Everyone Has Their View on Surrogacy. Few Actually Understand It.
When Lily Collins announced her child had been born via surrogate, the judgments and criticisms were swift and brutal. Many were just plain wrong.
How did something so joyful quickly become something so sour?
Late last month, Lily Collins, the star of the Netflix series, “Emily in Paris,” endured a brutal backlash after she announced the birth of her daughter, Tove, on social media and—naively, perhaps (though really was it anyone’s business?)—added that “words will never express our endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate.”
The reaction was swift and brutal. “Money normalizes cruelty,” wrote one commenter. “Could have adopted,” added another. “So you just bought yourself a baby?” asked another.
Collins’ husband, the director Charlie McDowell, hit back in the comments. “It’s OK to not be an expert on surrogacy,” he wrote. “It’s OK to not know why someone might need a surrogate to have a child. It’s OK to not know the motivations of a surrogate regardless of what you assume. And it’s ok to spend less time spewing hateful words into the world, especially in regards to a beautiful baby girl who has brought a lot of love into people’s lives."
Right.
Surrogacy is steeped in misinformation. But the reality is that while surrogacy—like all forms of reproduction—can be misused, for countless parents of children born to gestational carriers, it’s a route to parenthood that feels nothing short of miraculous. At least, that is what I have found in my reporting. And for most, like Collins, the well of gratitude to the person who carried those children is deep. In one study, 10 years after the birth, 85% of biological mothers had stayed in contact with the women who carried their children.
Gestational carriers—never “surrogate mothers”—are generally not the victims they’re made out to be by media commentators. To take a recent example, the columnist Martha Gill, wrote in The Observer that “for the vast majority [of gestational carriers], the driving force is unquestionably the need for money.”
It’s a common argument, but the data, at least out of the U.S. and the U.K., suggest otherwise. An analysis published in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine last year showed that gestational carriers in the U.S. “have medium to high education” and “above-average income.” The study found that “altruism and empathy are the primary motivations for participating in surrogacy processes.”
In a U.K. study published in 2022, “less than a quarter of our respondents reported income below the national average.” In other countries where foreign surrogacy is common, like Ukraine, parts of South America and countries in Africa like Ghana, the motivations are less clear-cut.
We can’t possibly know what reasons led Collins and her husband to use a gestational carrier—but even if we did, so what? What business is it of ours?
There is no requirement to explain one’s choice, though other actors have been more outspoken about their decisions to do the same. Lucy Liu has said: “It just seemed like the right option for me because I was working and I didn’t know when I was going to be able to stop.”
Other celebrities have chosen to use gestational carriers because of age (Naomi Campbell was 53 when her second child was born, two years after she had her first).
And there might be a multitude of other reasons: People taking medications that they can’t go off of, for example, or people wanting to become moms post-hysterectomy after cancer. It’s life-changing.
I interviewed one woman who had to use a gestational carrier because her previous pregnancy had ended in termination because her baby wasn’t going to survive. The procedure damaged her uterus so badly, she couldn’t carry a child.
But there is one thing that is unequivocal: Surrogacy is expensive. In the U.S. it costs up to $170,000; in the U.K., altruistic surrogacy rules mean gestational carriers can only be compensated for their expenses which can be up to £80,000.
So yes, most of the people who have the option of surrogacy are rich. But between the lines there are judgments too many to count: She’s entitled, unmotherly, un-feminine, selfish, going against the so-called “natural order of the things.”
Let’s not delude ourselves, of course, surrogacy can be misused. In some countries, where it is significantly cheaper, there is a risk of vulnerable women being pressured into it. India, Thailand and Nepal have all banned foreign surrogacy because of worries around human trafficking (though Thailand is now looking into reinstating it).
In Ukraine, which before the war held a quarter of the global surrogacy market, gestational carriers complained of abuse. Even in the heavily-regulated U.S., the system can be manipulated. Last year Bloomberg reported on the case of an American billionaire who is alleged to have conned women into donating eggs and carrying his children, before taking them from their mothers. Concerns over these practices are valid, and demonstrate why careful regulation of surrogacy is critically important.
But the same can be said for any reproductive technology: egg donation, IVF, the developing science of exogenesis—gestating fetuses outside of the womb. They all have the potential to be used in nefarious ways. Reproduction is messy and complicated—more often deadly than it should be. Lest we forget, every day 800 women around the world die in childbirth.
The voices missing in most discussions around gestational carriers are the gestational carriers themselves. But in my work running Big Fat Negative, a podcast about IVF and infertility, I’ve interviewed many carriers. One emotion that often emerges in the course of our conversations is joy: Joy, at being able to give people—heterosexual couples, gay couples, single people, women and men alike—the very thing for which they have longed.
“There’s such a need for it,” Ariel Taylor, a Toronto-based gestational carrier, told me last year. “It is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”
Josie Cox
Ginanne Brownell
Emma Haslett
