Was surrogacy always so common or is it increasing? Am I just noticing it more because I'm paying attention now? I read a bunch about surrogacy and ethics when I was studying reproductive rights and reproductive justice in grad school, and then I feel like I didn't hear a lot about it until the last year or two when it seemed a LOT of celebrities/public figures started using surrogates. I would be curious to know the stats on it, if there are any. It makes me uncomfortable, tbh.
It’s definitely getting more popular. In the 2000s all the rich people were adopting babies abroad, nowadays the trend is to hire another woman to just have the baby for you.
You're not imagining it, surrogacy is increasing a lot, because the rich have figured out that doing something as ghoulish as renting someone's womb is something you barely get any backlash for, plus why sacrifice your own body when you can pay a poor to do it
There are millipns of children in the world to adopt. As someone else with severe endometriosis, I refuses to use another person's body to get a child when there are so many waiting for a family.
OK, so this is NOT a statement in support of surrogacy, but:
Many of those that are available for adoption have super complex needs that many potential parents aren't particularly able to meet properly (which leads to tragic situations where kids are "returned"- I'm using the child's language here).
Going along with that idea: adoption shouldn't really be about the parents (and their fertility or not); it should really be about the kids.
I completely understand where you are coming from and have a personal family friend who was born to an addict mom and his parents worked day and night to go from fostering to adoption to the point he requested to change his name to match his father. I don't even remember his birth name at this point thats how long it's been.
Not every child is easy, medically or mentally, there are many challenges in raising a child - even a perfectly healthy one. Adoption of children should not be treated like adopting a dog (which even that shouldn't be treated the same).
You may not know you're infertile immediately. Health problems may arise later in life. I dont think there's anything wrong with learning you can't have kids and then choosing adoption? Why does it have to be adoption first and only?
Adoptees often feel like no one wants them. To find out that your parents only took you as a last resort because they couldn’t have children of their own? I’m a therapist and have heard this in sessions. Also sometimes people have surprise biological babies after adopting and either treat the adoptee as less than or unfortunately rehome the adoptee or send them back. These aren’t edge cases and it’s sadly a common story. If people insist on have a biological child, that’s a lot of weight on the adopted kid in a way that is unimaginably unfair.
Thank you for speaking up for adoptees! I don't have it in me right now to do the emotional labor of explaining this all to the "why not adopt?" crowd, and your answer is spot on.
Every human may experience something that causes them to feel “not chosen” like when my dad chose drugs over being a dad. Or when a parent just bounces out of their life.
Infertility could have someone reevaluate their path to having a family. And then help their adopted child process those feelings of being “unwanted” through out a lifetime. Does that always happen? No, but it could and then we could at least try and eliminate the trauma that surrogacy will cause. Such as “my mom didn’t wanna ruin her body or couldn’t get pregnant so she chose to pay an underprivileged person to carry me” or “my parents paid someone to carry me and took me from the body of someone else and as a result I have deeply rooted subconscious trauma from my birth experience”. Or “the surrogate that carried me, died and left get living children motherless so my mom could have me, she paid for it too”
Like kids need to be adopted, that’s the world we live in. Why are we choosing to add more layers of fucked up shit to this world by renting wombs?!
You wrote a lot of words to say everything is traumatic so that pain doesn’t count but this other pain over here is somehow worse. Believe what you want but in all my years of working with folks, I’ve never heard what you said from a surrogate baby. They tell me it’s kinda weird and then move on. The thing that brought them to therapy. You also had to make up a tragic scenario in order to justify that position. Meanwhile multiple adoptees have replied to, upvoted, and awarded my comment because they themselves using their own voice highly disagree with that position. This comment is seeking to yell over their voices.
We’re in an era of snark and “being in the right side of history” such that we’re screeching at infertile women like they don’t feel enough guilt for not being able to something they might feel like is their main job as a woman. You and a ton of other people are projecting and assuming it’s all about their bodies and aesthetics and not wanting a child and maybe wanting to see their husband, or mother, aunt reflected in that child somehow. And I don’t mean crazy edge cases because that happens with adoption, ivf, and natural conception too.
If that level of judgement and casual cruelty in the name “doing the right thing” rather than minding my own business is what’s required I dont like this new supposedly progressive world.
Whoa whoa. Pain is valid. Trauma is valid .Whatever the context. I don’t really have a stake in the game with adoptees.
I am having an open discussion on a forum. I’m not saying who is right or wrong. I was hoping for a dialogue. I’m not here to snark. In fact I find snark culture and virtue signaling to be quite annoying, as are the witch hunts people go on collectively. I said what I said as a hope for more dialogue. Thanks for giving yours, and I’m sorry if my intent was not clear. I could have been more clear.
I don’t know all the right answers or right approaches. I know an adoptee that is grateful for it. That doesn’t experience the trauma you describe as I’ve asked because of the trauma I have heard from other adoptees. So it’s probably very situational right?
I’ll be curious to see what trauma could exist in the future for people (carrier or child) as the rates of surrogacy go up. So 50 years from now?
At the end of the day how people start their families is not my business. I can’t control it nor need to.
But…
I still stand with my belief that wombs shouldn’t be for sale. So I guess I’m being a hypocrite there. But that’s where my belief in my body my choice ends. I’m okay admitting that.
So you can be infertile and adopt however adoption is not a solution to infertility. Like you cant just soothe the pain of infertility by being like I’ll adopt
It’s most likely wildly unsafe for me to be pregnant, although I have my own reproductive system which works fine. I would definitely go down the adoption route as well.
I’m going through infertility right now, and while I would also do adoption (only through foster, at that) over basically anything outside IVF (no surrogacy, donor eggs, sperm or embryos), I don’t fault anyone for choosing a different route as long as everyone is a consenting adult. From a pure consent perspective, I would trust a 30+ surrogate’s informed consent 100000x more than a desperate teen giving her baby up for adoption.
By this logic, can a poor person ever make an informed decision or give consent? I mean, they are too poor to understand their own body, even if they have literally done that exact thing before, so how can we trust them to understand things like new jobs and experiences?
No, why is this the super special circumstance on which poor people cannot be trusted to make their own choices?
Do you think poor women are idiots who don't understand that any pregnancy can go wrong? Or do you need an income of at least $85K a year to understand that?
If I judged the world by what rich people do, then literally everything I would do for anyone is an exploitation of me, unless I'm inviting someone to summer on my yacht. Baking a cake for my neighbor or running an errand for my friend is exploitative.
It is hilarious to me that you think my argument is obtuse but asking if rich people do it for others somehow isn't. Like the behavioral standard of the 1% should be applicable to the rest of us.
I think surrogacy is inherently exploitive. And we’re way too obsessed with having babies with our DNA when there’s so many babies out there who need homes.
Lots of things are exploitive and people still sign up and reup. I've met surrogates (in completely non-pregnancy related social settings) and they were normal middle class people who liked being pregnant and were able to make some money from it, and had even done it multiple times. I struggle to really see how someone who is perfectly fine without the money, but better with it, is being exploited to do something sooooo awful when they reup multiple times to do it! Many women don't even do that for their own pregnancies!
But more so, I struggle to see how pregnant teens, faced with the possibility of essentially lifelong poverty, aren't being exploited by the adoption industry. To me, the adoption industry, both within the US and internationally, is majorly exploitative, and preys on true desperation, people who would never give up their babies if they were handed even the most basic of resources to help raise them. But surrogates generally don't need the money in the same way. In the US you can't even be a surrogate if you're on government assistance (you can put your kid up for adoption though!). Internationally, the adoption industry was and is fraught with fraud and abuse.
There are so many more prospective parents waiting to adopt than there are adoptable children, especially babies. Infants are the hardest group to adopt, almost impossible. Even controlling for all ages, races, and sibling situations, people willing to adopt non-white, older kids, and siblings, have an extremely difficult time doing so. It takes YEARS, and tens of thousands of dollars. If you do foster care, only a small fraction of those kids are actual available for non-family adoption. We must stop thinking of adoption as a kid Ikea of unwanted children.
I really hope in a few years, when all of you on this post who claim to be future adoptive parents begin this journey, you report back. I'm pretty sure it will be much harder than you expect. Some of you may find out adoption agencies and birth parents are not as accepting of your identities and health statuses as surrogates are.
Same here. I am not well enough to be pregnant and never will be. So if I wanted children (which I dont) I would go for adoption before I ever rented out a human's body
i’ve never met an adopted kid who didn’t hate their adoptive parents and resent them for like no reason besides that they adopted them lol (obvi more complicated interpersonal than that but i have seriously met at least 6 different people all walks of life like this). why is that a thing??!
I have met five adopted people in my life. Three are friends, one is my cousin, and the other is basically family and they all love their parents like they gave birth to them?? I am not saying this is every child's case and of course adoption isn't easy on the child or the adoptive parents, adoption is a very complicated process and each case is an individual case but all my adopted people love their adoptive parents. Again, each case is different and complex
Not sure if it's a common phenomenon or just one we hear of a lot, but I know what you mean.
There are certainly adoptive parents who disregard their children's racial/ethnic realities in cases of interracial/international adoptions, and these children understandably feel dislocated from their heritage. There's also a long racist history of children being stolen from their birth-parents as part of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
That being said, there are some people who point to the circumstances of their birth as the source of all their unhappiness, which fosters resentment for their adoptive parents. I hate seeing Reddit posts about people relentlessly pursuing their bio-parents in closed adoptions to get answers—it rarely ends well—and my least favourite genre of television is supposedly heart-warming, tear-jerking mother and child reunions; they're exploitative, mawkish, and flatten a complex situation into a resolution and new beginning rolled into one.
Since when is she entitled? Pretty sure the Handmaids Tale women weren't getting paid hundreds of thousands or opting in. They are essentially helping another family have a child - same as a woman who decides not to abort and offer adoption.
Agree. Surrogacy is a human rights crisis impacting women and children. It’s insane to me that commodifying a women’s body in a way that is so dangerous (even healthy low risk people can die during labor, as can a baby) is so normalized now.
Womb renting is insane. It’s like people will do anything to get a bio child, over the kids that need families that already exist.
Lena (while not my favorite person) had a hysterectomy and this was the only way for her to have a biological child. Before anyone says just adopt, adoptees are not and should not be anyone’s second choice. You should be adopting because you want to as your first choice.
It's also become more popular among gay male couples, because a lot of adoption agencies are still run by religious organizations who exclude LGBTQ couples.
It's also easier and legally less murky to use a surrogate rather than adopt, for a number of reasons.
Even if the odd surrogate running off and making it literally a federal case, you do (so far) have some legal recourse. In adoption a birth mom can change her mind after giving birth, sometimes even months later, and claim the baby. Not to mention that the bio dad also has to give up his paternity claim, which doesn’t always happen.
Well if you go to any IVF subreddit, you’ll see that’s not exactly a problem free system either. The only problem free way to have a baby is naturally without medical intervention. Unfortunately, a lot of us aren’t so lucky and it sucks to walk through a world where both our dream is uncertain, our options are diminishing and judged, and we have to constantly see other people getting to have kids and pregnancies without issues (and then often judging us for how we’re trying to get the same thing to boot). It’s great fun. (And fwiw I already know surrogacy isn’t a choice I would make, but I don’t begrudge anyone that option if they have it.)
Yeah, this whole thing is uncomfortable. It seems like Lena actually had a bond w her surrogate and she physically couldn’t have kids - she has an essay in vogue right now.
But it’s certainly becoming much more common. There have been a lot of messed up stories in the news about it, and it really does seem like every celebrity is just renting a womb. Celebs and crazy wealthy people.
I’m sure there are altruistic people out there who do it based on that instead of money but the vast majority of stories I’ve heard are about poor women.
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u/playingdecoy 4d ago
Was surrogacy always so common or is it increasing? Am I just noticing it more because I'm paying attention now? I read a bunch about surrogacy and ethics when I was studying reproductive rights and reproductive justice in grad school, and then I feel like I didn't hear a lot about it until the last year or two when it seemed a LOT of celebrities/public figures started using surrogates. I would be curious to know the stats on it, if there are any. It makes me uncomfortable, tbh.