Surrogacy Gives Birth to Industry
By Peter Korn,
Portland Tribune
| 06. 21. 2012
Oregon's Medical Advances, Willing Mothers Attract International Clients Who Bring Cash With Their Dreams
Jeri Chambers is in the middle of her seventh pregnancy and still enjoying the process.
That's a good thing, since the 34-year-old Chambers is serving as a gestational carrier, or surrogate mother, for the fourth time after delivering three children of her own.
Chambers, who also owns the local Greatest Gift Surrogacy Center, is part of a little-known but fast-emerging industry in Oregon: international surrogacy.
In the past year and a half, couples from around the world looking for surrogate gestational carriers to bear their children have discovered Oregon, with its liberal surrogate laws and highly rated reproductive medicine clinics.
A year ago, Chambers' agency had three international customers. This year, Chambers says, she has had 23 couples from outside the United States who have come to Oregon to have a surrogate carry their children.
John Chally, co-founder of Northwest Surrogacy Center in Northeast Portland, also has seen his international business take off. Chally says about a third of his agency's 36 clients this year are from outside the United States, a significant shift from five years ago, when his...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...