[People's Daily] When Xiao Luo arrived in south China’s Guangzhou city in May last year, the 30-year-old was struggling to raise her 6-year-old son alone in Hunan Province. Her husband never showed up soon after a business failure. “I was devastated that my husband abandoned us just like that, leaving dunners knocking on the door every day,” Luo recalls. Desperate for cash, she searched for ways out and a website for a surrogacy agency popped up. “I thought that it could help solve my financial problems.” But she was wary that it might be a scam. After several conversations with the agency’s manager on the phone, she decided to go to Guangzhou, where the agency is based. When she arrived, however, she decided that bearing someone else’s baby was a step too far. Luo, who grew up in a small town in central China’s Hunan Province and finished nine-year schooling only, had very conventional ideas about parenthood and child-bearing. But the agency persuaded her to meet a couple in their 40s who lost their child in an accident.

The woman could not have another child because of her physical condition and age, says Luo. “She wept in front of me and I was really moved. They had my sympathy and I felt that I can do something for them.” In January, Luo gave birth to a baby girl. “It was not as painful as with my first delivery,” Luo recalls. “I was relieved that she was healthy and I knew all along that it was the couple’s baby, not mine, to detach myself,” she says.

Luo declines to reveal how much she got paid for the labor, but admitted it was enough for her to pay off her husband’s debt. Lu Jinfeng, founder of an online surrogacy agency, says surrogate mothers act out of compassion, but also according to their own financial woes. “In most cases, they are facing economic hardships either because of medical bills from family members or business or marriage failures, such as divorced women who cannot afford raising kids on their own,” says Lu. More clients are looking for surrogate mothers since Lu launched his online agency in 2004. They are mostly couples from big modern cities such as Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or from overseas, given the wives are unable to bear children but can still produce healthy eggs, says Lu. Some others come up to Lu for hope in sorrow: their children died in accidents and they are too old to bear new babies. The infertility rate among Chinese couples is up to 15 percent, and women shoulder the causes in nearly half cases. But less than one third of the infertile women can be cured with medical treatment. “These couples suffer from being childless.

A family without a child is incomplete in Chinese culture,” he says. Mr. Wang, a 37-year-old peasant from Anhui Province, married his teenage sweetheart 16 years ago.

After repeated attempts for having babies failed, his wife was diagnosed as having endometrial adhesion, which left her unable to carry a baby. “We’ve tried every possible solution, both from experts in big cities and folk remedies, but none of them ever worked,” Wang says. “Whenever we see couples with kids, we feel both envious and sad. We want a happy family, a family with a child.” The couple became subject of rumors in their village. “In the countryside, people are superstitious. When they notice you are still childless several years after marriage, they make up all kinds of stories.” The couple eventually left to find jobs in the city, and to get away from the pressure from family and gossips. Now a small businessman in Guangzhou, Wang and his wife are happier because they are expecting a baby, carried by a surrogate mother. “The pregnancy is already six months through now,” Wang says. “We don’t mind whether it’s a boy or a girl. We’re ecstatic that we are going to have a baby.” Wang first heard of surrogacy a couple of years ago, when one of his friends signed a surrogate mother through an agency and succeeded in parenting a baby girl. “I’ve got a lot of doubts in mind at the very beginning, the most important of which is whether the baby will be healthy. I’ve been witnessing my friend’s baby girl growing in perfect condition for two years,” Wang says. According to the Wangs’ agreement with a surrogate mother, a 32-year-old divorcee who has a son of herself, the couple will pay100,000 yuan (14,706 U.S. dollars) upon the arrival of a newborn, plus a monthly allowance of 2,500 yuan (368 U.S. dollars) during her pregnancy. “We are very grateful to her, and I think it’s reasonable to pay her for bringing a baby into our live,” Wang says. The total cost amounts to more than 200,000 yuan (29,412 U.S. dollars), including medical expenses, in-vitro fertilization and delivery, and a nanny to take care of the surrogate mother. Wang says his wife visits the surrogate mother almost every week. The couple is still concerned that she will become too attached to the to-be-born, although she has learnt from the beginning that it was their child and she was just helping them. Xiao Luo feels the same. She has never seen the baby girl after delivery as agreed in advance with the parents. “Sometimes I would wonder how she looks like. She should be happy together with her loving parents,” she says. With growing demands for surrogate mothers, underground networks of surrogacy agents have spread over the recent years, making lucrative profits. For Lu’s agency, commission fee ranges from 12,000 to 15,000 yuan (1,765 to 2,206 U.S. dollars) for one surrogate mother. Two types of surrogacy are in service at the moment: one through in-vitro fertilization with the clients’ eggs and sperms; the other through test-tube fertilization with eggs from surrogate mothers. To avoid disputes, Lu’s agency has denied requests for surrogacy with donated eggs because of the high risk of the surrogate mother becoming too attached to the child to give it away. Source:Xinhua The legitimacy of surrogacy in China is open to question. In 2001, the Ministry of Health issued regulations on human assisted reproduction technology, which prohibits medical institutions and medical workers from conducting any kind of surrogacy treatments. However, surrogacy agencies argue they are exempt from the regulations, which only ban medical institutions and medical workers from conducting surrogacy treatments. Lu, whose agency has successfully helped with more than 2,000 surrogate children, declines to give any information about where and how the treatments are conducted. His agency charges 20,000 to70,000 yuan (2,941 to 10.294 U.S. dollars) for matchmaking hospitals with clients, according to the agency’s website. Professor Li Benfu, medical ethics expert at Peking University Health Science Center, says the surrogacy is very risky with the current legal status and will lead to serious problems, with commercial surrogacy in particular. “There’s always risk of complications or even death for the pregnant women and the risk of a baby born with birth defects,” says Li. “the problem is who will take responsibility if these situations occur?” But Li also acknowledges the fact that some women cannot bear a child by themselves even though they produce healthy eggs. “Banning surrogacy virtually deprives these women of the right to reproduction,” he says. He suggests making rules for surrogacy instead of completely banning it. But with the number of surrogate birth is still very small, the prospect of a safe legal framework remains distant, he says. Lu agrees: “There should be specific regulations regarding surrogacy agencies. For example, health authorities can set strict standards and issue certificates to qualified agencies.” Liang Xiao, partner at a law firm based in Foshan, Guangdong Province, has received a couple seeking for legal advice about their dispute with a surrogate mother, a divorced woman who bore a baby with the couple’s sperm and egg but refused to give them the child after delivery as agreed. “They did not file a lawsuit in the end, but the case raised a lot of concerns,” Liang says. Current Chinese laws did not apply to the case, Liang says. A circular issued by the Supreme People’s Court states that if a married couple agree to have artificial fertilization, the child is regarded as their marital child and their rights and duties are subject to the Marriage Law. “But the parentage of children carried by surrogate mothers has yet been defined by law, thus causing disputes,” Liang says. He suggests that it is necessary to notarize surrogacy agreements by official institutions, in addition to technical regulations defining which organizations are allowed to conduct surrogacy treatment, as well as strict management and supervision of the medical institutions and professionals. Liang argues the regulations should make it a rule that couples seeking for surrogacy must prove they are legally married and the wife is unable to bear a child, and those who violate the regulations should be severely punished. “Because this problem hasn’t yet sparked widespread social interest, so the government hasn’t started doing anything about it,” says Lu Jinfeng. To legislate surrogacy is not yet on the agenda, according to the information office of the Ministry of Health. Medical institutions and doctors that perform surrogacy operations can be fined up to 30,000 yuan (4,412 U.S. dollars), according to current regulations on human-assisted reproduction technology. The Ministry has no figures of institutions or medical staff that have been punished since the regulations took effect in 2001. However, an official from a district family-planning office in Guangzhou who asks not to be named, says doctors who perform in-vitro fertilizations get bonuses of about 40,000 yuan (5,882 U.S. dollars) and the surrogacy industry is valued in the millions of yuan each year. In February last year, the family-planning office found three women in a communal flat were acting as “illegal” surrogates and all of them had “agreed” to undergo “remedial measures” in accordance with the law, said the official. Existing in a gray zone, surrogacy agencies are alleged to have arranged prostitution, and blackmailed or defrauded clients. “It is high time for the government to map out surrogacy regulations and clean up the industry, says Lu, “we are willing to come under supervision and sunshine.” But he says commercial surrogacy should never be allowed. “Some rich women rent a womb simply because they want to keep fit — that is absolutely not acceptable.”