“Pandemic Disruptions” in Surrogacy Arrangements in Germany, U.S.A., and India during COVID-19 medanthroquarterly.org/2020/08/11/pandemic-disruptions-in-surrogacy-arrangements-in-germany-u-s-a-and-india- during-covid-19/ By Anika König, Heather Jacobson, and Anindita Majumdar Gestational surrogacy is a medically assisted reproductive technology (ART) in which a woman carries a child for others and hands it over to them after birth. This ART is marketed as a service to those experiencing a “reproductive disruption” on their journey to parenthood due to infertility or the inability to become pregnant or sustain a pregnancy to live birth. Legal regulation of surrogacy greatly differs between countries. Some, like Germany, strictly prohibit it, while others, such as Ukraine, do not regulate it at all. Still others, such as the United States (and, in an increasingly restricted way, India) allow for and facilitate it. Despite these legal variations, over the past several decades, the global surrogacy industry, which is heterogeneous, flexible, and adaptive to change, has become somewhat institutionalized, with practices and bureaucratic procedures established to facilitate the transfer of children. For many “intended parents” (IPs) and surrogates, travel is an essential and expected component of their surrogacy arrangements. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, travel has been severely restricted. Even despite challenges to parents’ mobility, children were (and continue to be) born via surrogacy — resulting in the dilemma of intended parents being unable to retrieve their newborns to bring them home. This presents a significant disturbance not only to individual lives and parent-child relationships but also to the global surrogacy industry. In this essay, we focus on three spaces of reproductive disruption within surrogacy: the U.S., Germany, and India. In the last several decades, the U.S. surrogacy market has attracted a diverse population of international intended parents. The United States boasts a robust ART industry, uniquely providing all available procedures to client/patients of every sexual orientation, age, and marital status. While ARTs in the U.S. come at considerable cost and U.S. residents who cannot afford these technologies (including surrogacy) at home sometimes travel to other countries to do so, the U.S. performs the second highest number of ART cycles annually in the world. At the other end of the spectrum, Germany strictly prohibits surrogacy, which means that for German IPs, ART necessarily involves crossing borders in order to circumvent national laws. Until 2015, India was the most important “low- “Pandemic Disruptions” in Surrogacy Arrangements in Germany, U.S.A.... https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/jrd4VF 1 von 4 18.08.2020, 20:40