Alysa Liu’s Olympic Spotlight Draws Attention to the Dangerous Practice of Surrogacy
Rachana Chhin /
During the recent Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, it came to light that one of the most prominent and celebrated athletes—Alysa Liu—was born via surrogacy and an anonymous egg donor.
Surrogacy is an assisted reproductive technology whereby a woman (the surrogate mother) is impregnated and carries a child for so-called “commissioning” or “intended” parent(s). It is generally divided into two forms—“traditional” and “gestational” —based on whether the surrogate mother is biologically related to the child.
While the circumstances of Alysa’s conception do not diminish her human dignity or exemplary accomplishments in any way, various commentators have expressed the serious legal, moral, and ethical concerns surrounding the nexus between eugenics and assisted reproductive technologies.
After escaping China following the Tiananmen Square protests, Alysa’s father, Arthur Liu, built a life in the U.S. He chose to start his family in a “non-traditional way” and became a single father by choice to Alysa and her four younger siblings with the help of another woman who essentially helped raise all of his children.
Conveying profound questions as a child surrounding her sense of identity and familial origins, in interviews after the Olympics, Alysa candidly remarked how she knew from an early age that she and her siblings were different: “I mean, we didn’t know about it for a long time. I actually figured it out because, I don’t know, I was like, because our mom is full Chinese, too. And I was like of like, ‘Oh, I totally don’t look full Chinese. Like, there’s something up.”
While Alysa’s tale culminated in gold, the transnational and cross-border implications of surrogacy, as well as its heightened risks in facilitating trafficking, abuse, or neglect, have once again brought surrogacy to the forefront of international conversation across the ideological spectrum.
For example, children born via surrogacy have increasingly voiced objections to the practice based on how it traumatized them. One of the most prominent advocates for the global abolition of surrogacy, Olivia Maurel, has stated: “The most difficult thing is the trauma of abandonment. … We all need to know who we are, where we come from, who our grandparents are, because it defines us for the rest of our lives.”
Rather than viewing it as empowering, certain feminist critiques of surrogacy have attacked it for commodifying women, especially vulnerable low-income women. They have also argued that it perpetuates various abuses against surrogate mothers in the context of, inter alia, oppressive legal contracts, lifestyle restrictions, and inadequate aftercare.
Likewise, advocates for persons with disabilities have also criticized surrogacy for promoting ableism and the interests of big fertility. There have been reports of “commissioning” or “intended” parents abandoning support for surrogate mothers and children or seeking to compel abortion of the unborn child on various grounds, including fetal abnormality or genetic disorders.
Finally, civil society groups have also engaged through the Declaration of Casablanca for the Universal Abolition of Surrogacy.
These efforts have gained the support of both the late Pope Francis as well as Pope Leo XIV, who recently stated: “By transforming gestation into a negotiable service, [surrogacy] violates the dignity both of the child, who is reduced to a ‘product,’ and of the mother, exploiting her body and the generative process, and distorting the original relational calling of the family.”
These critiques are consistent with international human rights law, which does not recognize any affirmative “right to a child,” as such. Rather what is clear is that every child has rights from conception.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes the child’s right to “special safeguards and care, including legal protection, before as well as after birth”, and the child’s right “as far as possible, to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”
A child also has the right not to be “separated from his or her parents against their will” except when conforming to judicial procedures, the law, and in the “best interests of the child.”
In this regard, the CRC’s optional protocol prohibits the sale of children, defined to mean “any act or transaction whereby a child is transferred by any person or group of persons to another for remuneration or any other consideration.”
While the legal framework is explicit, various U.N. organs and mandate holders have also begun to call for action to end this harmful practice.
In her 2018 report, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children called for States to adopt “clear and comprehensive legislation that prohibits the sale of children … in the context of surrogacy.”
In 2024, the U.N. General Assembly adopted Resolution 79/154 on human trafficking that called upon U.N. Member States to take “preventive measures to address … exploitative commercial surrogacy.”
Finally, in 2025, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls called for the global abolition of all forms of surrogacy, recognizing that surrogacy is a “system of violence, exploitation, and abuse” that “reinforces patriarchal norms by commodifying and objectifying women’s bodies and exposing surrogate mothers and children to serious human rights violations.”
While we should be sensitive to the plight of couples experiencing infertility and accompany them with appropriate healthcare services that are both ethical and evidence-based, we should not forget that it is surrogate mothers and children themselves who bear surrogacy’s harshest physical and mental burdens.
Therefore, we must strive for its universal abolition to ensure that no woman is further abused and so that each child can be welcomed as the profound gift that he or she is.
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