Reproductive Tourism: Paying Women in Poor Countries to Bear Our Babies is Rife with Ethical Problems

By some accounts, the Indian ART industry is worth $500 million to $2.3 billion.

In their upcoming paper, “Ethical concerns for maternal surrogacy and reproductive tourism” in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Professor Raywat Deonandan of the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa, along with students Samantha Green and Amanda van Beinum, enumerate the specific ethical challenges posed by this emerging new industry.

Along with six other concerning issues, the authors identified the tension between business ethics and medical ethics as being at the heart of the industry’s ethical problem, along with an insufficiently broad definition of “informed consent.” When desperately poor, illiterate and vulnerable village women are entering into complicated contracts to sell their reproductive health to wealthy foreigners, often some of the softer social risks are not communicated to them, such as their risk of estrangement from their communities, or the risk of domestic unease with their spouses and existing children.

Part of the problem is that when commerce collides with medicine, there isn’t an agreed upon ethical framework for establishing rights and...