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Grayscale photo of a pregnant woman holding her stomach.

China's illegal surrogacy market is booming with vast numbers of women earning money through offering their wombs for service.

Women in rural villages are being lured away from their factory jobs to carry others' fertilised eggs to birth according to a two-month investigation by a state-run news site, The Paper, The Times reported.

Couples pay anywhere between £40,000 to £114,000 for surrogacy, and are even told they can guarantee the baby's gender. Agents claim they can do this by either testing the sex of the embryo or aborting babies of the unwanted sex, both of which are illegal practices in China.

One pregnant woman said: "You can make more than 100,000 yuan [£11,400] from each birth, something I would never be able to make in my whole life."

Because surrogacy is illegal in China, knowing the extent of these services is difficult however there are distinguishable triggers for the surge in demand. It is thought that 15 million Chinese couples are infertile- a figure blamed by some on pollution. In addition, in the aftermath of China's relaxation on it's...