The EXcel Conference center in East London was recently host to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology’s huge international expo, focussing on AI use in IVF, surrogacy, the genetics of ovarian response and the success rates of Embryo Transfer.
ESHRE’s vast expo was laid out over 90,000 square feet, featured over 220 exhibitors, with sponsors from 140 countries – all because quite simply, for the global surrogacy and fertility market, the ongoing ruthless commodification of women’s bodies continues to be big business. I attended not as a doctor, embryologist or delegate, but as part of the events team helping to organise the four-day congress. During our briefing, we were told that the Belgium-based organisation was focused on fertility treatments both within and beyond Europe. We were expecting around 12,000 delegates – although event managers later said attendance had reached over 14,000.
Delegates arrived from across the globe, including representatives from former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Belarus, as well as Islamic countries including the United Arab Emirates, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. (Women earn considerably less in these countries than women do in Western Europe). Our role was to highlight the ‘missions and visions’ featuring research on human reproduction and embryology to the general public, scientists, clinicians and patient associations and were told that ESHRE “collaborates with politicians and policymakers throughout Europe.”
Dr. Bart Fauser, a renowned Dutch reproductive endocrinologist and Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University, declared in his speech on the first session that there is a critical global decline in fertility, most notably across Europe. He noted that women are increasingly delaying motherhood and shifting away from prioritising traditional maternal roles. While countries such as France, Hungary, Sweden, and the United Kingdom provide at least one free IVF treatment, these measures remain insufficient to alter demographic decline, even as global IVF births exceed 20 million.
In Denmark, IVF conceived children comprise roughly 10% of total births, with 30% of assisted reproduction therapy is for LGBTQ+ individuals. Within this framework, access to reproductive ‘therapies’ encompassing post-mortem conception, surrogacy, and care for HIV-positive or transgender couples, is treated as a universal right, broadening the definition of infertility treatment to all individuals regardless of reproductive capacity. He also added that Australia is the only country that has data on lesbian couples, single men, and gay men who cannot have children without the involvement of the opposite sex.
In the Sunday session Dr Fauser said to a packed audience “It was once the hetrosexual couple, usually married, that wanted to be together forever and have children and if it didn’t work out they would come to us. Now they are in a minority so the term has changed from INFERTILITY care to FERTILITY care – because we are treating people that are not infertile. Until very recently the World Health Organisation did not want to have anything to do with infertility. Again, why? Because there are too many people in this world – and I’ve been discussing this with them for quite some time and they say we know there are maybe in some parts of the world too many children – but it doesn’t make their pain any less. It’s about means and individuals.”
These ‘means and individuals’ include womb transplants from young or deceased donors (Womb Transplant UK reported more than 65 healthy babies worldwide in 2025, with more live births to be recorded in 2026), as well as finding countries where it is easy to obtain donor eggs, i.e. those with looser regulations.
Across the four days, there were more than 80 sessions, alongside pre-congress courses, keynote lectures, and numerous oral and poster presentations held in huge suites. And they all came with a little bit of controversy. The coordinator of ESHRE is Professor Antonio Capalbo, who is also a member of the Italian Society of Human Genetics. Antonio’s presentation entitled ‘Debate: Back to Basics or Back to the Future’, featured slides of various political leaders (Trump, Meloni and Nawrocki) who stand against embryo testing and surrogacy.
Irene Cervelló, who specialises in Cell Biology, Somatic Stem Cells and Reproductive Medicine, discussed research in which pig and rabbit wombs are stripped of their cells, leaving the natural biological scaffold of the uterus to be processed into biomaterials for potential use in regenerative medicine (accompanied by lots of cute animal pictures). And the Ukrainian-UK obstetrician and gynaecologist Evangelia Katsika greeted her audience with her national flag and took an impromptu photoshoot with pictures of a bombed Kyiv before her presentation. But the pièce de résistance was a speaker from Chile presenting to a packed auditorium on the “International Glossary on Infertility.”
In essence, he was explaining that the 348 terms now considered internationally acceptable in the fertility industry for 2025, has an updated version of the original 2017 glossary, which contained 283 terms.
The glossary is intended “for all stakeholders, including policymakers” and the latest update is designed to “reflect contemporary scientific knowledge, changing social needs and more inclusive definitions, while standardising language across clinical practice, research, policy and the public domain.”
The speaker was Dr Fernando Zegers-Hochschild, Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile, and a prominent figure in reproductive medicine and assisted reproductive technologies. Reading straight from the trans-ideology playbook, he rattled off terms such as ‘assigned at birth’, ‘gender identity’, ‘cisgender’, ‘Not aligned with the sex at birth’, ‘gender dysphoria’ and ‘gender reassignment’.
What struck me was hearing a man in his late 70s delivering a presentation using the language of Gen Z identity politics – particularly terms such as “inclusive definitions” and “social needs” – to an auditorium packed with highly educated medical professionals. The contrast was striking, and, frankly, rather surreal.
His closing remarks called for ‘open dialogue’ and ‘mutual respect’ and the importance of avoiding language that might offend, yet in the same breath, he referred to surrogate mothers as “gestational carriers”. When it comes to the commodification of women’s bodies in the fertility and surrogacy industry, it seems the person whose dignity and feelings are given the least consideration is the woman herself.
Walking around the exhibition hall, I was struck not only by the sheer number of delegates from every corner of the world, but by the spectacular scale of the stands themselves. The largest belongs to Ferring Pharmaceuticals. Owner by billionaire Swedish owner, Frederick Paulsen, Ferring Pharmaceuticals Ltd. has donated £1.43 million to the Liberal Democrat party over the past six years through the UK subsidiary of his Switzerland-based company. (Ferring is also one of the world’s leading makers of the puberty-blocking drug, triptolen, which halts puberty by suppressing sex hormone production in boys.)
The BSV Bioscience stand was also huge and boasted its positioning as a market leader in theIndian women’s health and fertility drug market . There was a corporate display of the operational footprint map including developing countries such as Afghanistan, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Mauritius. Very few poor nations have not been mined for their resources and potential benefit to the global fertility industry.
Walking across to the London Egg Bank stand, there were smiling faces of women featured on it’s posters. The young hostesses were eager to greet you for a chat. I wondered whether they were fully aware of who their employers are exploiting. Despite being the first and only ‘UK egg bank’, it was criticised for targeting students as potential egg donors at a welcome event at King’s College London in 2020 and at Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University in 2018. (photo)
Everywhere I turned I was bombarded by pictures of babies and glossy adverts for same sex parents to obtain babies via surrogacy. Cyromate who ‘proudly serve lgbtq families around the world’ (photo) showed 3 men on the back of their leaflet along with their clearly marked position that they ‘believe everyone has the right to parenthood’.
Human beings are apparently something you are entitled to create no matter your circumstances or sex, and you can play human pick-and-mix with women who donate their eggs by choosing the eye colour, hair colour for a potential child and even weight and occupation of your chosen DNA provider (under the assumption that you would want an educated and high-IQ take-away human).
The London Sperm Bank, which obviously focuses on lesbian couples and single women, eagerly touts a free demonstration of its online sperm-choosing software portal. I was given a flyer for a ‘Queer and ethically-driven surrogacy journey’ for a french podcast called ‘Surrogacy Daddy’ which can be heard on Spotify and Youtube. Based on a gay French couple, each episode explores their journey to the USA to obtain a baby. (picture). Episode – 12 – A Tale, Some Doubts details their surrogate’s serious hemorrhaging a few days after giving birth and describes this horrendous medical emergency as “a difficult trial”. (This event resulted in a hysterectomy for the woman involved.)
The BMJ (2024) states that ‘surrogates seem to have a higher risk of developing complications such as postpartum haemorrhage and severe pre-eclampsia and are more likely to give birth prematurely. This was not something that was ever mentioned in the podcast.
Despite the endless freebies (cartoon sperm bags, keyrings, pens and notepads galore) and the relentless promises of increasing populations, there was remarkably little acknowledgement of the effects of modern feminism, social media and poor education on women’s relationship with their bodies. Women’s bodies are still ruled by biology.
I was left with a rather sad reflection. With all the science, technology and supposed progressiveness of modern society, particularly here in Europe, women in 2026 are still being commodified and advertised. Their bodies are treated as resources to be used to fulfil other people’s needs and desires, like privatised medical machinery sold to the highest bidder.
Europe’s largest fertility expo is doing nothing to help challenge these regressive and misogynistic ideals, and instead is doing everything they can to perpetuate them.
