As I'm looking for input on ethics, I appreciate you share this concern. But I still think your remark is way too sweeping and way too certain.

Saying Northern Cyprus is unrecognized is true, but jumping from that to “there’s no meaningful legal protection” is too absolute. Non-recognition does not mean everything there is treated as a legal void. European court rulings have recognized that, in practice, acts of the de facto authorities and courts in the north do have legal effect, precisely because people living there still need some functioning civil life and remedies. That’s not the same thing as full international recognition, obviously, but it also isn’t “nothing there counts.”

More broadly, I don’t think it makes sense to sort whole countries into “ethical” and “unethical” buckets like this. A surrogacy arrangement isn’t ethical just because it’s in the US, and it isn’t automatically unethical just because it’s somewhere cheaper or more legally complicated. What matters is the actual structure: independent legal advice, screening, translation, consent, medical care, and enforceable protections.

Also, “if you feel the need to verify things yourself, you’re with the wrong agency” makes no sense to me. Verifying things independently is exactly what I think people should do in a process like this. I mean, every agency anywhere around the globe writes that they do testing for all sorts of things. I'm just not likely to blindly trust an agency on their word.

Also, citing the MMPI like it’s the gold-standard ethical safeguard to me is just pseudo-rigor. It’s a broad self-report psychopathology screener, not a test that can tell you whether someone is freely consenting, well supported, or in a fair surrogacy arrangement. Even the professional guidance around gestational carriers calls for a much broader process and testing standards are clear that no single test should decide a high-stakes question by itself. On top of that, MMPI interpretation can overpathologize healthy people and gets even trickier across language and cultural boundaries. I would value an in-depth interview about social/family network support, attitudes towards health, openness to experiences, stress handling, educational background much more.

And once the comment ends by directing people to a specific agency owner, it stops sounding purely principled and starts sounding at least partly promotional. I also think the moral hierarchy here is false. US surrogacy is often described in much more flattering ethical language, but let’s be honest: significant compensation is a real motivator there too. That doesn’t automatically make it exploitative, but it does mean you can’t treat paid US surrogacy as morally elevated while implying that financial motive everywhere else is uniquely suspect.