How Mexico’s surrogacy market banks on women’s bodies

Mexico has rapidly emerged as a center for international “baby business” propelled by foreign demand and local impoverishment. 

Key Takeaways:

• As other countries cracked down on foreign surrogacy, Mexico became a destination.

• The lack of regulations and low cost make the Central American country attractive to those looking to purchase women's bodies.

• Surrogacy contracts are left up to the discretion of the parties involved, making surrogates easily exploited.

The Details:

The Central American country’s emergence as a global surrogacy destination started around the early 2010s, when restrictive laws in India and Thailand limited previous “offshore” markets for Western and Asian surrogacy agencies.

Mexico then moved into the market, with the state of Tabasco becoming the epicenter due to legal changes in the 1990s allowing surrogacy contracts. Subsequently, surrogacy agencies swarmed to Tabasco to capitalize on competitive medical costs, poor oversight, and the legal ability to publish birth certificates naming individuals biologically unrelated to a child as the child’s parents.

Since then, Mexico has become a primarily unrestricted, profit‑driven market where clinics, brokers, and intermediaries have transformed the country’s initially-budding surrogacy landscape into an all-out baby export industry. 

According to a 2024 article by Mexico News Daily: 

Tracking the exact birth figures through surrogacy in Mexico is impossible due to the lack of regulation in this area. According to news outlet N+Focus, for example, the state of Sinaloa registered 115 births through surrogacy between 2016 to 2022. Only one in five involved a signed contract.

Quoting Sofía Rosas Michel, a University of Monterrey-trained lawyer focusing surrogacy, the same Mexico News Daily article stated:

Currently, a surrogacy contract is left to the discretion of private agreements regarding the rights that the State should safeguard, such as the right to one’s family, to know one’s origins, to remain with one’s family of origin, and to have a nationality, among others.

Zoom In:

A 2017 report by El Pais detailed the situation in Tabasco, the key hub for surrogacy: 

Tabasco’s civil registry allowed the contracting parent(s) to register the baby as their legal child, using only a certified copy of the surrogacy contract.

In response to the international demand from hopeful parents whose countries don’t allow surrogacy, intermediary agencies began to spring up in search of profits.Tabasco’s law did not explicitly prohibit or permit trade.

It became common for a Mexican woman to receive between $13,000 and $15,000 (€11,700–13,500) for a pregnancy and contracting parents to pay between $50,000 and $70,000 (€45,000–63,000) for the entire process – half of what surrogacy costs in the US.

A 2022 Vice report found that for intended parents, procuring surrogacy in Mexico is considerably more affordable — around $70,000 for the full process, versus $130,000 or more in the United States. The process also is usually expedited, due to available surrogates. With commercial surrogacy banned across much of Europe, Mexico has become an attractive option for many prospective parents from overseas. 

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The Mexican Supreme Court’s move protecting surrogacy accelerated the number of surrogacies in the country, effectively repealing state‑level bans and reinforcing “equal access” for all intended parents, regardless of marital status, sexuality, or nationality. 

The Big Picture:

Mexico City and other jurisdictions have emerged as appealing surrogacy destinations as well, peppered with several surrogacy agencies, an increasing number of IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) clinics, and pre‑birth‑order procedures that allow foreign parents to even eradicate the surrogate’s legal parenthood before the birth of the child.

“It is required that you sign a contract promising not to love the baby,” Anna, a surrogate mother who lives just outside Mexico City, admitted to The Critic. “I was trained by the agency to think of myself as an incubator and absolutely not a mother.”

Detailing her experience with surrogacy brokers, Anna elaborated that they “would come around the colonia [a working-class housing complex] asking if women wanted to make money … They saw I had a child, and probably heard I had left my marriage. They offered me enough money to buy my own place if I would have a baby for a couple [that were] desperate but infertile.”

Consequently, Mexico is currently a country where international surrogacy is promoted as a cheap ethical alternative to traditional adoption or domestic surrogacy.

Many Mexican surrogates hail from economically deprived or rural backgrounds, where a few months of pregnancy can yield large amounts of money — far more than they would normally make with typical employment. Surrogacy agencies promise huge sums that seem substantial on paper but still fall short of what surrogate mothers in the United States receive, as the intermediaries and clinicians absorb most of the total surrogacy fees.

The 2022 Vice article documented the issues faced by surrogate mothers: 

While many surrogacy journeys end happily, horror stories have emerged: surrogates who received far less money than promised; intended parents cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars; and foreigners stranded in Mexico because they can’t get a passport for their baby.

In 2020, baby twins born through surrogacy were abandoned at a Mexican hospital. The surrogate, who was carrying the babies for a couple living in the U.S., suffered complications when she was six months pregnant and had to undergo a C-section.

One of the babies was born with serious cognitive deficits and physical impairments. The surrogate had suffered multiple health problems during the pregnancy, she said in an interview with local radio station MVS News, including low blood sugar and fainting, but the surrogacy agency told her to just rest at home.

When she finally went to the hospital, the doctors were more concerned about the unborn babies, she said. ‘They didn’t ask me anything about me, or my health.’

Also, as The Critic noted, Mexican surrogate women seldom have legal, medical, or psychosocial support. 

 Patricia Olamendi Torres, a lawyer protesting Mexico’s surrogacy trade, lambasted the surrogacy situation, saying, “The profiteers exploit the poverty in which millions of women find themselves. They have promoted Mexico as a cheap market where you can buy a baby.” 

The Bottom Line:

A huge tragedy of the Mexican baby business is not only the exploitation of women, but the way it reconfigures the child’s place within the family.

Surrogacy, especially international surrogacy, erodes the natural bond between the birth mother and her child, dehumanizing the mother into a temporary incubator whose presence is conveniently set aside once the baby is born and transferred to the intended parents.

As a result, a child born via surrogacy is not received by their parents as a gift, born into a context of loving continuity, but is instead “designed” and “ordered,” usually via a contract drafted with a thorough consideration of genetics, cost, and convenience.

One cannot claim to be pro-life while tolerating or even encouraging a system where women’s bodies are rented and children are manufactured as per the whims of others.