Experts from the fields of medicine, law, ethics, politics and media met in Berlin on 6 March, shortly before International Women’s Day, to raise public awareness of a global billion-pound business: the business of female fertility and children as products.
A report by Anna Diouf /Tichys Einblick
‘I was lucky,’ says Olivia Maurel. The spokesperson for the Casablanca Declaration, which campaigns for the global ban on surrogacy, was herself born through surrogacy. She explains what this practice means for those affected.
She was born through ‘traditional’ surrogacy: the woman who carried her also provided the egg cell. This distinguishes Maurel from most children who are purchased through surrogacy.
In most cases, three women are involved: one contributes the egg cells and thus becomes the genetic mother. She often remains anonymous. Another offers her body to carry the child, and a third pays for the child and, not infrequently, for the birth mother to be removed from the birth certificate.
Contractually formed identity
A fake identity, right from the start. The lineage is deliberately split and obscured. Not least so that the biological and legal bond between the surrogate mother and the child can be ‘easier’ to sever. The emotional wound remains – for both mother and child.
Maurel’s identity is ‘only’ split between two women. She was able to locate her genetic mother, as well as her biological brother. That is why she considers herself lucky, despite the depression, the suicide attempts, despite the feeling of abandonment that has weighed on her since childhood.
Maurel is moved to tears when she talks about her first encounter with her brother: joy, a sense of belonging and, at the same time, deep sadness about the stolen bond, about all the things they were not allowed to experience together. She was wanted. But she was ordered like an object, like one orders a car.
Visibility for a marginalised issue
The audience listens to Maurel spellbound and visibly moved. 130 people have come, and the hall in the Federal Press Conference building on the banks of the Spree is almost full. Children and Commerce – The Business of Surrogacy and the Desire to Have Children is the title of the conference, which brings together experts on the subject of surrogacy.
The organiser is Aktion Lebensrecht für Alle (ALfA). Germany’s largest pro-life organisation has chosen the location and time carefully: ‘We are not only in the heart of the capital, but we are also at the heart of the capital’s public relations work,’ says Cornelia Kaminski, federal chairwoman of the human rights organisation. “Right in the middle of the Federal Press Conference, where the most important decisions for this republic are announced and discussed. (…) The issue of surrogacy must not be a matter of indifference to you politicians sitting over there, within walking distance, in the Bundestag, in the Federal Chancellery.”
It is 6 March, two days before International Women’s Day and one day before the fertility fair Wish for a baby takes place in Berlin. At this fair, surrogacy is openly advertised. Although it is illegal in Germany, as is advertising for it. So it is the right time to raise public awareness of the exploitation of women and children.
The speakers at the conference are all experts in their fields: lawyers who explain national and international legal implications, doctors and psychologists who identify health risks and consequences, and theologians who offer an ethical and philosophical framework for answering the question of whether humans can be turned into objects. Journalists and political actors complement the specialist presentations with insights into their work.
A comprehensive presentation of the issue, culminating in Olivia Maurel’s contribution: facts and figures, everything that is explained theoretically before and after, comes to life and becomes concrete in her and through her. Here stands a person who has herself experienced being treated as a commodity.
Children are not a therapeutic measure
Olivia Maurel emphasises that she is speaking here not as an activist, but as someone who has been affected. She also gives a voice to others who have been ordered in this way but do not dare to speak out, either because the trauma is still too fresh or because they fear losing the relationship with the parents who ordered them and with whom they grew up.
Maurel has accepted this consequence because she does not want to remain silent.
Surrogacy is always viewed solely from the perspective of the commissioning parents, while the ‘existential consequences for the child are ignored’. Surrogacy is portrayed as an expression of compassion. But compassion for suffering adults should not come at the expense of children. As a mother of three, she has great understanding for the pain that unwanted childlessness brings. But: ‘Children are not a therapeutic remedy for the suffering of adults.’
The difference between adoption and surrogacy is that adoption is intended to compensate for the loss of biological parents, whereas surrogacy deliberately brings about this loss. ‘The separation was not the result of tragic circumstances, but was contractually agreed,’ says Maurel.
How does she feel about fighting a practice without which she would not be alive, asks a hesitant question from the audience. Maurel replied that she had been asked this question many times before. ‘You wouldn’t ask someone who was conceived through rape that question.’ It’s an uncomfortable but understandable parallel: no one would think of promoting rape because there are people who were conceived as a result of it.
Prenatal interaction: relationships do not begin at birth
Maurel wants to destroy the structure that shaped her life and manipulated her even before she was born. Birth is ‘not the beginning of a relationship, but the transformation of a relationship that already began in the womb.’
This is confirmed by the medical professionals present. They describe the prenatal interaction between mother and child on a cellular and physical level, as well as on a psychological, emotional and communicative level.
Dr. Andreas Weber documents the increased health risks for mother and child, which do not begin with the separation after birth. Since the surrogate mother usually has no genetic relationship with the embryo that is implanted in her, there is a high risk that her body will reject the child. The exact consequences of freezing eggs in the course of in vitro fertilisation are not even known, as the data available is sparse: humans are playing God without being able to foresee the consequences.
Health risks for the women involved
The term ‘egg donation’ obscures the massive intervention in a woman’s hormone balance that is necessary to bring several eggs to maturity at the same time and to ‘harvest’ them, as it is called in English terminology. This process alone can be accompanied by serious complications, according to Weber. The surrogate mother must also be hormonally stimulated to build up enough tissue for implantation to take place. The morbidity rate and the risk of complications during childbirth are significantly higher for surrogate mothers. There is also a previously unexplained loss of fertility in women who have acted as surrogate mothers.
However, it is not only physical and psychological consequences that both women and children suffer as a result of surrogacy.
Human trafficking and exploitation
Throughout the conference, it becomes clear time and again that this is a matter of human trafficking and exploitation. Weber is deputy director of the European section of DAFOH (Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting), a human rights organisation that campaigns against illegal organ removal and organ trafficking.
He addresses a cruel reality: organised crime in third world countries profits from surrogacy. Women and children serve as ‘human material’. Egg cells, organs, stem cells: the human body as a resource that is produced and exploited for profit.
Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, joins us from Brazil. She also emphasises that criminal activities involving surrogacy, in which children become victims of human trafficking and abuse, can no longer be dismissed as conspiracy theories.
Among other things, she points out that there is hardly any data available on the clients. Cases have already become public in which convicted paedophiles obtained a child through surrogacy.
Another danger for the child is that the commissioning parents can change their minds at any time. Then children are aborted, often against the will of the surrogate mothers, or left behind.
As Special Rapporteur, Alsalem published a report on surrogacy in a global context in October 2025. She describes the situation of the women involved. They are often forced into contracts that they do not fully understand due to a lack of education or language barriers. Several cases have made headlines, for example in Georgia and Greece, where women were held captive against their will in slave-like conditions as surrogate mothers or egg ‘donors’ in ‘egg farms’.
The parallels to prostitution are obvious: the pimps are the agencies, the clients are the customers. Women’s bodies and fertility are exploited.
Social and financial power imbalance
Asalem also draws attention to the power imbalance: rich women would never carry children for poor women or make their eggs available.
She laments that surrogacy is promoted in many countries despite a lack of data and without sufficiently understanding the entire issue, and expresses her disappointment that international agreements exist regarding other human rights violations. Alsalem therefore calls for a global action plan against this ‘physical, psychological and economic violence against women.’
A billion-dollar business
As surgeon Kai Witzel and publicist Brigit Kelle also make clear, this is an international billion-dollar business. Surrogate mothers receive only a fraction of the sums that agencies and clinics earn from financially strong clients who want to have children. Where national law restricts the practice, the market shifts to countries with less regulation.
The lawyers present also addressed this issue: there is no right to have a child, said Felix Böllmann from the legal human rights organisation Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF International). International and national law make this clear, and the European Court of Justice has already ruled against surrogacy. The main problem is the enforcement of existing law.
Surrogacy is marketed as a ‘glossy’ and lifestyle choice. The human rights violations behind it are consistently ignored, even by many media outlets. This concealment also occurs through the choice of words: ‘Altruistic’ surrogacy, for example, in which the fee for the surrogate mother is simply reclassified as ‘compensation’ – a convenient excuse, moreover, to justify lower payments to the surrogate mother – is nothing more than a marketing euphemism.
The legal dilemma
However, Böllmann, like Reem Alsalem, points out that the existence of surrogacy forces states to enact legal regulations that act as a backdoor form of recognition. This is because children born through surrogacy also need legal status and protection, for example from statelessness. Allowing commissioning parents to adopt the children creates the impression that the practice is de facto tolerated.
Regulating surrogacy is not a solution, according to Böllmann, as it does not prevent the human rights violations caused by surrogacy, but only structures them.
An attempt to counteract this is the Italian legislation that punishes parents who try to bring their child born elsewhere to Italy. This makes Italy unattractive as a market for agencies and clinics. This is in stark contrast to Germany, where fertility fairs such as Wish for a Baby and Men Having Babies are held regularly. The latter event is specifically aimed at homosexual men who want to have children.
Unexpected alliances
The association Frauenheldinnen e.V. wanted to prevent Wish for a baby from taking place in Cologne because it was proven that illegal advertising and contract negotiations were taking place there. Eva Engelken, the chairwoman of the association, talks about the association’s campaign against surrogacy fairs and its attempt to have them banned under administrative law. Engelken appears determined and undeterred in the face of a conflict reminiscent of David’s battle against Goliath: feminists and pro-life activists, with limited financial resources and without broad media and political support, are opposing the operators of a lucrative business model – a difficult process, even though they know they have the law clearly on their side.
Engelken’s presence attests to the novel alliance that has already become apparent in the campaign against trans ideology: Engelken calls it a ‘single-issue alliance,’ in which people with different views come together. After all, pro-life activists and feminists are not usually considered ‘natural allies.’
However, there is interdisciplinary agreement on the assessment of surrogacy. Without exception, the speakers advocate an international ban.
This consensus, incidentally, would not shy away from debate: Cornelia Kaminski emphasises that representatives of the Association for the Promotion of the Legalisation of Surrogacy in Germany were also invited to participate in a panel discussion. However, the proponents of surrogacy declined.
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