Pregnant Women Photography Studio Increasingly Popular In Beijing (Photo : Getty Images)
Experts are now seeking more specific and concrete rules to regulate surrogacy in China following the approval in December 2015 of a revised version of the Population and Family Planning Law. The revised law excluded a controversial clause in the draft that banned all kinds of surrogacy.
The go-signal for surrogacy came along with the end of China’s one-child policy in the same month. This development is the result of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress withdrawing the clause that prohibited surrogacy as a recognition that the practice could not be banned, reported VOA.
Global Times reported that some of the women who offer their wombs to childless couples do it for failure to find a good job. And even if the number of Chinese no longer capable of bearing a child has reached 40 million or 12.5 percent of Chinese who are of childbearing age, clients tend to be selective when picking a surrogate.
A young woman from Deyang Village in Sichuan Province, who offers her babymaking service by listing in two online surrogate groups, described the selection process as similar to joining a beauty contest. She explained, “Height and good appearance mean good genes, which are tokens for asking a high price.”
Other criteria clients use in selecting the potential mother of their babies, besides height, are weight, age, education and appearance, the surrogate shared. And similar to some beauty pageants when the winner is the contestant sleeps with a contest judge, one of the four methods of becoming pregnant – the natural way – involves having sex with the client when the surrogate mother is ovulating.
The client and the surrogate mother could also opt for the manual method when she manually inserts her client’s semen into her womb, in vitro fertilization when an egg fertilized in a laboratory is inserted into the woman’s womb and blind donation when a woman simply provides the egg extracted at a qualified hospital with the surrogate not knowing who fertilizes her egg.
Online advertisements in surrogate groups place the fee at about 300,000 yuan ($45,000). The arrangement includes flying the woman to the client’s place at his expense. Choosy clients could ask the woman to undergo a physical test, and if she passes his standards, he has to pay a deposit of 10,000 to 20,000 yuan and provide the surrogate mother a monthly salary while she is pregnant.
The client and the woman could agree on a sanyang arrangement in which he has no say on her daily life, as opposed to juanyang when the client has close supervision, including her diet.
Because of the unsupervised nature of surrogacy, some women use it to steal money from clients, while it creates also problem between couples when the man fails to tell his wife that he entered into a surrogacy deal, especially if the arrangement is to make the baby the natural way.
