by Laura Dodsworth, The Free Mind
Renowned feminist and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently disclosed that her twin boys were carried and birthed by a surrogate mother. Speculation has run rife. Some suggest fertility challenges, given she was 47 at the time of their birth. Others point to her career. In a March 2025 BBC interview, she described how pregnancy with her first child in 2016 caused a ‘terrifying’ writer’s block. Perhaps she wanted to avoid the physical and emotional toll she had previously endured. We don’t know. But her decision raises an uncomfortable question: what has happened to motherhood?
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Mothers are vanishing. Not literally, of course — there will always be women bearing and raising children. (Unless the grotesque techno fantasies about artificial wombs come to pass.) But there are ways in which role of the mother is being eroded in law, in language, in medicine, and in culture, with the rise of surrogacy and artificial reproductive technologies alongside gender ideology and the systematic downgrading of what it means to be a mother.
In the UK, legal reforms are being proposed to make it easier for ‘intended parents’ to take immediate custody of a baby after birth, stripping the woman who carried and delivered the child of any maternal rights. Meanwhile, in the US, the industry is thriving, fuelled by billionaires and celebrities who bypass pregnancy in favour of paid gestation. Khloe Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and Chrissy Teigen have all used surrogates, gushing about their babies on Instagram with little acknowledgement of the women who carried them.
Even the word ‘surrogate’ is problematic. A woman, a mother, is reduced to a thing — a function, a vessel, a service to be paid for. It is objectifying language, stripping her of her identity and her relationship to the child she has carried. She is not a surrogate — she is a mother. Yet the language of the surrogacy industry deliberately dehumanises her, making it easier to disregard her experience and her loss.