Surrogacy is a huge business – and an exploitative one
Feb 4, 2025 by Jill
by Suzanne Moore, Telegraph:
The practice has become a global phenomenon, estimated to be worth almost £14.5 billion – with the mothers its waste product.
Here is some astonishing celebrity news. A beautiful actress has just handed over a gorgeous baby boy to her Mexican housekeeper. The star felt much sympathy for the woman because she was having difficulty conceiving, so offered to become her “gestational carrier”. The embryo from her housekeeper’s eggs was implanted into her body. “It felt like the right thing to do,” said the Oscar-nominated actress. As to the question of how much contact she will have with the child she carried, she declared it a private matter.
Obviously, this is a fantasy, because there is a general understanding that no woman in her right mind would go through pregnancy to give a child away unless there were some reward for doing so. There are exceptions to this surrogacy rule – where sisters carry a child to term for one another, for example – but such cases are rare.
In this country, commercial surrogacy is, thankfully, illegal. It’s still a muddle, however, because what is allowed are “altruistic” arrangements in which the surrogate can receive expenses, and there is no limit on what those may be.
What is clear, though, is that surrogacy more widely is becoming increasingly normalised through the celebrity circuit, with the actress Lily Collins, 35, and her husband, the film director Charlie McDowell, the latest to welcome a child this way.
We all know that infertility is painful, and speculation around Collins’s history of eating disorders meaning she could not conceive naturally is rife.
[…] We understand that newborns need skin-to-skin contact. It is awe-inspiring to see a tiny new creature make its way up to the breast. The body of the mother is what the baby knows before anything else, and many renowned psychotherapists and child development experts describe the first few weeks of an infant’s life as the fourth trimester.
This does not happen in surrogacy. We actually give dogs and cats more time with their offspring before we take them away. Well, say defenders of this practice, adult women make this choice, contracts are made and none of this should be anyone else’s concern. The truth, though, is that surrogacy is a huge business – and an exploitative one. Globally it is estimated to be worth almost $18 billion (£14.5 billion), according to research firm Global Market Insights, and is predicted to rise to $129 billion by 2032.
Between 5,000 to 20,000 babies are thought to be incubated to order annually. In some instances, they come from the most desperate of places and circumstances.
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Here is some astonishing celebrity news. A beautiful actress has just handed over a gorgeous baby boy to her Mexican housekeeper. The star felt much sympathy for the woman because she was having difficulty conceiving, so offered to become her “gestational carrier”. The embryo from her housekeeper’s eggs was implanted into her body. “It felt like the right thing to do,” said the Oscar-nominated actress. As to the question of how much contact she will have with the child she carried, she declared it a private matter.
Obviously, this is a fantasy, because there is a general understanding that no woman in her right mind would go through pregnancy to give a child away unless there were some reward for doing so. There are exceptions to this surrogacy rule – where sisters carry a child to term for one another, for example – but such cases are rare.
In this country, commercial surrogacy is, thankfully, illegal. It’s still a muddle, however, because what is allowed are “altruistic” arrangements in which the surrogate can receive expenses, and there is no limit on what those may be.
What is clear, though, is that surrogacy more widely is becoming increasingly normalised through the celebrity circuit, with the actress Lily Collins, 35, and her husband, the film director Charlie McDowell, the latest to welcome a child this way.
We all know that infertility is painful, and speculation around Collins’s history of eating disorders meaning she could not conceive naturally is rife.