This weekend, two stories revealed some troubling aspects of the surrogacy industry: one from the shiny, expensive high-end American market, and one from the grimy, Second World budget end of the spectrum.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Chinese billionaires are using international surrogacy, especially in the United States, to purchase enormous families. Some seek to procure tens, perhaps even hundreds, of genetic children via surrogacy. The practice is banned in China, but the laws governing surrogacy overseas are sufficiently ambiguous for a large market to have opened up for those wealthy enough to go abroad — including in the US, where commercial surrogacy is legal and big business.

The appeal is heightened by the ability of American surrogacy firms to exploit a grey area in American citizenship law, despite Donald Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. But it’s not clear whether this applies to babies born via surrogacy to a mother who is a US citizen. In this murky environment, American surrogacy companies are effectively selling not just babies, but babies with US passports. It is a popular product for the international super-rich.

Some, the WSJ reports, are now procuring multiple concurrent pregnancies and leaving them to be raised by third parties, with the aim of “forging an unstoppable family dynasty”. One such case recently hit the headlines when an LA mansion owned by a wealthy Chinese couple was raided by police, and 15 children were moved into care. The children, all procured via surrogacy, were being cared for by nannies; authorities became involved after one toddler was hospitalised with head injuries after being violently shaken by one nanny.

What had life been like for these babies? What will happen to them now? Anti-surrogacy campaigners point out that surrogacy is distinct from the adoption of children orphaned by misfortune, in that it in effect intentionally creates an orphan. In those situations (of which there are already many, including this one) where the resulting baby is taken from or rejected by the commissioning adults, the result is desperately vulnerable infants who, through no fault of their own, are manufactured intentionally without loving parents and left at the mercy of whoever will take up their cause. It is difficult to fathom the mindset of anyone, however wealthy, who imagines that mass-producing progeny in so objectifying a fashion will produce any kind of meaningful dynastic succession.

As a recent NYT report this weekend showed, the surrogacy market extends well beyond America. It characterises the US market as the ‘hub for white-glove commercial surrogacy,’ highlighting how much more rigorously regulated the industry is there compared with other countries. Following several human-trafficking scandals and government crackdowns, the baby trade market has moved its centre of operations from India, Thailand, Mexico, Nepal, and Russia; more recently it has also been displaced from Ukraine, after Russia’s invasion prompted disturbing reports on the surrogates and babies left in limbo as war interrupted human-production supply chains.

The implications of this lucrative, fluid, and globalised market are profoundly dehumanising. But — and despite pleas from the UN special rapporteur on violence against women to recognise surrogacy as a system of abuse against women — the problem is only getting worse. The UN has called for a ban on worldwide commercial surrogacy; instead, a global, transhumanist market in human body parts — and living human babies — seems only to grow more established.

It’s easy to spin dystopian stories of how mad scientists (or perhaps Elon Musk) aspire to re-engineering humans, maybe grafting on machine parts to create monstrous new hybrids. But the real transhumanist threat is less those who seek to re-engineer humans, than those who reduce our creation to a manufacturing process governed by market forces. For in doing so, we are less adding machine parts to human bodies, than removing the “human” from bodies. All that’s left behind is saleable meat.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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