Georgia's Surrogacy Boom: Opportunity or Exploitation?

Three years ago, a couple from Hamburg—Olga, forty, and Daniel—decided they wanted a child through surrogacy. Germany forbids the practice, which meant any child born this way would require a lengthy court process to establish legal parenthood. Olga had grown up in Russia and spoke the language, so the couple began exploring the Russian surrogacy market. Then, in 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. Moscow banned foreign clients from entering surrogacy contracts. The international agencies that had been brokering these arrangements—connecting intended parents with surrogate mothers—began relocating. Many of them moved to Georgia, a mountainous country in the Caucasus that suddenly became, almost overnight, a global surrogacy destination.

Georgia's transformation was swift and dramatic. According to the country's Public Service Development Agency, more than three thousand surrogate mothers were registered there in 2023 alone. Since 2012, they had carried more than five thousand children to term. But the real acceleration came after the war. In 2021, roughly three hundred surrogate mothers gave birth in Georgia. By 2023, that number had jumped to over eleven hundred. The economics were straightforward: clinics in Tbilisi and Batumi charged between forty-five thousand and fifty-five thousand euros for their services—roughly a third of what agencies elsewhere demanded. Surrogate mothers themselves earned between eighteen thousand and twenty-eight thousand euros per pregnancy, with bonuses for twins.

Anastasia, thirty-nine, a Russian surrogate, had already carried three pregnancies to term. Her first, in 2021, helped her save for a property down payment. She completed her first two surrogacies in Russia, then traveled to Georgia for a third, arranged through a Moscow clinic's branch office for a Japanese couple. Like many surrogates, she returned home after embryo implantation and came back to Georgia at twenty-two weeks pregnant. She lived in an apartment with another surrogate who was carrying twins. When DW spoke with her, Anastasia said the experience had been manageable, though she'd heard from other women about payment delays and difficulties. She was willing to do it again.

When Olga and Daniel began their search, they found approximately nineteen clinics operating across Georgia. After months of effort, they received lists of potential surrogates from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia itself, along with detailed process descriptions and lawyer contact information. But the couple, both working in medicine, had questions about the surrogates' health histories and possible genetic disorders. They felt the agencies couldn't always provide clear answers. They chose a thirty-year-old Ukrainian woman who had already served as a surrogate once before for a European couple. A half-hour Zoom call was arranged—hardly enough time, Olga felt, to make such a consequential decision. In spring 2024, they traveled to Tbilisi to meet Elena, the surrogate's pseudonym. She showed them pictures of her own children and explained she wanted to use the money to renovate her apartment. The couple felt cautiously optimistic.

Then came the complications. The agency had initially told them Elena would remain in Tbilisi throughout the pregnancy, living in a rented apartment. But after the embryo was implanted, Elena returned to Ukraine—to a country at war—for several months. Olga and Daniel felt blindsided. They also noticed the agency's pressure tactics intensifying. They were told to decide quickly because other couples were interested in Elena. The agency claimed it had paid out of pocket to bring the surrogate to Georgia, a cost not mentioned in any contract. At one point, a representative asked Olga how much longer she wanted to remain childless, a question that felt designed to exploit her emotional vulnerability. The couple returned to Germany unsettled and decided, at least for now, to abandon the idea.

Human rights lawyer Nino Bogveradze identified the core problem: Georgian law regulates the relationship between surrogates, intended parents, and clinics, but it leaves agencies entirely unaccountable. Surrogate mothers have minimal legal protections. Most concerns about pregnancy, medical care, and payment are governed by private contracts, not national standards. The state sets no minimum requirements for social guarantees or contractual terms. Once an embryo is implanted, surrogates cannot keep the child, withdraw from the program, or end the pregnancy. Human Rights Watch and the International Women's Health Coalition have both argued that Georgia's established surrogacy practices violate women's reproductive autonomy and self-determination.

Olga Doletskaya, an anthropologist at the University of Leeds who studies reproduction and migration, offered a blunt assessment: agencies present themselves as facilitators of dreams, but they operate primarily on financial incentive. That profit motive, she said, leads them to exploit the precarious situations of surrogate mothers while simultaneously pressuring intended parents. Olga and Daniel's experience bore this out. They felt manipulated at every turn—rushed, emotionally leveraged, kept in the dark about basic facts. The couple from Hamburg had come to Georgia seeking to become parents. Instead, they encountered an industry optimized for extraction, not care.