The study is the work of Polina Vlasenko, an anthropologist at Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, published in the journal Mobilities on 16 June. It draws on fieldwork in Georgia and Kazakhstan across 2023 and 2024 and more than 100 interviews. Its subject is the layer the market keeps out of view: the intermediaries who run it, agents and clinic coordinators, many of them former surrogates.
Georgia has allowed surrogacy since 1997, under Article 143 of its health-care law, and became a hub after 2022, when the war in Ukraine closed the previous one. Demand from foreign couples outgrew the local supply of women willing to carry, so the clinics reached across the Caspian. Where Western markets describe surrogacy in the language of altruism, the Russian-language advertising aimed at Central Asia describes a job arranged through a phone.
The hold is financial and physical. Payment arrives in stages, with the largest share kept back until after delivery. Most women stay in Georgia for the length of the pregnancy, often in shared housing under rules that reward mutual monitoring. Leaving early can mean losing the payment that made the journey worth taking. Vlasenko calls this affective governance: the intermediaries manage the women's feelings as closely as their logistics.
Payment arrives in stages, with the largest share kept back until after delivery.
The supply side sits in Central Asia's labour markets. Scarce formal jobs, thin social protection and the unpaid weight of care at home push women toward informal and cross-border work. Surrogacy carries a stigma across the region, so it stays quiet. One woman in the study, a 38-year-old mother of five from Astana, took it on as a way to keep her family, a livelihood rather than a calling.
The gap is in the rules. A 2023 draft law to limit commercial surrogacy in Georgia to citizens and residents was rejected, so the cross-border recruitment runs on. Georgia oversees the clinics, not the intermediaries or the women they place. The home governments treat the whole arrangement as private and shameful, and count none of it. The women fall between the two.
This is a reproductive-labour channel that moves money the way remittances do, and it is even harder to see. It earns a place on our hidden-story track for that reason. Watch whether any Central Asian government names it, whether Georgia returns to the restriction it dropped in 2023, and whether the intermediaries' grip tightens as demand climbs.