Policy-makers in Australia keep insisting that assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and surrogacy belong under one legislative roof — a position that might suit industry and bureaucracy, but one that leaves women exposed to exploitation and harm. NSWWAA’s latest submission to the NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Fertility Support and Assisted Reproductive Treatment lays out exactly why this is a dangerous false equivalence.
ARTs such as IVF, egg and sperm donation, and fertility support are medical solutions to conception difficulties. Surrogacy, by contrast, is not a medical matter but a contractual arrangement, turning women into suppliers and children into commodities. As our submission makes clear, these are distinct practices, each raising unique ethical, human rights, and medical questions that cannot, and should not, be combined or regulated together.
The problem with this “bundling” is twofold. Firstly, it waters down the legal and ethical scrutiny that surrogacy so urgently demands. The submission warns that potentially merging ARTs and surrogacy under a single law masks the risks and limits policy debate, serving industry interests while sidelining women’s lived realities. ART impacts patients and their families; surrogacy impacts women who are exploited as surrogates, commissioning parents for whom women’s exploitation is accepted, and the resulting children of surrogacy arrangements — all with vastly more complex questions of consent, coercion, exploitation, and rights.
Secondly, conflating these processes undermines the democratic process and marginalises the voices of women and feminist organisations — the very groups most affected and most equipped to analyse harm. As our submission notes, consultation that prioritises emotive “personal stories” from would-be commissioning parents further silences women who face stigma, economic pressures, and contractual silencing. Moreover, important feminist social analysis and structural critique of commodification and exploitation risks being erased when regulatory policy treats ARTs and surrogacy interchangeably.
Our position remains abolitionist and clear: surrogacy arrangements in all their forms — commercial or so-called “altruistic” — represent a systemic and structural exploitation of women’s bodies and reproductive labour. Regulatory tweaks and “support” don’t fix what is fundamentally a violation of women’s dignity and rights. This is why NSWWAA’s submission calls on Parliament not simply to separate ARTs from surrogacy, but to prohibit surrogacy outright as a vital safeguard for women and girls.
If policy-makers truly value women’s health, equality, and autonomy, they must reject false equivalence, insist on clear legal distinction, and support a universal ban on all forms of surrogacy. Anything less endangers women and the principle of human dignity our laws should defend.
