The Belgian surrogacy system creates two parallel realities: one that creates happy families and another one which arguably exports misery abroad.
Surrogacy is a medical procedure in which a woman, known as a surrogate, carries and gives birth to a child for another person or couple. In traditional surrogacy, the surrogate is also the egg-donor, but surrogacy can also be gestational, where the surrogate is not the egg-donor, but instead carries an embryo created via IVF from the sperm and eggs of the intended parents or donors.
These services are typically sought by couples who are unable to conceive due to fertility issues, same-sex couples, and, in some extreme cases, affluent couples who wish to avoid the discomforts and complications associated with pregnancy and childbirth.
Surrogacy in Belgium
Navigating the Belgian surrogacy scene is very tricky. Here, surrogacy occupies a legal grey zone, and statistics on the procedure are hard to come by.
“Right now, Belgium is in quite an unusual position where surrogacy is not regulated at all, but it's also not prohibited. It’s in what we call a legal grey zone,” Dr. Nishat Hyder-Rahman, a researcher specialising in bioethics, medical and family law, encompassing surrogacy, told The Brussels Times.
Belgium is recognised for its world-class reproductive medicine, based around its care centres in a handful of hospitals. But the fragmented nature of the system means there is a patchwork of policies, established by the country's six fertility centres.
While some rules – like the purity of altruistic intention and the use of gestational surrogacy – are common among all of the clinics, others are not. For example, only half of them assist same-sex male couples, creating an unequal landscape for intended parents.
But the biggest domestic hurdle to surrogacy isn't accessing medical treatment. It is who is officially recognised as the parent. Under Belgian laws, legal motherhood is automatically assigned to the woman who delivers the baby.
“In Belgium, the person who gives birth is always, always allocated as the legal mother. There is no exception to that,” Dr. Hyder-Rahman emphasises. That remains the case "irrespective of whether or not she is genetically related to the child she delivers”.
This requires the adoption process to transfer the surrogate’s automatically allocated legal motherhood to one of the intended parents. What is more, the adoption is decided on a case-by-case basis, without a guarantee of success. Adoption is almost always a lengthy and costly process.
Due to facing so many hurdles at home, many Belgians choose to join other westerners in looking abroad for surrogate mothers on the global free market.
Traditionally, Asia and Ukraine have been the world's surrogacy hubs, but these destinations are now restricted as a result of ongoing geopolitical crises. Today, Georgia, with its lightly regulated commercial market, has become one of the most popular destinations for people seeking surrogates.
Outsourcing surrogacy: the Georgian case
Entire niche communities dedicated to surrogacy recruitment and discussion have been formed on major social media platforms and online forums. While conducting an investigation and browsing through such communities, The Brussels Times found many EU-based intended parents swapping tips on which developing nations offer the best “value for money”.
In Georgia, international surrogacy has been legal since 1997. Georgia is at the top of the list partly because the costs for intended parents are significantly lower than in most western countries (in Georgia it costs between €47,000 and €72,000 compared to over €200,000 in the United States), and partly because the country's law is highly favourable to foreign intended parents.
It grants them immediate parental rights on the child's birth certificate, while at the same time offers virtually no protection to the women actually carrying the children and giving birth.
Georgian groups on social media sites specifically operate with anonymity. They are something of a marketplace, where clients can connect with surrogates and intermediaries – the so-called “agencies”.
These agencies are medical fertility centres with their own doctors and agents who recruit women. They often have their own lawyers and help connect intended parents with potential surrogates.
But if Belgians opt to go down this path, they should not expect an easy ride.
The first major legal difficulty that parents encounter starts with issuing a passport or visa for the newborn through the Belgian embassy. Once home, they face a lottery at their local municipal office when trying to register the Georgian birth certificate.
“Some local authorities will recognise the foreign birth certificate in full, others will not, or will only partially recognise it,” Dr. Hyder-Rahman notes. “You just have no certainty, no consistency whatsoever about the legal family status, which is very frustrating for everyone involved – but perhaps most difficult for the status of the child.”
Ultimately, most find themselves right back where they started – forced to hire a lawyer and establish their legal parenthood through the Belgian family courts via the recognition of foreign birth certificates or court orders, or adoption. It is a process that takes months at best and requires the foreign surrogate’s documented consent.
The human cost of 'value for money'
Behind the glossy websites of Tbilisi-based agencies promising European standards lies a grim reality. For most women, the motivation to become surrogates in Georgia is severe poverty. Young women often face pressure from their own families, who push them into surrogacy programmes in order to earn enough cash to pay off household debts.
In 2025, the average income for a woman in Georgia was just over €620 per month. Surrogate mothers are typically paid around $20,000 (approximately €17,000) – a life-changing sum for many families.
Beyond the money question, there are other ethical concerns. Local women are not just being asked about their health when they sign up to be surrogates. The agencies reportedly post strict demands for women with "natural beauty," specifying light hair and light eyes. In some extreme cases, according to the agents chatting among themselves online, some intended parents have even requested intelligence tests for potential surrogates.
This "shopping list" mentality exposes an ignorance of the medical realities. In most cases the surrogate is purely gestational, meaning the carrier of the baby has absolutely no genetic connection to the child.
“If the surrogate is not genetically involved, if her egg is not being used, then her physical appearance or test results have no bearing at all on the future child,” says Dr. Hyder-Rahman. “It makes me wonder whether the intended parents really understand the process they are about to embark on.”
Sometimes, surrogates have to purchase necessary pregnancy medications at their own expense. We have seen evidence on surrogacy groups on social media of women selling their partially used or leftover prescription pills to other surrogates at a lower price just to recoup some of their out-of-pocket costs.
A cry for help
During the investigation conducted by The Brussels Times, our team managed to get in touch with a surrogate mother named Nino, whose name we changed to protect her identity. Finding someone willing to speak to journalists is extremely difficult due to the taboo around the topic, so what we found was a rare cry for help.
Nino made a public, non-anonymised post about not receiving the full amount of money she was owed after giving birth to a child and handing it to the parents. There, she mentioned a name of a specific Tbilisi-based agency with a reputation tarnished by dozens of similar posts by other surrogates.
At the time of our conversation, it had already been three weeks since she gave birth, and our interviewee was still trying to obtain the final instalment of her payment through her clinic. During our brief discussion, she appeared depressed, and one of her messages even hinted at suicidal thoughts. On top of dealing with the clinic, her child had fallen ill and needed her care.
Initially, Nino was motivated to speak on the record to expose the alleged financial shenanigans of the agency involved. But a few hours after agreeing, she changed her mind and refused to talk.
Our research in online forums suggests that clinics often look for and find excuses not to pay the full amount owed to surrogate mothers. They justify their actions by claiming that something is wrong with the baby or citing delays in the bank transfer. When international transactions like this go wrong, the surrogate is left entirely unprotected.
“Any engagement with international legal frameworks would have to be via the local system,” Dr. Hyder-Rahman explains. “It would really require the surrogate to have access to local legal advice and legal support. And I'm very aware that this is not always the case. That is hugely problematic.”
A brighter future for everyone?
“Surrogacy can be carried out in an ethical manner,” Dr. Hyder-Rahman concludes, noting that Belgium’s own clinics do an excellent job with the altruistic cases they are allowed to handle. “It's not the actual reproductive medicine that's problematic. It's the total absence of a legal framework and the legal entanglements around parenthood that cause the problems."
It is also worth noting that the public perception of cross-border surrogacy is often shaped by its most disastrous failures. “I think the other thing to perhaps bear in mind is that when things go wrong, people will talk about it,” Dr. Hyder-Rahman adds. “When things go right, families are just busy looking after the child and being a family.”
Belgium’s Federal Government’s current coalition agreement includes a promise to eventually establish a formal legal framework for altruistic surrogacy. But for now, a legal grey area in Belgium drives parents to seek other options, in countries that make surrogacy attractive to foreigners, while ignoring women's rights.
