Gestational surrogacy is a reproductive arrangement where a woman gestates a child for others—the “intended parents”—in order to be handed over to them after birth. Since the turn of the millennium, demands for surrogacy have continuously increased due to social and demographic changes, rising rates of infertility, and the normalization of new, non-heteronormative, family forms. Many countries prohibit surrogacy, and others that previously permitted this reproductive arrangement closed down as a result of political decisions or surrogacy scandals. Moreover, surrogacy is offered at greatly varying costs, ranging from approximately US$50,000 in countries like the Republic of Georgia to US$200,000 in fertility clinics in California. Accordingly, many of these arrangements are transnational, with intended parents who cannot access surrogacy or afford surrogacy in their home country commissioning it in countries such as the United States, until recently Ukraine, and today increasingly in the Republic of Georgia. Existing research has focused on surrogacy from different angles, such as practices of kinning and de-kinning, inequality and stratification, the political economy of the fertility industry, and its gender dimensions. We engage in, but further these debates by drawing attention to settings, accounts, experiences, and new theoretical notions that diverge from “mainstream” presentations of surrogacy. Moreover, in this Special Issue, we experimented with writing joint papers with a deliberative aim to provide comparative analyses and emphasize the links between and diversity of different cases of surrogacy. Therefore, all papers have an explicit comparative character and are all based on empirical studies from more than one field site. They provide nuanced understandings of surrogacy arrangements, grounded in empirical data rather than ideological, political, or moral assessments.

妊娠代孕是一种生殖安排，女性为他人——“意向父母”——代孕，以便在出生后交给他们。自世纪之交以来，由于社会和人口变化、不孕不育率上升以及新的非异性恋家庭形式的正常化，对代孕的需求不断增加。许多国家禁止代孕，而以前允许这种生殖安排的其他国家由于政治决定或代孕丑闻而关闭。此外，代孕的成本差异很大，从乔治亚共和国等国家的大约 50,000 美元到加利福尼亚的生育诊所的 200,000 美元不等。因此，其中许多安排是跨国的，与无法在本国代孕或负担不起代孕的准父母在美国等国家委托代孕，直到最近的乌克兰，今天越来越多地在格鲁吉亚共和国。现有的研究主要从不同角度关注代孕，例如亲子关系和去亲子关系、不平等和分层、生育行业的政治经济学及其性别维度。我们通过提请注意与“主流”代孕呈现不同的环境、账户、经验和新的理论概念来参与并进一步推动这些辩论。此外，在本期特刊中，我们尝试撰写联合论文，旨在提供比较分析，并强调不同代孕案例之间的联系和多样性。所以，所有论文都具有明确的比较特征，并且都基于来自多个现场的实证研究。它们基于经验数据而不是意识形态、政治或道德评估，对代孕安排提供了细致入微的理解。