Dilara has been living in Tbilisi, Georgia for several months now, turning her hand to various types of work, from hairdressing to shoemaking to waitressing.
But really, there’s just one job she wants: to carry someone else’s baby.
The widowed 34-year-old mother of four left her children with her parents in Uzbekistan last year, hoping to find work in the country’s nascent commercial surrogacy industry.
“I had loan debts from the bank and I have four children to take care of. They have school, they have expenses, you know. It’s hard on my own,” Dilara told CNBC.
Of course I would like to be a surrogate mother.
Commercial surrogacy refers to an arrangement in which a woman is paid a fee for carrying a pregnancy for another person or couple. This differs from altruistic surrogacy, in which a woman volunteers to carry a pregnancy without any compensation beyond medical reimbursements.
Typically, commercial surrogacy is gestational surrogacy, meaning the surrogate has no biological link to the child.
The laws around surrogacy vary widely from country to country and state to state. In the U.S., for instance, the practice is permitted in some states but banned in others, while in Canada and the U.K., only altruistic surrogacy is allowed. In Georgia, meanwhile, as in Ukraine and Russia, both forms are legal.
The growing commercial surrogacy industry
Dilara is one of a growing number of women turning to commercial surrogacy as a source of income amid swelling global demand for carriers.
The global commercial surrogacy industry was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2022, according to market research consultancy Global Market Insights — though exact numbers are hard to verify given the private nature of many arrangements.
By 2032, that figure is forecast to rise to $129 billion, as infertility issues increase and a growing number of same-sex couples and single people look for ways to have babies.
That demand is driven primarily by so-called intended parents in wealthy, Western nations. Many of these are seeking cross-border surrogacy services to avoid long waiting lists or higher fees at home, or because domestic laws forbid surrogacy or exclude particular groups — such as gay couples — from the practice. The end of Covid-19 travel bans also led to an increase in global surrogacy demand last year.
“The pandemic reduced international surrogacy, but we’re now seeing all that pent up demand,” surrogacy expert Sam Everingham, who’s global director of Sydney, Australia-based surrogacy support group Growing Families, said.
Ukraine war pushes surrogacy into new markets
Until last year, Ukraine was the world’s second-largest surrogacy market behind the U.S., attracting foreign would-be parents with lower fees and a favorable regulatory framework. Crucially, that includes naming intended parents on the baby’s birth certificate, rather than the surrogate mother.
But that all changed with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukra
