CIAMS/ICASM opposes a plan to reopen the reproductive market at the very moment the region is closing, and salutes the mobilisation of Thai civil society
31 July 2026
This text is an excerpt of the contribution ICASM would have filed in the public consultation opened by the Thai Ministry of Public Health, had that consultation been accessible to it. The platform being closed to the international civil society concerned, the coalition publishes its position in full.
As the public consultation opened by the Thai Ministry of Public Health on a draft revision of the law governing assisted reproduction closes today, ICASM, a coalition of sixty organisations in twenty countries across four continents, opposes a text that would reopen surrogate motherhood to the international market, and salutes the mobilisation of the Thai organisations that are resisting it.
The draft brought forward by the Department of Health Service Support would reopen surrogate motherhood to foreign clients, set official tariffs for it, extend it to new categories of clients and authorise the export of oocytes, sperm and embryos. Thailand had nonetheless restricted surrogate motherhood and prohibited its commercial exploitation in 2015, following the scandals that had exposed the exploitation of women and the trade in children on its soil. This draft would undo that protection.
Beneath a vocabulary of safeguards, the text institutes what it claims to prevent. Setting an official tariff does not prevent exploitation, it establishes it. Making the access of foreign couples conditional upon their sharing the nationality of the surrogate mother is not a protection but the opening of a market. Authorising the export of reproductive material organises a cross-border trade and increases the danger to the women from whom oocytes are extracted, who are systematically rendered invisible within these arrangements.
Let there be no mistake as to the reach of these objections. ICASM asks for no further guarantees, no tighter supervision and no better drafted framework. It is abolitionist, and its position is that no arrangement, however rigorous, can render acceptable an agreement by which a woman undertakes to become pregnant, to give birth, and then to hand the child to others, because what is at stake is not the quality of the supervision but the existence of the transaction. To regulate a practice of exploitation does not correct it: it confers upon that practice the authority of law and places it beyond criticism. ICASM therefore proposes no amendment to this text and calls for its withdrawal.
“Commercial” or “altruistic”, the act contracted for is the same
Thailand adopted in 2015 the strictest version of this distinction that exists anywhere. Any payment exceeding reasonable expenses constitutes there an offence punishable by up to ten years of imprisonment and a fine of two hundred thousand baht; the surrogate mother had to be a blood relative of the commissioning parties; those parties had to be married and Thai, or married for three years to a Thai national; a genetic link with one of them was required, and the surrogate mother’s own oocyte could under no circumstances be used. It is that architecture the Ministry now proposes to abandon by setting official tariffs. Yet a State does not fix the price of that which it maintains is not sold: the draft is itself the admission that the distinction did not hold.
It could not hold, because it bears upon the payment and not upon the act. What is contracted for, in both cases, is the programmed severance of a bond: adults agree among themselves, before conception has even taken place, that a woman will become pregnant, that she will live through that pregnancy to its term, that she will give birth, that she will be separated from the child, and that the child will belong to others. Whether money changes hands or not does not alter the nature of that agreement; it alters its price. And it will be noticed that in a so-called “altruistic” surrogacy, the woman who lives through the pregnancy is the only party asked to gain nothing: the clinic is paid, the agency is paid, the lawyer is paid, the broker is paid. Altruism is required of her alone.
It must finally be said what was concealed by the requirement, presented in 2015 as a guarantee against commodification, that the surrogate mother be a blood relative of the commissioning parties. Removing the price does not remove the constraint, but relocates it. A woman whose own family asks her to undergo a pregnancy for a brother, for a cousin or for a brother-in-law is not negotiating a contract she might walk away from; she accepts or refuses from within a bond upon which she depends, under the eyes of all her kin, and her refusal would cost her not a transaction but her place in her family. She will then live alongside that child, and alongside those who asked it of her, for the rest of her life. There is no withdrawal clause in a family. The model of 2015 and the draft of 2026 are thus two means of obtaining the same thing, the one through the obligation of kinship, the other through price.
The Thai women held in Georgia had in fact been recruited through an advertisement for surrogate motherhood promising twenty-five thousand baht a month to help childless couples. The vocabulary of help and the monthly salary appeared in the same sentence.
Thailand would open at the very moment all its neighbours are closing
This draft arrives out of step with everything happening around it. In December 2022 the Russian Federation prohibited foreign nationals from resorting to surrogate motherhood on its territory. In 2024 Georgia moved to close its market to foreign clients. On 14 July 2026 Kazakhstan reserved the capacity to commission to its own married nationals, that Law entering into force on 25 July. Within days, the consultancies that advise international clients publicly named Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia as the jurisdictions towards which their clients would henceforth be directed.
None of these measures made the demand disappear, each of them merely displaced it, and one must look at what these texts in fact regulate, for they decide which women will become pregnant, in which country, holding which citizenship and within which marriage, while not one of them ever touches the purchaser. He who was turned away from Moscow, and then from Tbilisi, and then from Astana has at no point been deprived of anything whatever; he has simply been given, each time, a new address. His money is intact, his intention is intact, his embryos are frozen and portable across whichever border he chooses next, and the only variables that change at each closure are the nationality of the woman who will live through the pregnancy and the depth of the poverty out of which she will have been recruited. The address this draft offers him today is Bangkok.
In reopening, Thailand would therefore not create a market: it would volunteer to receive the one its neighbors have just refused, and it is Thai women who would carry the weight of it.
What the Georgian egg farm case has already established
ICASM recalls what Thai women endured barely eighteen months ago. In February 2025 three of them were repatriated from Georgia, the Georgian Ministry of the Interior confirming the repatriation and the questioning of four foreign nationals, while the Thai police opened an investigation. These women had been recruited through an advertisement for surrogate motherhood promising twenty-five thousand baht a month to help childless couples, and were then routed via Dubai and Armenia. On arrival their passports were confiscated and they were told they were in the country unlawfully and risked arrest. They described a house in which sixty to seventy Thai women were living, in which there existed neither contracts nor commissioning parties, and in which they were anesthetized once a month so that their oocytes could be extracted and sold on. The Pavena Hongsakul Foundation for Children and Women, which triggered the rescue together with Interpol and the Thai authorities, estimated that a hundred further women remained held.
This must be named for what it is. It is not a poorly informed consent, nor an unbalanced contract, nor an asymmetrical commercial relationship whose terms might be corrected, but coercion exercised by an organised criminal network, with the confiscation of identity documents, de facto confinement, the threat of criminal prosecution and a ransom demanded for release, which is to say the whole of the elements constituting trafficking in human beings within the meaning of the Palermo Protocol, to which Thailand is a party.
This case is not a marginal excess of the reproductive market, it is how that market works. Surrogate motherhood served there as the recruitment channel for the trade in oocytes: these women were not taken in spite of surrogacy, they were taken by means of it. Georgia then had no specific law and companies presented their services there as lawful. And the transit ran through Armenia, precisely one of the jurisdictions the industry has just designated as a destination for displaced demand. It is this circuit that the Thai draft would feed by authorising the export of oocytes.
Regulation does not prevent the sale of children
The argument that rigorous supervision would prevent abuse has been refuted by the State of the region which has legislated most. In Kazakhstan, whose law has organised surrogate motherhood in the fullest detail since 2011, the prosecutor’s office of Astana secured the conviction of a nineteen year old mother and her intermediaries for trafficking in minors, the instrument of the sale having been a fictitious surrogate motherhood contract concluded in the eighth month of pregnancy. The child was placed in an institution. Where the law supplies a form which attributes a child in advance to those who pay, that form is borrowed by the very persons the law purported to exclude.
International experience is consistent: India, Nepal and Cambodia each opened, suffered the abuses, then closed again, while the industry moved on. Thailand has already lived through this.
A consultation that is not one, and a civil society that is rising
ICASM observes that the consultation, presented as a historic piece of legislation which the public could help to advance, gathered only some two hundred and sixty people and was conducted on a platform closed to the international civil society concerned. An arrangement designed to ratify a decision already taken cannot stand in place of deliberation.
Faced with this draft, Thai civil society has mobilised. Organisations defending the rights of women and children, networks against trafficking, and academics have circulated critical analyses and have asked, within the consultation itself, for genuine consultation with the organisations concerned. This response is decisive: it shows that the refusal of surrogacy is not an importe position but is rooted in Thai society, where it was Thai organisations that brought to light the trafficking of their compatriots to Georgia when no international institution had seen it. It joins the opposition carried elsewhere by more than a hundred feminist organisations of Latin America, the Caribbean and Central America, gathered since 2020 in the Latin American Manifesto against Reproductive Exploitation.
“In 2015 Thailand protected women and children by refusing this market. Today, as Russia, Georgia and Kazakhstan have each in turn closed their doors, Thailand is being asked to open its own. It is Thai women themselves who are reminding their government that reproductive exploitation is not regulated, it is abolished. We stand with them.”, state the co-presidents of ICASM.
ICASM calls upon the Ministry of Public Health for the outright withdrawal of this draft, and not for its amendment. It then calls upon the Ministry to abolish surrogate motherhood on its territory, in all its forms and whatever the nationality of those who commission it, by ceasing to give legal effect to agreements by which a woman undertakes to become pregnant, to give birth, and then to be separated from the child for the benefit of third parties. The prohibition of commercial exploitation alone has demonstrated over ten years what it left standing: it removed the price and preserved the agreement, the constraint thereafter operating through the bond of kinship instead of operating through money. That abolition must extend to the extraction of oocytes for transfer and to the export of reproductive material, which are the same trade under another name, and penalties must be directed at intermediaries, agencies and clinics, not at the women recruited, who are the victims of this market and not its authors.
It asks finally that the situation of children already born and of pregnancies in progress be settled by a judicial decision taken after birth and founded upon the best interests of each child, without the recognition of their situation amounting to a retroactive validation of the arrangements that produced them; and that a genuine consultation be opened with organisations defending the rights of women, the rights of the child and working against trafficking, as Thai civil society has itself demanded.
ICASM affirms without reservation the bodily autonomy of women, including the right to abortion. The exploitation of a woman’s gestation and reproduction cannot become a right conferred by any couple.
These concerns are anchored in international law. The exploitation of surrogacy is recognised as a form of trafficking in human beings by Directive (EU) 2024/1712. The Palermo Protocol, General Recommendation 41 of the CEDAW Committee and the 2025 report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls (A/80/158) address the exploitation to which this reform would expose women and children.