Healthcare Professionals and Unregulated Commercial Surrogacy in China: Ethical and Legal Challenges

Recent reports from 2023 and 2024 have brought to light alarming instances of healthcare professionals in China being involved in commercial surrogacy arrangements. These cases reveal the dual roles these professionals play: active facilitation, which includes actions such as selling fraudulent birth certificates that contribute to baby trafficking, and passive involvement, where routine medical care is provided to surrogate mothers without full awareness of the surrogacy context. Current regulations in China broadly prohibit surrogacy-related medical activities but fail to differentiate between healthcare professionals who actively facilitate surrogacy arrangements and those who fulfil their professional obligations to patients. Drawing on professional ethics outlined in the revised 2021 Medical Practitioners Law of the People's Republic of China and recent developments in modern slavery scholarship that emphasize the critical role of healthcare professionals in identifying and preventing exploitation, this paper argues that China has an opportunity to clarify and broaden the role of healthcare professionals in the context of surrogacy. Healthcare professionals should not be prohibited from providing medical care to surrogate mothers, provided they are not actively facilitating surrogacy arrangements. Simultaneously, they should be empowered to act as gatekeepers against exploitation. This would be an important step toward enhancing the current regulatory framework, ensuring better protections for children and women involved in surrogacy.