Mexico's Booming Business of Producing Babies for Foreigners Is About to Go Bust Gabriela Gorbea - VICE News
go to original January 20, 2016

A 2014 Report Exposing Mexico's Surrogacy Industry (Journeyman Pictures)

Geoff Moss thought he had found — in Mexico — the "ideal location" for his agency that offers childless people the chance of paying a woman to bear them a baby.

The southern state of Tabasco happens to have a clause in its civil code that explicitly permits surrogacy, allowing contracting parents to obtain birth certificates with their names on them even if they have no genetic link to the child. Mexico is also not only close to the United States, where most of his clients come from, but costs are far lower, most notably the sums demanded by the surrogate mothers.

"It took a little time for the business to take off," Moss told VICE News. "It took time to convince people that Mexico was a good option, that it had good doctors, hospitals, and proper attention."

Moss was one of the pioneers of international surrogacy in Mexico that began when people like him were looking around for a new base after being largely shut out of India — the previous world hub — in 2012.

By last year, the service was booming. New agencies were springing up all the time and recruiting potential mothers into their programs with the promise of making more money than these typically poor and uneducated women would normally have the chance to earn in many years. The fact that the Tabasco law states that surrogacy is only allowed when it is "altruistic" was considered only a minor inconvenience.

Now international surrogacy in Mexico is coming tumbling down.

A reform approved by Tabasco's congress in December means the state's civil code now limits surrogacy to Mexican heterosexual couples. This essentially removes the surrogacy boom's main two markets — childless foreigners in general, and childless foreign gay couples in particular.

Read the rest at VICE News

Related: Same-Sex Couples in Mexico Can Adopt Children, Supreme Court Rules (VICE News)

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