the market in the capital.
The agency's website, daiyunguke.com, breaks down the cost as: fetus implantation 60,000 to 95,000 yuan; brokerage fees for the agency 140,000 yuan; surrogate mother 100,000 yuan; monthly apartment rent 3,000 yuan; and maternal care 2,000 yuan.
The intermediary charges clients 30,000 to 40,000 yuan in "connection fees" for doctors who carry out the fertilization procedures, says Jiang.Jiang, 27, says his agency helps up to 200 couples to find surrogate mothers each year, with a successful in-vitro fertilization rate of just over 50 percent.
Most would-be surrogates come from small or medium-sized cities or rural areas and almost all have financial problems, but only about one in five applicants are accepted.
"Applicants are preferably aged 22 to 35, have a clean medical record and a good healthy body, and most important, they must be mentally stable and unlikely to withdraw midway," he says.
Within a month of their first interview with the agency, they could be signing a three-party contract with the biological parents and intermediaries.
Almost all biological parents refuse to contact the surrogate mother after the birth and more than 90 percent of biological parents have DNA tests to confirm the genetic link, says Jiang.
A woman who only identifies herself as Wang, 28, a jobless single mother of a 6-year-old boy, says signing the contract eliminated any fears that she might be cheated.
Wang traveled from her home in the countryside of northeast China's Jilin Province to Beijing after an online interview with Jiang's company. She says she "had nothing to lose" in signing a contract with the biological parents and the intermediary company.
But the validity of the contract is still subject to dispute, says Song Yongfeng, a lawyer at the Shenzhen Branch of DeHeng Law Offices, who has been dealing with maternal law for 10 years and is an expert on surrogacy.
Surrogacy contracts are not included in the Contract Law, which has no specifications regarding surrogacy, he says. In some cases, newborns have been abandoned or surrogate mothers have refused to give babies to the biological parents. Both biological parents and surrogates are reluctant to admit it, but the contentious issue of who is actually the "mother" remains, Song says.
Genetically, the child inherits the features of the biological parents, but they are nurtured by the blood of a surrogate mother.
