China's 'womb brokers'

As Tyler Cowen might say, there's a market for everything. Meet China's "womb brokers":

Liu Jin Feng, 30, was a manager for a joint venture company in his native Zhejiang province with a newly pregnant wife when the concept of womb-broking occurred to him.

He spent six months investigating. Four hundred babies later, he is confident he has picked a sustainable industry. Couples need to budget for at least 300,000 yuan ($A50,000). About 40,000 yuan is for the surrogate, a fee for the agent, and the rest covers extensive medical, travel and living costs.

Of course, China is far behind India, where commercial surrogacy was made legal in 2002 (it's illegal but tolerated in China). And if you turn to the classified section of any elite U.S. university, it's easy to find advertisements from infertile couples looking for an egg donor with an Ivy League pedigree. In fact, California has some of the most liberal surrogacy laws in the world, and parts of Europe have become links in a globalizing commercial surrogacy industry. If anything, the Chinese are just playing catch-up -- though I imagine further digging would show that the phenomenon is not quite as new as the above article would have us believe.

(Hat tip: China Digital Times)