Olivia Maurel

She can't.

She's bound to the contract.

It's the Wild West in...

of the world.

I mean, take the United Kingdom or Canada, where they allow what's called altruistic surrogacy.

So, in theory, there's no profit, so there's no money handed over directly to the surrogate.

But in reality, there's always payments, expenses, compensation, indirect financial support.

And then you look at places like the Ukraine or the US, where you have highly structured contract-based systems.

That doesn't eliminate the ethical problem, sorry.

It just professionalizes it.

And so globally, what we see is cross-border surrogacy.

People go where the rules are looser, like in Mexico, for example, where you have poor women becoming surrogates and being exploited, and they're not worth a lot.

So regulation in one country doesn't solve the issue, it just exports it.

And this is not marginal, it's rapidly growing.

We're talking about a global industry projected to reach around 200 billion dollars by 2035.

Beyond all of that, the very core problem always remains the same, and it's unchanged everywhere.

A woman is going to carry a child and is expected to give that child away at birth.

So you can regulate money, you can regulate contracts, you can regulate agencies, but you cannot regulate that separation at birth.

And that's really the key point.

Some practices cannot be made ethical through regulation because the problem is how they are organized.