The Top Surrogacy Destinations for Australians

In this video, our director and award-winning fertility lawyer, Stephen Page, reveals the top surrogacy destinations for Australians.

Transcript: 

G’day Stephen Page from Page Provan Family and Fertility lawyers, and today I’m talking about what are the top surrogacy destinations for Australia, you may say? Well, why does anyone need to go overseas?

Well, the statistics, as best as I can find them, and they’re easy for overseas, but they’re harder for local, is that there’s basically a one in five chance that a child born through surrogacy is born locally.

Because basically, for every child born here, four are born overseas, and where are the top places that intended parents go overseas in the 2022 year? There were six places that are listed separately after them, then it’s less than five in any other country, and there’s a whole variety of any other country.

But the top six, in descending order, are, number one, the United States, and to give you the kind of number it’s from recollection, 99 children were born in the US to Australians while surrogacy in the 2022 year.

So this is the year ending 30, June 2022, and what does that mean in the scheme of things? Well, more Australian children are being born there via surrogacy than in Australia. Great, if you are on the US side of that equation, not so good at this end.

It’s rather depressing that more Australian children are being born via surrogacy in the US than at home. Number two, Ukraine. One of the things seen in the 2022 year was some places that I hadn’t expected to see, where children were born in small numbers.

For example, Poland, a place that doesn’t recognise surrogacy, and why does this matter? Well, because, of course, the invasion occurred by the Russians in February 22. Up to February 22, Australian children being born in Ukraine.

After that, Surrogates being shipped undercover out of Ukraine to neighbouring countries, one of them in the example, Poland. So Ukraine, I don’t expect in the 23 figures, will be anywhere near as big, but might be because, of course, the timing from 1 July 2023 sorry, from 1 July 2022, I’ll get it right if the surrogate was pregnant prior to February 2022 might turn up in the 23 figures.

Number three Canada. Canada has typically been number three in recent years and that stayed pretty consistent and then number four was a tie. The numbers had dropped considerably by the time we got to number four and we had seven children apiece from Georgia.

Which has been typically number four in recent years, number three, or number four, and Georgia being available for heterosexual couples, and it closed down during the pandemic and it’s going to close down again from 1 January 2024 for international parents, and I’ve got a separate video on that.

The other one is the rising country and we’ve certainly seen it for gay couples, and that’s Colombia, which also had six sorry, also had seven. I’ll get the number right, and number six was Thailand, and it had six children. Now, you may think that Thailand would have no Australians going there.

But as we’ve seen consistently since the Baby Gammy saga and the Thai Baby Farm scandals, which occurred back in 2014, and I’ve spoken about pretty regularly since 2014, the Thai Parliament passed laws to make it almost impossible to do Surrogacy there.

It had to be altruistic, it had to be a heterosexual couple, one of them had to be a Thai citizen. In essence, the Surrogate had to be a relative and on it went. Now, you would think that if you’re an Australian of Thai origin, you might be eligible.

Yeah, sure, we’re a nation of migrants, but we don’t have so many that we’re going to have nine or ten or six or seven children born to Australians in Thailand each year through Surrogacy, it just doesn’t add up.

What I’ve seen in practise, however, is that Australians have continued to go to Thailand. Typically, they are of Chinese background, they have been marketed to via WeChat.

The Surrogate is implanted in Laos, gives birth in Thailand or Malaysia or China, so they’re the destinations. I’m certainly interested to see how 2023 turns out with the war in Ukraine. Thanks. For more legal information contact Surrogacy lawyers Sydney.