By Dr Elisabeth Taylor
Following a six-week extension, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) is due tomorrow to deliver its Final Report with its recommendations for surrogacy law reform in Australia to the Attorney-General. The report must then be tabled in Parliament and made available to the public within 15 sitting days – by 18 November 2026.
Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t cause the earth to shake. The review was intended to look at harmonising existing state and territory laws regulating ‘domestic altruistic surrogacy’ arrangements. Any recommendations made by the ALRC were to be consistent with Australia’s international human rights obligations and to prioritise the rights of the child.
However, instead of sticking to its brief, the ALRC seems to have set about developing the regulatory framework for a whole new commercial surrogacy industry. Of course, they don’t call it ‘commercial surrogacy,’ because that has such nasty, modern slavery associations. The good people of the ALRC – at least, whoever wrote the November 2025 Discussion Paper – would like us to believe that ‘compensated’ surrogacy is qualitatively different.
‘Compensated’ surrogacy comes complete with a ‘feminist’ marketing strategy. The ALRC suggests that financial payment for a woman’s ‘unique contribution’ to creating a baby should be regarded as ‘an employment right’ or a ‘moral or ethical imperative’ and that only some (probably rather strange) people ‘consider the idea itself as deeply objectionable.’
The Discussion Paper footnotes academic papers written by well-paid female academics in first-world universities, including one by Professor Ronli Sifris,[1] who has been appointed by the ALRC to lead this review. These papers suggest that obliging women to gestate babies for other people without financial reward – as current Australian law requires - is not respectful of women. They say the ‘right’ to work as a surrogate (and be paid for it) is just the next obvious political milestone in the long march towards women’s emancipation.
Those who sincerely care for the wellbeing of women and girls have seen this trick before with prostitution. Here we have an obviously immoral industry that profits from the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women attempting to throw dust in our eyes by talking about women’s autonomy and empowerment. There seems no shortage of ‘feminist’ academics prepared to theorise about the ‘right’ of women to be exploited. Perhaps these academics imagine all women are like them; well-educated, comfortably circumstanced, genuinely empowered to make autonomous decisions about their own lives.
The global reality is very different. In July 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, Reem Alsalem, published a report on the subject. She drew on submissions from around the world and online consultations with experts, ‘commissioning parents, surrogacy agencies, medical experts and women with lived experiences of surrogacy’. She included ‘reputable secondary sources’ but noted that these were few, given the methodological weaknesses of most academic studies.
Alsalem’s report describes surrogacy as ‘a system of exploitation and commodification of women and children, which reinforces patriarchal norms and subjects them to economic, psychological, physical, and reproductive violence, including in connection to slavery and human trafficking.’ She points out that globally, most surrogate mothers ‘have experienced multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and poverty long before entering surrogacy arrangements, which capitalize on these stark inequalities, leading to further marginalization.’
Surrogacy places a monetary value on a woman’s capacity to bear and give birth to healthy children. Instead of being treated as human beings, women are reduced to body parts and reproductive functions. This dehumanisation is reflected in derogatory terms such as ‘gestator,’ ‘oven’ or ‘womb for rent.’ Notably, the ALRC’s Discussion Paper only once describes surrogates as ‘women’ and never uses the word ‘mother.’
The ALRC will, no doubt, argue that ‘proper regulation’ of commercial surrogacy will solve all the usual problems. But horror stories abound, even from countries where commercial surrogacy is ostensibly well regulated. For the last decade, the United States, for example, has produced a steady litany of devastating stories. These include women pressured to abort their babies against their wishes and women who experience deep anguish when they realise the children they gave birth to have been handed over to criminal enterprises. In one case, a surrogate only belatedly realised that one of the ‘twins’ she had carried was the genetic progeny of her and her partner and had to fight to regain custody of the child.
A 2023 study on commercial surrogacy around the world concluded that legalisation and regulation of commercial surrogacy do nothing to reduce the harms to women and children, the exploitation of the poor by the rich or the dehumanisation that is unavoidable in these arrangements. Rather, the power of the state is called upon in the enforcement of commercial arrangements. State authority used in this way serves to legitimise the exploitation of women.
In short, what the ALRC looks set to propose will deliver the opposite of what is claimed. It will establish a regulatory scheme that normalises the exploitation of women under the guise of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ for the benefit of allied commercial interests that profit financially from these arrangements. When the ALRC presents its recommendations, Australian MPs at state and territory levels must be prepared to say ‘no.’
[1] Ronli Sifris, ‘Compensation in the Context of Surrogacy: A Feminist Perspective on the Insistence on Altruism’ in Becky Batagol et al (eds), The Feminist Legislation Project: Rewriting Laws for Gender-Based Justice, Routledge, 2024.
Dr Elisabeth Taylor is Head of Research at Women’s Forum Australia
Women’s Forum Australia is an independent think tank that undertakes research, education and public policy advocacy on issues affecting women and girls, with a particular focus on addressing behaviours and practices that are harmful and abusive to them. We are a non-partisan, non-religious, tax-deductible charity. We do not receive any government funding and rely solely on donations to make an impact. Support our work today.
| I’ll stand with women ▷ |