More than 160 organizations from dozens of countries have asked the United Nations to declare that surrogacy, paid or unpaid, is the sale of a child.
Story Snapshot
- The Casablanca Declaration, first announced in Morocco in 2023, calls on the UN to ban surrogacy worldwide, including unpaid arrangements.
- Backers say surrogacy contracts amount to a prearranged handover of a child for payment, which they argue fits the UN’s own definition of child sale.
- Human Rights Watch and other groups disagree, saying fair payment to a surrogate does not by itself make the deal a sale of a child.
- A UN children’s rights committee has warned that poorly regulated surrogacy “may lead to” child sale, but has not said all surrogacy is a sale.
What the Casablanca Declaration Demands
The Declaration of Casablanca went public on March 3, 2023, signed by 100 experts from 75 countries. It calls for a new international treaty banning surrogacy “in every modality and kind, whether remunerated or not.” The group wants governments to strip all legal weight from contracts where a woman agrees to carry and hand over a child. More than 160 groups now back the effort, organizers say.
The coalition submitted its argument directly to the United Nations Human Rights Office. Surrogacy, the filing says, fits the definition of “sale of children” in the UN’s Optional Protocol because a woman agrees ahead of time to hand over the child she carries in exchange for payment or other benefit. That protocol defines sale as any transfer of a child for money or other consideration.
UN Has Flagged Risks, But Stops Short of Outright Ban
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has weighed in on this question before, but carefully. In a review of Georgia’s surrogacy laws, the committee warned that surrogacy “if not properly monitored and regulated, may lead to the sale of children”. That is a warning about weak oversight, not a ruling that every surrogacy arrangement counts as selling a child. The distinction matters for how much legal weight the abolition push can claim right now.
A former UN Special Rapporteur on the sale of children went further in a 2018 report, arguing that most compensated and even many uncompensated surrogacy arrangements amount to child sale under human rights law, and calling the practice a multibillion-dollar business built on demand and profit. That report gives the abolitionist side its strongest official backing so far, even though it is one expert’s opinion rather than a binding treaty ruling.
Rights Groups Push Back on the “Sale” Label
Human Rights Watch filed its own submission to the UN in 2019 taking the opposite view. The group said surrogates who receive fair pay for lost wages, medical care, and the burdens of pregnancy are not automatically victims of child sale. Such arrangements, the group wrote, “do not and should not in and of themselves constitute sale of children” under the protocol. Human Rights Watch instead blamed exploitation on weak regulation and unscrupulous brokers, not surrogacy itself.
Medical ethics researchers have staked out similar middle ground. A peer-reviewed review in the journal Human Reproduction found altruistic, non-commercial surrogacy to be the most ethically acceptable form, as long as payment is limited to reimbursing real expenses and lost income. The paper recommended separate independent counseling and legal advice for surrogates and intended parents, treating surrogacy as something to regulate carefully rather than erase entirely.
Why the Fight Matters Beyond Surrogacy
This clash lands at a moment when trust in global institutions is already shaky on both the left and the right. Parents who used surrogacy to build their families, and the women who carried those babies, are watching a debate that could reshape family law worldwide, decided largely through UN submissions and advocacy filings rather than court trials or broad research on real-world harm. Both sides agree children’s welfare is the stakes; they disagree sharply on what protects it.
Groups like Men Having Babies argue ethical surrogacy is achievable through strict protocols, not bans, saying their framework benefits everyone involved, including the women who carry the pregnancies. Whether the UN eventually sides with abolition, regulation, or something in between will affect fertility clinics, cross-border arrangements, and thousands of families already formed this way, long before any treaty text is finalized.
Sources:
declaration-surrogacy-casablanca.org, alliancevita.org, hrw.org, digitalcommons.law.uw.edu, ohchr.org
