*UPDATED for 2023* Bill Houghton talks about where surrogacy is legal, what countries are safe, what countries are affordable, and what countries are just downright dangerous.

So if you've been following along the video series then you've heard me talk a lot about different countries with different legal frameworks and different costs and today we're going to go over what are the available countries worldwide and where is the best place to have your surrogacy journey.

When we look at different countries we really can separate them into a few different categories. The first are countries where surrogacy is regulated and that allow for commercial surrogacy. After that our countries where surrogacy is legal but restricted by some local laws. Then there are countries where there is no regulation whatsoever. And finally countries where surrogacy has just been outright banned.

The first group of countries are those where surrogacy is supported at a high level and where commercial surrogacy is allowed and where there is a legal pathway to ensure that the intended parents have sole parental rights you know what we're looking for is is a legal process so that the intended parents can be named as the legal parents on the baby's birth certificate and the surrogates name would be removed right and this really includes just a handful of countries worldwide

The first country we're looking at is the United States. The US is considered to be the gold standard for gestational surrogacy worldwide. That’s in part that's because of the media hype that's gone around surrogacy in the US. Especially in Southern California.

Maybe you've seen or read about various celebrities having their children born in LA which has driven popularity of surrogacy there. But the US is actually a pretty good spot to have surrogacy all across the country. Nearly every US state has a favorable framework towards surrogacy. There's only a handful of states that we would call unfriendly and that wouldn't recognize your surrogacy arrangement.

The most legally friendly states in the US support what's called a “pre-birth” order. A pre-birth order is an important part of your surrogacy journey and U.S. law. When the pregnancy reaches the third trimester, there's a court process that declares that the intended parents should be named on the birth certificate and that they are in fact legal parents from the moment of delivery.

You can compare that to what we would call “somewhat friendly”, which would be states like Ohio or Pennsylvania or Arkansas. These states have “post-birth” orders that would amend the birth certificate with the names of the intended parents. In these somewhat friendly states, a quick legal process will remove her name and replace it with the names of the intended parents.

The most legally supported place to have your surrogacy journey is actually not in the US like you might think but it's in Eastern Europe and specifically in Ukraine.

It’s now Spring of 2023 when I'm recording this video, and there is an active military conflict going on in Ukraine now. So, I don't promote Ukraine as a surrogacy destination. But before the war (and God willing once peace is restored in the region) Ukraine was unique in its support for surrogacy. Of all the countries around the world, Ukraine had explicit surrogacy laws that support commercial surrogacy. Unlike the US, the surrogate never appears on the birth certificate and the baby is the legal child of the intended parents from the moment of conception.

There's no court process required. In Ukraine if you have a properly executed surrogacy contract, and you meet the country's other bureaucratic requirements, the baby is considered the legal child of the parents from the start of the surrogacy process.

A new addition to the list of surrogacy friendly destinations would be Mexico.

Now I've spent years telling clients to stay away from unregulated destinations like Mexico, but that changed dramatically in late 2021 when the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that surrogacy is a protected medical procedure. You can read all about the new legal framework in Mexico in the surrogacy guide, and we also have a recent video on Mexico. Essentially the court ruled that everyone should have equal access to the medical technology to form a family; and so surrogacy in Mexico was legalized for all individuals: gay, straight, married, single, foreign or domestic.

The Supreme Court went even further and ruled that the questions of the baby's parentage is not actually determined by biology or genetics. Parentage is determined by what they called “procreational will”. Essentially this ruling grants the intended parents the status of legal parents if they have a properly executed surrogacy contract that shows they had the initial desire to form the family and that the surrogate was just providing the incubator so to speak.