(LifeSiteNews) — The Irish state is a willing partner in the international sale of babies and the rental of women’s bodies to supply them on demand. As it refuses to criminalize this evil trade, it also ignores the damage done by its permission of the reduction of human life to a mail-order consumer product.
Scientific studies now confirm that women paid to give birth to babies they will then give away suffer mental illness at a far higher rate than mothers who do not sell their children. A leading anti-surrogacy campaigner has challenged the Irish Health Ministry with this evidence, in a move which further shifts the debate on the “surrogacy” industry towards criminalizing the trade.
Lexi Ellingsworth, who leads StopSurrogacyNowUK, has written to Ireland’s Minister of Health to ask what the consumer-nihilist Liberal government is going to do to help women who are used as living baby factories.
Ellingsworth runs one of many campaigns to stop “surrogacy” internationally. She informed LifeSiteNews that she first contacted Minister Caroll MacNeill on June 24 to “highlight the issue of prevalence of Post Natal Depression in surrogacy.”
In the light of new research conducted last year, Ellingsworth has once again written to the Irish health minister to “ask, once again, what provision will [the Irish] government offer the surrogate mothers abroad for treatment of post-natal mental health conditions that are specific to surrogacy arrangements under the 2024 Assisted Human Reproduction Act?”
Ireland’s government has refused to review the legal position of the ordering, purchase and sale of babies on demand, preferring a stance of official neutrality on Irish citizens buying babies – nor on Irish women selling them.
This despite the European Union’s EuroJust recognizing that selling babies internationally looks a lot like human trafficking.
“Cross-border surrogacy arrangements, where a woman agrees to bear a child and to hand it over, on birth, to another party, can lead to human trafficking and the sale of children,” said the October 2024 report by the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation.
What is surprising here is that the liberal bureaucrats of Europe recognize a basic fact of reality, as many “surrogate” babies are purchased from women overseas, and then transported to the purchaser’s place of residence. This is done as babies produced in Mexico or Ukraine – for example – are significantly cheaper than those bought in the U.S. or Canada.
The price ranges from around $20,000 in poorer countries, to over $250,000 in the U.S.
Ellingsworth explained the workings of the international sale of babies to LifeSiteNews in May 2024, explaining how moves to criminalize the trade in some countries are countered by attempts to liberalize access – including in Ireland – in an attempt to corner the market.
READ: Anti-surrogacy activist calls for end to multi-billion dollar ‘baby trade’ worldwide
‘Surrogacy’ causes mental illness in hired mothers
Ellingsworth’s emails to the Irish Health Ministry, seen by LifeSiteNews, refer to a study completed in May 2025.
Ellingsworth told the Irish Ministry this study proved a higher incidence of mental illness in “surrogate” mothers. It was, according to Ellingsworth “published in the Journal of American Medical Association” and it “concluded that there is a 43% risk of a surrogate mother developing a new-onset mental health condition, as a result of a surrogacy pregnancy (compared to 29% likelihood in non-surrogacy pregnancies).”
This study was conducted over nine years by a group of Canadian obstetricians, psychiatrists and physicians led by Dr. Maria P. Velez. The study says it measured data from “all women from the entire province of Ontario, Canada, without known mental illness before pregnancy and who gave birth at greater than 20 weeks’ gestation from April 1, 2012, to March 31, 2021.”
The study says its evidence “suggests gestational carriers [“mothers paid to sell their babies”] were more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness during and after pregnancy.”
Its conclusions note “potential risk factors for new-onset mental illness among gestational carriers” – meaning that so-called “surrogacy” should be recognized as very likely to damage the mental health of the women having these babies.
Selling your children is depressing
These “risk factors,” it says, “include the emotional effect of separation from the newborn.”
In addition to this latest research, Ellingsworth also cited a “2018 study of 222 surrogate mother[s] in the USA” which “noted a 37.5% increased likelihood compared to 4% in non-surrogacy pregnancies.”
These findings are reinforced by a study of Indian “surrogates” in 2018, which found “surrogates had higher levels of depression during pregnancy and post-birth … than the comparison group of mothers.”
This growing evidence base supports the conclusion of Dr Velez, who led the nine-year Canadian study:
The findings of additional analysis suggest that some gestational carriers may experience grief from relinquishing the newborn, such as that described after adoption or removal of the child into foster care—something that needs detailed study.
Refusing to protect children
The tragedy of the Irish state’s transition from Catholicism to amorality is demonstrated in its passing of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act 2024 – a bill which was denounced by Senator Ronan Mullen in June 2024.
“The Bill enables the exploitation of poor women for surrogacy and denies a child’s right not to be bought and sold through surrogacy,” Mullen said, adding that it “also provides for experimentation on human embryos.”
Shockingly, Mullen also noted that “this Bill passed through the Dáil [Irish Parliament] without a vote.”
Mullen’s claims about experimentation are legitimate and evidenced here – and they are not the only dimension of grave moral evil concealed in this bill.
After the bill passed without a vote in May 2024, the bill was debated. Stephen Donnelly – Irish health minister at the time – then refused to add amendments to protect children trafficked by the state’s legal indifference to “surrogacy.”
Donnelly claimed in June 2024 it would be “unacceptably discriminatory” to prohibit single men from buying babies – including those previously convicted of sexual crimes against children.
None of the 15 amendments proposed by Sen. Sharon Keogan to protect children from exploitation and abandonment were adopted.
It will come as no surprise to a readership which treasures the essential value of human life to discover that so-called “surrogates” (who are never called “mothers”) experience far higher rates of depression and related mental illness than do women who do not sell their babies.
With every examination, the profound evil of this trade in human life is further revealed in more detail. It is thanks to the unpaid campaigns led by women like Ellingsworth that this dehumanizing industry is exposed. As Ellingsworth told LifeSiteNews:
Isn’t it time that we recognise these risks and instead of arguing for ‘regulation’, we consider the very real dangers to be too much to ask of women and ban this controversial practice?
It can only be a matter of time before the knowledge of the damage done to human dignity by the reduction of women and babies to consumer production lines sees this wicked business banned forever.
Lexi Ellingsworth is the founder of StopSurrogacyUK. You can watch her explain the growing campaign to end the “surrogacy” industry in this interview with LifeSiteNews:
