Third-Party Reproduction in Taiwan: A Guide for Asian Intended Parents

Summary: Third-Party Reproduction in Taiwan

Following the Assisted Reproduction Act in 2007 (1, 2), which allowed egg and sperm donation for heterosexual married couples, Taiwan became a preferred destination for couples seeking these services in Asia, particularly from Hong Kong and Japan (3, 4). Access to high quality IVF clinics is widespread, with Taiwan having 103 government-licensed assisted reproduction institutions as of 2024 (4, 5).

There are no statutory age restrictions for intended parents in Taiwan, although clinics typically require the female partner to be under 45 and government IVF subsidies are limited to women under 45 (6). Egg and sperm donation is legal for heterosexual married couples that meet certain conditions (1, 2). Surrogacy is not legal (1, 7, 8).

On 11 December 2025, the Executive Yuan approved a draft amendment to the Assisted Reproduction Act that would extend access to assisted reproduction to single women aged 18 and older and to women in legal same-sex marriages; surrogacy was removed from the draft and will be addressed separately. The draft was forwarded to the Legislative Yuan for review and is not yet in force (9, 10, 11). This page reflects the law in effect as of 24 May 2026.

Pending Reforms: December 2025 Draft Amendments

On 11 December 2025, Taiwan’s Executive Yuan approved a draft amendment to the Assisted Reproduction Act and forwarded it to the Legislative Yuan for review (9, 10, 11). If enacted in its current form, the amendment would: (a) allow single women aged 18 and older with household registration in Taiwan to access assisted reproductive technologies; (b) allow married female same-sex couples (including marriages where one partner is a foreign national) to access assisted reproduction; (c) introduce a child-welfare assessment for prospective parents conducted by an independent third party.

The amendment would not legalize surrogacy, as this was removed from the draft and the Minister of Health and Welfare indicated it would be addressed separately with further public engagement. Because of this, it would not cover male same-sex couples (because surrogacy is required and is not in the draft. It also would not extend eligibility for the single-women provision to foreign nationals (Taiwan household registration is required). As of May 2026, the draft is under Legislative Yuan review and is not yet in force. Taiwanese legislative timelines can range from months to years; this page will be updated as the amendment progresses.

Is Egg Donation Legal in Taiwan?

Yes: In Taiwan, reimbursement for costs associated with gamete donors has been legal since the Assisted Reproduction Act was promulgated and implemented on 21 March 2007 (1, 2).

In order for a clinic to perform assisted reproduction, the couple must be heterosexual, married, and meet the following conditions (Article 11 of the Assisted Reproduction Act) (1): (1) The results of testing and assessment implemented in accordance with Article 7 confirm suitability to receive assisted reproduction. (2) The husband or wife of the married couple has been diagnosed as suffering from infertility, or has been diagnosed as suffering from a major hereditary disease designated by the competent authority, and it is suspected that natural conception and birth will cause abnormal children. (3) At least one member of the married couple possesses healthy reproductive cells, and that person has no need of accepting donated sperm or oocytes.

Written consent is required from the husband or wife in the use of gamete donation prior to treatment; the husband's written consent is required for sperm donation, while the wife's written consent is required for egg donation. The written consent must be notarized by a notary public (1).

All donor gamete recipients must receive approval from the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) of the Ministry of Health and Welfare prior to being approved to receive donor gametes. This process may take up to a month. Foreigners must provide an original marriage certificate and authentication by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) or Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the country that issued the marriage license (12). Note that this can create a challenge for IPs from Mainland China, who do not have access to a TECO/TECRO office.

Availability of Donor Eggs, Sperm, and Embryos in Taiwan

Many IVF clinics in Taiwan have donor egg and sperm programs, either an in-house fresh donation program, or through a frozen egg or sperm bank. Some clinics offer only fresh egg donation cycles, while some offer only frozen; it is best to check with your particular clinic.

All donors will be recruited in Taiwan; the Act prohibits the importation of donated gametes from abroad (13). Below are the criteria established by Article 8 of the Assisted Reproduction Act (1). Note that many clinics have additional criteria or screening processes for donors. For example, some clinics only accept donors between 20 and 34 years of age, while others screen for BMI, height, or other traits (14).

Egg donors must be:

• Women at least 20 and less than 40 years of age.

• The results of testing and assessment confirm the suitability of the donor.

• The donor agrees to donate without compensation.

• The donor has never donated sperm or oocytes before, or the donor's previously donated reproductive cells never helped any recipient couple complete live birth and were not stored.

Intended parents are informed of the donor's ethnicity, skin color and blood type (Article 15 of the Act) (1, 4). Donors and recipients cannot select each other; however, in practice some clinics report attempting phenotypic matching (based on photos) using non-identifying donor traits within the limits of the Act (4).

Sperm donors must be:

• Men at least 20 and less than 50 years of age;

• The results of testing and assessment confirm the suitability of the donor.

• The donor agrees to donate without compensation.

• The donor has never donated sperm or oocytes before, or the donor's previously donated reproductive cells never helped any recipient couple complete live birth and were not stored.

Each donor is limited to donation leading to only one live birth (Article 8 of the Act) (1). Each donation requires approval from the Health Promotion Administration. The IVF clinic should help intended parents arrange for this approval prior to starting treatment.

Egg Donor Reimbursement in Taiwan

The Assisted Reproduction Act does not allow commercialized donation, but does allow for 'nutrition allowances' to both sperm and egg donors. Under current rules, the total amount paid to an egg donor — covering the nutrition allowance plus any reimbursement for medical and transportation expenses — must not exceed NT$99,000 (approximately USD 3,000), and an egg donor is prohibited from making further donations for the rest of her life, once a single live birth has been achieved using her donated eggs (4, 15). If no live birth has resulted from her donated eggs, there is no statutory limit to the number of donation cycles that she can undergo within Taiwan. Brokering or selling gametes for profit is a criminal offense under Article 31 of the Act, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment and/or a fine of NT$200,000 to NT$1 million (1, 15).

Anonymous, Open, and Known Donation in Taiwan

Under the Act, gamete donors are anonymous. Identifying information about the donor cannot be released to the recipient couple. However, Article 15 of the Act requires medical care institutions to disclose the donor's ethnicity, skin color, and blood type to the recipient couple for reference (1, 4). Open donation is not an option.

Donor-conceived individuals (or their legal representatives) may, in accordance with Article 29 of the Act and the Regulations for Inquiring Kinship Information of Concern to the Children Born Through Assisted Reproduction, apply to the Health Promotion Administration before marriage to verify that the intended spouse is not a relative within the prohibited degrees of kinship (1, 16).

So-called 'known' donors, such as friends or family members, are not permitted in Taiwan; the Act prohibits the designation of a specific donor or recipient (Article 13 of the Act) (1).

Import and Export of Gametes and Embryos

Whether reproductive cells and embryos can cross Taiwan's borders depends on three separate questions: who created them, what they are made of, and where they are going. The picture below summarizes the law as written and what appears to happen in practice; intended parents should obtain qualified legal and medical advice before relying on any cross-border plan.

Import of donated gametes into Taiwan

Import of donated gametes is prohibited. Article 16 of the Assisted Reproduction Act lists, among the practices prohibited during assisted reproduction, the "use of donated reproductive cells imported from outside the country." Licensed assisted reproduction institutions in Taiwan must therefore use only domestically sourced donor sperm and eggs, and cannot use foreign donor gametes for treatment performed in Taiwan (1, 13).

Export of a patient's own gametes

Export of a person's own sperm or eggs is, in principle, permitted. The Act does not prohibit the cross-border transport of a patient's own reproductive cells, and several Taiwanese clinics publicly offer assistance with transport of patients' own sperm, eggs, or embryos to fertility centers abroad (24). Single women and same-sex female couples who have frozen their eggs in Taiwan but cannot use them locally have, in practice, exported their gametes to undergo treatment in jurisdictions such as the United States; the same practice has been used by male same-sex couples pursuing surrogacy abroad (18, 25).

Export of embryos created in Taiwan from donor eggs and husband's sperm

This scenario sits in a gray area, and intended parents should treat anything written here as a starting point for legal advice rather than as confirmation that a particular plan is lawful.

As a matter of statutory text, the Assisted Reproduction Act does not contain an explicit prohibition on exporting embryos that were lawfully created in Taiwan. The Act's transfer provisions allow a recipient couple's reproductive cells or embryos to be moved to another assisted reproduction institution for continued preservation with the couple's written consent, and clinics may notify the Health Promotion Administration of "transfer of the donated eggs or embryos created from the donated eggs" along with the reason (1, 26). Several Taiwan-based intermediary services openly market packages in which embryos are created in Taiwan using donor eggs and the intended father's sperm and then shipped to the United States for transfer to a gestational carrier (27). A directory listing of Taiwanese clinics also notes "arrangement of embryo shipping for the married couples wishing to transport their embryos to their country after IVF cycle" as a feature of the market (28).

At the same time, the legal basis for creating such embryos in Taiwan in the first place is narrow. Article 11 of the Act restricts donor-egg IVF to a "recipient couple," defined in Article 2 as a husband and wife in which "the wife's uterus can carry a fetus and give birth to a child" (1, 7). A married couple cannot lawfully access donor-egg IVF in Taiwan if the original plan is for a gestational carrier abroad to carry the pregnancy; doing so would conflict with both the recipient-couple definition and the Act's prohibition of surrogacy. Exporting embryos that were created on the understanding that the wife would carry, but which the couple subsequently decides to send abroad, is a different factual situation that the Act does not squarely address.

Brokering or selling reproductive cells or embryos for profit is a criminal offense under Article 31 of the Act, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment and/or a fine of NT$200,000 to NT$1 million (1, 15). Practical effects of this provision on cross-border embryo transport, especially in arrangements involving foreign surrogacy agencies, have not been definitively tested in Taiwanese courts in publicly reported cases. For intended parents, the safer course is to confirm in writing with the Taiwanese clinic, the receiving foreign clinic, and qualified counsel in both jurisdictions that the proposed export is permissible, and to retain documentation showing that the embryos were created in a procedure that complied with the eligibility rules in Article 11.

Practical logistics and timelines

Exporting gametes or embryos is not a quick administrative step. The sending clinic prepares the paperwork required by the receiving country's health authority (in the United States, FDA donor-eligibility documentation is required for any tissue used in a gestational-carrier transfer), and a specialized cryo-courier arranges shipment in liquid nitrogen. Stork Fertility Center reports that between agency fees and clinic administrative costs, patients should expect to pay roughly an additional NT$50,000 (about USD 1,600) and that a transfer typically takes three to six months to complete (4). For intended parents, this means that any cross-border plan should be coordinated closely with both the sending Taiwanese clinic and the receiving foreign clinic well in advance, with particular attention to whether the donor screening completed in Taiwan satisfies the destination country's requirements.

Surrogacy in Taiwan

Surrogacy is not permitted under the Assisted Reproduction Act. The Act defines a recipient couple as one in which 'the wife's uterus can carry a fetus and give birth to a child' (Article 2), effectively excluding surrogacy arrangements (1, 7).

In December 2025, when the Executive Yuan advanced draft amendments to the Act, surrogacy was removed from the proposed reforms due to ongoing medical, ethical, and political debate; the Minister of Health and Welfare indicated that surrogacy would be handled separately, with further public engagement (9, 10, 11). Until and unless the law is changed, intended parents seeking surrogacy must do so outside Taiwan.

Can LGBTQIA+ Couples Use IVF in Taiwan?

No. Same-sex marriage has been legal in Taiwan since 24 May 2019, making Taiwan the first place in Asia to legalize it (17). However, the Assisted Reproduction Act has not been amended in line with this change. Same-sex couples wishing to undergo IVF or IUI in Taiwan are currently barred from doing so under the existing Act, which applies to nationals and to foreign couples, even with a legal marriage license from a foreign country (3, 18).

The draft amendments approved by the Executive Yuan on 11 December 2025 would, if enacted, allow married female same-sex couples (including marriages where one partner is a foreign national) to access assisted reproduction; male same-sex couples would not be covered, as the proposal does not legalize surrogacy. As of 2026, the draft is now under review by the Legislative Yuan (9, 10, 11).

Can Single Women Use IVF in Taiwan?

No, single women cannot currently undergo IVF with their own or donor eggs in Taiwan. Though single women in Taiwan can freeze their eggs, unlike in China where egg freezing for non-medical reasons is restricted, it is only legal to use the eggs in a heterosexual marriage, which excludes unmarried women (3, 18, 19).

The draft amendments approved by the Cabinet on 11 December 2025 would, if enacted, allow single women aged 18 and older with household registration in Taiwan to access assisted reproductive technologies. The proposal also introduces a child-welfare assessment for prospective parents conducted by an independent third party (9, 10, 11).

Choosing an IVF Clinic in Taiwan

The certifying body for assisted reproduction institutions in Taiwan is the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The HPA publishes a list of licensed assisted reproduction institutions and the National Report of Assisted Reproductive Technology Summary in Taiwan, which includes success rate data by institution (2, 5). Look for clinics that are licensed by the HPA and whose physicians are affiliated with the Taiwan Society for Reproductive Medicine (TSRM) and doctors that are affiliated with the group (20). Check our section on “Choosing an IVF Clinic” for more information.

Average Costs of IVF with Egg or Sperm Donation in Taiwan

Many clinics offer packages with all medical costs, fresh or frozen donor eggs, and a transfer for around USD 18,000 to USD 28,000, depending on the clinic and the specific treatment plan. A standard (non-donor) IVF cycle at major clinics is generally lower, in the range of USD 6,500 to USD 10,500 (21, 22).

Taiwanese citizens and couples in which at least one spouse is a Taiwanese national may be eligible for the government's IVF Subsidy Program. Under the IVF Subsidy 3.0 program effective from 1 November 2025, women under 39 may receive up to NT$150,000 (approximately USD 4,800) for a first treatment, and women aged 39 to under 45 may receive up to NT$130,000 (6, 23). Foreign intended parents are not eligible for this subsidy.