Broken Bonds: Surrogate Mothers Speak Out

First published by Spinifex Press, 2019

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[Surrogacy] is not only a desire to raise a child, but also a demand that the mother be absent …

—Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought

For love is not to be bought, in any sense of the words …

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Contents

Introduction

Signing the Paper in Blood

Cathy (Canada)

Cathy agrees to be a surrogate for a gay couple – and almost loses her life after giving birth to three premature babies.

The Biggest Mistake of My Life

Oxana (Georgia)

As told to Eva Maria Bachinger

Oxana thinks that surrogacy will give her a chance to earn money, but then faces the devastation of surrendering a daughter with whom she has established a close bond.

Anonymous No More: How I Was Groomed to Be a Multiple Egg Donor

Maggie (USA)

As a naïve 21-year-old, Maggie was an easy target for a ruthless egg donor recruiter, unaware of the health risks entailed. She is now paying for the consequences of years of donation, facing terminal breast cancer.

Once They Found out I Didn’t Have the Perfect Baby, I Was Disposable

Britni (USA)

After four children of her own, Britni becomes a surrogate to help a couple, but when the twins that result are found to have abnormalities, she is pressured to abort and left to fend for herself as she faces psychological and physical trauma.

No Right to Know

Natascha (Russia)

As told to Eva Maria Bachinger

Natascha bought a car with the money earned from surrogacy but cannot say how much she earned. She had no say in who the parents of the baby would be, no control over contact with the child, and no idea what has happened to the eggs she donated.

Bitter Family Ties: Will I Ever See My Son Again?

Odette (Australia)

Odette acts as a surrogate for her cousin but the agreement goes wrong almost from the start and ends in a protracted painful battle.

When My Surrogacy Became My Nightmare

Denise (USA)

Surrogacy for a Chinese couple goes wrong when twins are born and one turns out to be not Chinese, but the genetic child of the surrogate mother and her partner.

I Am an Incubator

Natalia (Russia)

As told to Eva Maria Bachinger

Natalia relocates to Moscow to be a surrogate for a wealthy Russian couple, and wants it all to be over as soon as possible to resume her own life – with some much-needed money.

Exploited, Lied to, Financially Ruined and Devastated

Kelly (USA)

Kelly undergoes surrogacy three times for two couples overseas and one in the USA – and ends up almost dying in childbirth and with PTSD as a result.

Surrogacy Broke up Our Family

Rob (Australia)

Partner of a surrogate

Rob tells the story of his partner Bev’s devastating ‘altruistic’ surrogacy for a friend that turned their lives into a nightmare.

My Heart Is Hurting

Ujwala, Dimpy and Sarala (India)

As told by Sheela Saravanan

Ethnographer Sheela Saravanan tells the heartbreaking stories of three poverty-stricken Indian women. They needed the money but didn’t know surrogacy would hurt them so much.

Messing with My Body, Messing with My Mind

Marie Anne (UK)

Marie Anne wants to help her cousin have a baby, but not only does surrogacy destroy their relationship, it results in Marie Anne losing her career, and her own children too, because her mental health is destroyed by the process.

Surrogacy Is Business

Elena (Romania)

As told to Eva Maria Bachinger

For Elena, surrogacy is a chance to put food on the table and eke out a living.

Left Alone with Exploding Breasts and an Exploding Heart

Michelle (USA)

It is only after being a surrogate three times that Michelle realises that striving for money and self-fulfillment through surrogacy is a delusion.

A ‘Selfless’ Donor

Viktoria (Hungary)

Viktoria has donated over 70 eggs, and knows little of the result, besides that two girls have been born. This knowledge brings her a mixture of joy and despair, coupled with the health problems she is now facing as a result of her donations.

When Good Intentions Were Met with Racism and Hate

Toni (USA)

When Toni, a black American woman, acts as a surrogate for a white couple, she realizes, too late, that the child she is carrying will be growing up in a house full of hate.

Afterword

Acknowledgements

References

Introduction

The Erased Women

In the 21st century, reproductive marketplaces are expanding globally. Renewed debate has taken place about the commercialisation and regulation of the baby-making industry. The public conversation has been captured by those with vested interests; doctors, IVF clinics, lawyers, counsellors and pro-surrogacy advocacy groups all want a piece of the lucrative pie.

But what happens to the voices of the other people involved; the so-called ‘surrogate’ mother, the egg ‘donor’, and the child that is grown in the birth mother’s body from her own flesh and blood only to become a take-away baby and given to strangers who from now on are considered her or his parents?

‘Surrogate’ mothers¹ – without whom there would be no baby – are described as altruistic loving women who help to ‘build’ a family for desperate couples. To distance them from their child, they are reduced to ‘carriers,’ ‘ovens,’ and ‘suitcases’. To make this heartless exploitation more palatable, surrogacy is promoted as a way for poor women to earn good money and support their families. Time magazine labelled pregnancy one of the ‘10 Best Chores to Outsource’ (Lee-St John 2007). India’s baby factories were a big win for everyone involved, enthused Forbes Magazine. You’d rent a nanny or a house painter. Why not rent a uterus? the editorial asked (Smith 2013).

In Broken Bonds: Surrogate Mothers Speak Out, we challenge this dominant narrative around surrogacy and egg ‘donation’ and look behind the glitzy advertising and spin of third-party fertility brokers profiteering from the marketing of pregnancy and birth. We do this in the most compelling way possible – by bringing together the accounts of women – and one man who is the partner of a so-called surrogate mother – whose accounts disrupt the happy surrogacy stories.

These raw accounts expose the pro-surrogacy propaganda. They reveal the cruel disregard for the birth mother, the treatment of the child as a made-to-order commodity which has to be perfect or it will be rejected. The women’s words invite us to also consider broader ramifications such as the mass factory farming of women (one surrogacy site identifies them by numbered code ²) for their hair, breast milk, orifices and now wombs (Bindel 2016).

Broken Bonds asks us to consider surrogacy’s problematic role in the dissection and eradication of biological motherhood. Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Swedish journalist, writer and activist, in Being and Being Bought (2013, p. 151) explains how a woman, once she has performed her ‘service’, must thereafter be absent.

People who seek a surrogate have a very specific desire. It is not enough for them to get to know a child or to help to raise a child who is already alive … No, it has to be their own genetic offspring, a newborn baby of whom the buyer has sole custody. This is always concealed in discussions about surrogacy – that it is not only a desire to raise a child, but also a demand that the mother be absent.

Surrogacy agencies and clinics love to display photographs of couples with babies born of surrogacy. Invariably, everybody is beaming with happiness so that we should all feel delighted for them too; after all, a new baby is cause for celebration.

But in reality, these photos hide more than they reveal. Missing is the woman who carried and gave birth to the baby, the egg ‘donor’ who contributed half her genes, and perhaps even the sperm ‘donor’. In addition, each individual involved in surrogacy is a member of family groups. They carry their own history, their kin and place, their memories and their secret hopes.

The aspiring parents may indeed have been on a difficult journey: multiple IVF failures with its physical and psychological suffering for the women.³ Was it the nice surrogacy stories in glossy magazines that convinced them to continue their harrowing journeys of becoming parents? Had life without their ‘own’ children really become an impossibility to face?

We wonder how the beaming woman in the photo, holding the baby, arrived at the decision that another woman should grow and hand over a child for her. And still more perplexing is the question of what the commissioning male (or the two intending ‘fathers’) know of the profundity of pregnancy and birth. How do men expect a woman to give up a baby she grew in her own body?

I will pretend to the commissioning couple that I am so pleased I can make a baby for them. I will say that I love being pregnant and I really want to help. They will never know what I really feel … (Elena) ⁴

As for the baby, who can know what she has heard, felt, tasted and smelled before being given away to these new people? Despite her circumstances, she wants the breast milk and the warm skin of her mother, like all babies do. Will anybody tell her how she was made and transferred at birth, and at what cost?

Relinquishing the baby soon after birth is the absolute worst … I think the parents thought they were doing themselves a favor by not allowing me to hold her and comfort her … People who engage in surrogacy are usually well-educated who know that the baby sees, hears, and smells its environment before she or he is born. And yet they are so willing to snatch it right away from its mother, give it another designation … Babies aren’t blank slates. (Michelle)

The ‘surrogate’ mother is usually not pictured in these family photos. The whole point is that she is not meant to be part of the new family. What was it that motivated her to undergo painful hormonal injections, the embryo transfer, the morning sickness, then to spend those nine months creating a baby in her body, only to give it away?

My first surrogacy journey should have been a huge red flag to me. But I didn’t learn. I love being pregnant, I love excitement, I love people fussing over baby bellies and I love happy endings, you know … I remain incredibly unwell and I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two international couples have exploited me, lied to me, and have caused my family and me so much suffering. And all because I wanted to help them having a child in their lives. (Kelly)

We wonder what she was told, and by whom, about the surrogacy journey she would begin. Had she been informed that surrogacy is riskier to both herself and the baby than her own naturally conceived pregnancies? Babies born from surrogacy have higher rates of preterm birth and low birth weight, and ‘surrogate’ mothers have more obstetrical complications including gestational diabetes, hypertension and placenta previa. They often require antibiotics during the almost always obligatory caesarean section (Woo, Hindoyan, Landay et al. 2017).

When she signed the contract, who guided her through its contents, explaining the procedures and risks? How many tests, injections, hormonal drugs, scans, miscarriages, terminations, and procedures did she endure for this baby to grow in her womb? How did she feel about the developing baby and about the time when they would part? Did she heed the clinic’s advice that this was not her child and had nothing to do with her? Did this requested separation of mind and body – in other words, dissociation – leave her feeling empty? Will she ever forget? The women in this book answer these questions and their answers are heart-breaking.

The pain never goes away. I am still an emotional basket case and struggle every day with this … When I signed