Surrogacy in Taiwan: notes on the women's movement

Yenlin Ku 顧燕翎

Near the end of 2018 the Student Association of National Taiwan University organized a debate on whether surrogacy should be legalized in Taiwan and invited me to be on the negative side. Receiving the invitation at too late a date, I missed the opportunity to be present and watched the debate, carried out by two professors from different universities, on the internet.

        Surrogacy has been contested as a gender issue in Taiwan since the 1990s. The Ministry of Health (now Health and Welfare), under the pressure from infertile wives and medical doctors, passed the Act of Artificial Reproduction in 2007 to legalize IVF (in vitro fertilization). In the following years, the Ministry made attempts to add surrogacy to the Act. However, the draft was kept at bay by women’s and child protection groups, though supported by sexual libertarians.

        During the year-end debate, the concepts of commercial and altruistic surrogacy are mixed up, though neither side actually uses these terms. Also causing confusion is the definition of “reproductive right’. The draft made it very clear that the surrogate can receive monetary reimbursement only for nutrition, medical expenses and loss of work, i.e. her act must be altruistic and not for profit (commercial). Furthermore, one of the important arguments the Health Ministry makes for legalizing surrogacy is that the infertile woman has reproductive right—the right to have her genetic offspring-- as a basic human right. The affirmative side also argues for women’s reproductive right, defined as the right of the surrogate to use her womb to make a living, but not “make a fortune”. It is emphasized that legalization is a way to empower low-income surrogates so that they would be protected from being abused and exploited. This argument has often been used by sexual libertarians to advocate commercial surrogacy as a job, but they never set a cap on the wages. Generally, labor laws mandate minimum, not maximum, wages.   

  

What makes the draft most unacceptable to the women’s groups is that it places the rights of the intended parents and the reproductive industry/business above that of the surrogate mother and the child. For one, it stipulates that the intended parents are the legal parents and raises no objection to the profits the doctors and clinics make. In other words, it expects the surrogate mother to risk her life to carry the fetus, which belongs to the intended parents, to term only for altruistic purpose, but allows others to make profit/a fortune from her pregnancy.

The debate in Chinese:
https://www.facebook.com/NTUSA.Academics/videos/919168668285147/