Surrogacy Care

Surrogacy continues to raise important social, legal, ethical, and healthcare questions as its use becomes more common across diverse cultural and regulatory contexts. It involves complex arrangements between surrogates, intended parents, healthcare professionals, legal systems, and often cross-border institutions. While surrogacy offers an alternative path to parenthood, the processes surrounding it—before, during, and after birth—can be fraught with emotional, legal, and ethical challenges. These include issues of autonomy, parentage, compensation, access, equity, and care continuity. Despite growing public attention and evolving legal frameworks, there is a lack of multidisciplinary research that captures the lived experiences, policy gaps, and systemic implications of surrogacy. There is now an urgent need to bring together global perspectives that explore surrogacy not only as a reproductive practice, but as a complex social and healthcare phenomenon.

The goal of this Research Topic is to advance understanding of surrogacy in its many dimensions by inviting multidisciplinary scholarship that critically examines its ethical, legal, cultural, medical, and psychosocial aspects. Although surrogacy is legally permitted in several settings, the practical implementation of policies and support systems remains inconsistent and often inadequate. There is limited empirical evidence on how surrogacy arrangements unfold across different stages—pre-conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and postnatal care—and how these experiences are shaped by gender, class, race, and geography. This Research Topic seeks to address key questions about equity, access, identity formation, ethical dilemma, healthcare preparedness, and long-term impacts. By gathering diverse contributions, we aim to generate a nuanced understanding that can inform ethical practices, inclusive policies, and future research.

Area of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Lived experiences of surrogates, intended parents, and children born via surrogacy
• Legal and policy frameworks across countries and their impact on practice
• Ethical dilemmas, power dynamics, and informed consent in surrogacy arrangements
• Access, equity, and reproductive justice in surrogacy pathways
• The role of healthcare professionals and institutions in supporting surrogacy
• Commercial vs altruistic surrogacy: perspectives and consequences
• Psychological and emotional dimensions of surrogacy for all parties involved
• Cross-border surrogacy, regulation gaps, and implications for child rights

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: surrogacy, birth care, pregnancy, maternal health, commercial surrogacy, surrogated, altruistic surrogacy

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.