A quick google for “surrogacy package Greece” turns up a host of options promising success.

Amid photos titled “little miracles” of cherub-like babies (many posed on a towel with tiny wings making them look quite like angels or cupids), the Gaia Fertility company states that Greece is a “surrogate-friendly country” and that “there is no residency or citizenship requirement, meaning you can return to your country after you sign the documents and come back for the birth of your baby.”

Companies with names like Growing Families or GestLife offer all-inclusive packages which include legal support, egg donations, embryo transfers, surrogate matching, pregnancy monitoring, and paperwork assistance for heterosexual couples looking to have a child via surrogacy.

Many couples from Europe, or even further afield from eastern Asia, Australia, or the U.S., travel to Greece to have a child via reproductive technologies that are not available to them at home.

“The Greek legal framework around surrogacy is actually one of the most accurate, complete, well-built and liberal in Europe,” says Marianna Vassiliou, a lawyer before the Supreme Court of Greece who specializes in assisted reproduction law, speaking on To Vima’s Explaining Greece podcast.

Greek law requires the parent or parents of the child to sign an agreement with the surrogate that is then verified by court before the process begins. The implanted embryo is not at any point the child of the surrogate, and cannot be denied by the legal parents. Vassiliou explained that, compared with the legal frameworks in the U.S. or U.K., this leaves far fewer loopholes and gray areas.

Surrogacy has been legal in Greece since 2002, but a 2014 amendment to the law vastly changed the practice in the country; the new provisions stipulated that neither the surrogate nor the parent(s) needed to be permanent residents of Greece. This created a burgeoning market for reproductive tourism.

Other common destinations for surrogacy or reproductive tourism include Georgia, India, Colombia, Argentina, the U.S. and Ukraine. However, Greece is considered an ideal option thanks to its location and pricing: “The medical services in Greece are excellent. The level of Greek doctors is very high. The services are cheap,” Vassiliou notes. A surrogacy package in Greece rings in at somewhere around 81,000 euros; in the US or Argentina, the price is at least 90,000 euros.

In 2022, surrogacy tourism was made even simpler when the Hellenic Authority for Medically Assisted Reproduction decided that the residence status of the surrogate did not need to be officially proven, simply declared by the person herself.

The majority of the women who donate eggs or act as surrogates in Greece are not Greek. Many are from poorer eastern European countries such as Ukraine or Georgia. Statistics viewed by the Katherimini newspaper indicate that only one third of the surrogates approved by the Athens Court of First Instance from 2005 to 2015 were Greek citizens.

The company GestLife states: “There is a great shortage of Greek surrogate mothers, as they demand amounts that are not in accordance with the law. This makes it necessary to use surrogate mothers from Ukraine, who comply with the limits set by the surrogacy law, thus avoiding committing a crime.”

This statement is misleading, however. While it is true there is massive demand for surrogates in Greece, legally-speaking, all surrogacy must be altruistic rather than commercial. Surrogates may receive a small compensation for their pregnancy, and their medical costs must be covered, but they cannot be paid. Still, it is an open secret that many of these women are paid under the table, or coerced or trafficked so that someone else can make money out of them.

“It really amazes me that all those straight couples who have a child with a surrogate are rich couples aged 40 to 50 who just happen to have a very good friend who’s around 20, very poor, and either from a highly vulnerable population like the Roma, or from poor eastern countries like Ukraine or Albania,” Vassiliou notes ironically.

These “surrogate matching” programs rely on the fallacy that there are hundreds of women happy to travel to Greece to engage themselves in the demanding process of surrogacy and pregnancy out of pure altruism. And on the reality that many people are desperate to have children and willing to shell out loads of money to make it happen.

There are few statistics and little oversight in the field. The original oversight body, the National Authority for Assisted Reproduction, was underfunded for years before being disbanded in 2008. The current National Authority for Assisted Reproduction, which was re-founded in 2014 and has slowly grown into the body it is today, estimated to the Katherimini that assisted reproduction through surrogacy accounts for up to 50% of fertility clinics’ turnover in Greece.

In 2023, there was an enormous scandal concerning women trafficked to Chania, Crete, for surrogacy and egg donation. Police reported that “brokers” had lured women to a clinic in Chania from Greece and abroad, with 98 victims of human trafficking exploited into acting as surrogates. The Ta Nea newspaper asserted that “The criminal organization received between 70,000 and 100,000 euros per surrogacy program, with 70% of that being net profit.”

These real instances of the most vulnerable women being trafficked, commercialized and exploited have been name-checked in relation to a host of other surrogacy-related questions over the last two years. However, the panic has been projected onto another population.

Since the 2002 law, gay couples and single men have been forbidden from accessing reproductive technologies such as surrogacy in Greece, which have been reserved for straight couples and single women. So, when the Bill permitting same-sex marriage was debated in Parliament in 2024, there were varying degrees of hand-wringing and outrage over the thought of reproductive technologies becoming available to same-sex couples, too.

Several politicians and parties from the governing right-wing New Democracy to the communist KKE opposed the same-sex marriage law on the grounds that it would include access to surrogacy, and that allowing gay couples to access these techniques would open the doors for exploitation.

“This concept of women being turned into baby-making machines on demand – […] that’s not going to happen. I want to be absolutely clear that we are not doing anything with regard to assisted reproduction. We are not changing anything,” Prime Minister Mitsotakis stated at the time.

In the end, the same-sex marriage Bill passed into law without granting homosexual couples in Greece access to reproductive technologies. It did allow those who had had children via surrogacy elsewhere to have their children legally recognized here. Gay rights groups argued that this simply means that those with the funds to travel abroad and access surrogacy there could do so, and that poorer couples looking to have children were simply out of luck.

Then in April of this year, Minister of Justice Giorgos Floridis introduced a legislative stipulation that explicitly prohibited homosexual men and single men from having children through surrogacy. Though it simply restated and formulated the existing prohibition, the new provision was announced with great fanfare.

The minister stated that the regulation had a “profound humanitarian character,” since “with the previous interpretation, Greece risked becoming a country of trafficking in surrogate mothers.”

Opposition politicians critiqued it as a “hypocritical instrumentalization of the drama of the vulnerable female victims of trafficking.”

“I’m extremely puzzled about how single men or gay men or lesbian women who were never explicitly allowed by Greek law or the Greek courts to have a child via surrogacy were supposed to have trafficked these women,” said Vassiliou. “If anything, it was the amendments of 2014 and 2022 that likely made trafficking easier in Greece,” she said referring to the removal of the permanent residence requirement.

The reproductive technology tourism businesses are unbothered by this prohibition. Success Surrogacy LLC cheerfully promotes their “modern clinic in Greece” on their website, stating the country is “recommended for EU, Russian and Asian citizens, married and unmarried couples, single woman, female couples.” For gay couples, they simply suggest that they take their business to one of their many clinics located elsewhere.