: On Geoffrey Li’s 40th birthday last year, he put aside his dream of an early retirement on an idyllic island and instead decided to raise a child in Taiwan using a surrogate in Southeast Asia.
Global fertility services were estimated in an initial valuation to be worth about US$21 billion in 2018 with the industry forecast to grow to US$41 billion by 2026, according to India-based market research firm Data Bridge. But although two-thirds of Taiwanese voters — about 7 million people — opposed changing the country’s civil code to recognise same-sex marriage in a 2018 referendum, parliament in May passed a law legalising gay marriage.Under current laws, same-sex couples can only adopt children who as biologically related to at least one of them, with activists marking this as one of the next frontiers in the fight for LGBT+ equality on the island of 23 million people.
There is no legislation concerning surrogacy at the federal level in the United States and some states allow commercial surrogacy arrangements. American Fertility Services, San Diego Fertility Center and International Surrogacy Center were among the sponsors of the event, which included a panel on budgeting, testimonies from parents and surrogates and onsite consultations with clinics.Jerald Goldstein, founder of Fertility Specialists of Texas , attended the conference as part of a bid to build businesses in Taiwan and China.