Surrogacy Under Scrutiny

With its soft pink background and the picture of a happy, healthy baby, at first sight, Ymdaiyun.com looks no different from any other website that caters to the needs of expecting mothers.

But the website doesn't sell nappies, or formula milk, strollers or any of the other products usually associated with motherhood. Rather a cursory skim of its text reveals that it is in fact a surrogacy intermediary website.

Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. At present, doctors in China are banned from performing surrogacy procedures, according to a 2001 regulation on assisted reproductive technology released by the Ministry of Health.

The regulation also prohibits the trading of any human gamete, zygote or embryo.

Despite this regulation, an illegal surrogacy black market continues to thrive in China. At the end of 2011, surrogacy was brought to the public's attention by a wealthy couple in south China's Guangdong Province, who had surrogate mothers give birth to five of their eight children.

The rich couple had failed to conceive a...