In the shadows of Manila’s skyscrapers, a clandestine industry is quietly thriving. Young women are renting their wombs to strangers, often foreigners, for sums that can exceed a decade of local wages.
Babies are conceived in backroom IVF clinics, carried in secret, and handed over at birth with forged documents that conceal the surrogate’s name.
This is surrogacy in the Philippines: illegal in practice, immoral by doctrine, yet booming in the gaps left by a legislature paralyzed by faith.
It affects rural areas like the Bicol Region because recruiters target poorer provinces to recruit surrogates through channels like Facebook.
The Philippines is the most Catholic country in Asia. Roughly 80 percent of its 115 million people are Roman Catholics. Abortion is punishable by prison. Divorce is banned.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines wields influence that can stall bills for decades—the Reproductive Health Law took fourteen years to pass despite overwhelming public support.
When Pope Francis condemned surrogacy as “deplorable” and called for a global ban in January 2024, Filipino bishops echoed him loudly. Surrogacy, they declared, violates the dignity of both woman and child.
Yet no law explicitly prohibits it.
That silence is the loophole. The Family Code of 1987, written long before IVF became routine, simply states that any woman who gives birth is the legal mother. Surrogacy contracts are therefore unenforceable—considered “contrary to morals and public policy” by most legal scholars.
Intended parents cannot be placed on the birth certificate at conception. The surrogate’s name goes on it, and removing it requires adoption proceedings that courts often refuse when money is involved. In short, commercial surrogacy is effectively illegal.
But effective illegality is not the same as enforced illegality.
Investigations by Rappler and Al Jazeera in 2024 revealed a sophisticated underground network operating with startling openness. Agencies advertise on Facebook and encrypted apps, quoting packages from US$35,000 to US$70,000—less than half the cost in the United States, a fraction of pre-ban India or Nepal.
Surrogates recruited from impoverished provinces receive US$8,000 to US$15,000, usually paid in installments.
The industry exploded after neighboring countries slammed their doors. Thailand banned commercial surrogacy in 2015. Cambodia followed in 2016, then Laos. Vietnam allows only tightly regulated altruistic arrangements between relatives.
Even Georgia and Ukraine—current darlings of the global surrogacy circuit—have tightened rules for foreigners. The Philippines, with English-speaking doctors, modern neonatal intensive care units in Manila, and rock-bottom prices, thus became the path of least resistance.
Market research firm InsightAce Analytic estimated the formal Philippine surrogacy sector at less than US$1 million in 2024—tiny compared to the United States’ multibillion-dollar industry. But that figure captures only the visible tip of the industry.
The underground trade is believed to be many times larger, though it’s impossible to quantify precisely because everything happens off the books: cash payments, fake addresses, babies smuggled out on tourist visas with parents listed as the biological parents on forged certificates.
The human cost is stark.
Surrogates sign contracts—often in English they barely understand—that require them to abort if the fetus has Down syndrome, or to undergo cesarean on demand.
Some are housed in secret “baby farms” during the final months, cut off from family.
When things go wrong, there is no recourse. In 2023, a Chinese couple reportedly abandoned twins born with minor disabilities, and the surrogate was left to raise them on her own meagre savings.
Cambodian police raids in 2024 and 2025 netted dozens of Filipino surrogates, many with phony student visas. They were charged with human trafficking alongside the brokers who recruited them.
Catholic opposition is one reason regulation keeps failing.
Since 2012, at least seven bills have been filed to govern assisted reproductive technology. The most recent—House Bill 1037, the Assisted Reproductive Technology and Surrogacy Regulation Act of 2024—would have permitted only altruistic surrogacy: The surrogates could receive expenses only, at no profit. It would have been limited only to Filipino citizens, with strict health and ethical oversight. It would have banned commercial arrangements and foreign intended parents.
But the Bishops Conference killed it before it reached the House floor.
In position papers and pastoral letters, the bishops argued that any legal recognition of surrogacy—no matter how restrictive—would normalize the separation of gestation from motherhood and open the door to further moral decay.
In other words, the same religious force that prevents legalization also prevents criminalization. Surrogacy lacks the visceral political weight of abortion or same-sex marriage. It remains in limbo.
Clinics illustrate the divisiveness. The Philippine Society for Fertility and Reproductive Medicine officially discourages surrogacy among members. St. Luke’s Medical Center and The Medical City—two of the country’s top hospitals—refuse to perform it. Yet smaller, less scrupulous facilities in Quezon City and Cebu do a brisk trade, often partnering with agents who also traffic eggs and sperm.
Intended parents are overwhelmingly foreign—Chinese, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Australian, European. Some are gay couples; others are heterosexual pairs who exhausted options at home. They fly in for embryo transfers, then return nine months later to collect the child. Meanwhile the surrogate disappears back into her province, often pregnant again within a year for another couple.
Until the Philippines decides to regulate or prohibit the trade, it will continue. Poor women will keep offering their bodies because hunger is stronger than dogma. Wealthy foreigners will keep coming because the price is right. And children will keep being born into a legal twilight—wanted desperately by one set of parents, but erased entirely from the life of the woman who carried them to term.
In the Philippines, faith drew a line in the sand, and the market simply stepped around it.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA. Grok AI was employed in research for this article.