Under the deal, Excellence introduces its customers to the South Korean firm,
which chooses a suitable medical institution where the procedures will be
conducted and, when requested, a South Korean surrogate mother.
The Tokyo company, which has been operating since 1996, has advertised this
service on its Web site.
The firm offered the service after one of its customers - a single woman in her
40s - asked a South Korean woman through a South Korean intermediary to be a
surrogate mother to her child.
Early this year, another woman became the first person to sign a contract with
the firm on surrogacy.
A lesbian couple in their 20s signed a contract in August.
The firm is planning to perform in vitro fertilization using ova provided by
one of the women in the couple and sperm from one of her acquaintances and
place a fertilized egg in the uterus of the other woman in the couple.
The procedure will be conducted at a medical institution in South Korea, where
there is no regulation on surrogacy, for 3 million yen.
In cases that involve a South Korean surrogate mother, the fee is expected to
reach about 7 million yen.
Those who ask the firm to organize a surrogate birth will bear their own travel
expenses to and medical fees in South Korea.
The costs are less than half that for a similar process in the United States,
and the degree of medical expertise available in South Korea is equivalent to
that in the United States, according to Yuji Sasaki, who heads the Tokyo firm.
In 2001, a doctor at a maternity clinic in Nagano Prefecture announced publicly
that he had conducted the nation's first surrogacy.
In 2003, the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology forbid its members from
organizing surrogacy.
The same year, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry's committee on assisted
reproductive technology compiled a report on the ban, but no move has been made
to legislate the procedure.
Some doctors at maternity hospitals have supported surrogacy, saying women's
desires to have children should be respected.
Yomiuri Shimbun
