I met my brother on my sister’s wedding day in 2021, the first time I met her too. The next time I saw him was this summer as we watched his cold body get lowered precariously into the ground on a steep hillside in Oklahoma. It was the kind of hot day where nothing you do will stop you from sweating. As a group of men, including another brother of mine, struggled with his casket over the recently dug hole, I heard his wife morbidly joke, “haven’t you all done this before?”. I stood next to my late brother’s estranged oldest daughter, my technical niece I am trying to know, and my sister being comforted by her husband. The anger was palpable from his daughter he left behind and the sorrow overflowing from our sister–I was somewhere in between. Angry and terribly sad that I hardly knew him. It didn’t need to be this way yet this is what the fertility world carefully created and designed. I was not supposed to know him or any of them. I was not supposed to want to. 

During the makeshift ceremony, his dad’s girlfriend read aloud the names of the family he left behind. I never expected to hear my own name spoken in front of those who knew him. My name painfully vibrated in my body after she read it aloud and announced me as his sister. It was the first time that had been publicly acknowledged and I had no room left in my soul to feel the grief of that fact. My birth mom was sitting in the front row of simple black folding chairs and immediately tried to find me in the small crowd when she realized I was near. We locked eyes as I began to sob and she nodded, both of us taking in the small comfort of seeing the other there. 

I didn’t recognize my birthmom when I quickly walked up the big hill late to the ceremony after driving a little too fast across the bumpy, grassy field in a two wheel drive rental car. I hate being late but my niece runs on her own schedule and it was her dad we were burying afterall. Dead dad trumps dead brother in my book, especially when we both didn’t have a good sense of who he was. I waited outside her hotel watching the minutes pass and wondering if she’d appear at all. We nervously made jokes about trying to hide our collective queerness as we asked a group of white men, including a sheriff, where to go when we arrived at the family home. We stood out and it wasn’t just because we were late.

“Mom cuts her hair off every summer,” my sister matter of factly informed me, saying “mom” so normally that I almost felt like it was for a brief moment. I never knew that and it explained why I didn’t immediately spot her in the crowd. I never spent enough time with my birth mom to know how she handles seasons, fighting instead just to get snapshots of her over the last decade of trying to connect. How did I not know that? Every interaction felt soaked in grief.

Later at the church during the more formal community gathering, I watched a slideshow of images I’d never seen from my dead brother’s life surrounded by people I mostly didn’t know but who knew and loved him. At the very end, a voicemail from him played and I rapidly slipped down even deeper into grief. In any other context, I wouldn’t have known it was his everyday voice leaving a quick message. I listened to family members I hardly know speak of him and noticed those who couldn’t bear to share a word. 

“You were robbed of knowing him,” my sister in law told me when we talked on the phone for the very first time mere days after he suddenly died. She somehow got that I should have when my own parents who raised me struggled to see the connection. A few days before the funeral, my parents called to check in on me and asked, “Do you have to go?”. I always feared my birth mom, my biological mother, dying before I could know her but I never thought once about losing a sibling. Now, I only can attempt to know him through the stories of others, an incredibly inadequate replacement. I’ll never know our dynamic, if we’d have been close or estranged. There is so much I’ve had to fight to know about my own roots, my own self.

In my early 20s after a break up and a wild time living in San Francisco, I was left in the privileged position of a remote job, money to spare, and few belongings to my name. I began nomading six months before the break up, a sign then that I was longing to chart a new path away from a cheating and lying partner who demanded I move to a city that didn’t fit me. The sudden drop off of being in love and feeling seemingly safe with another in a way I hadn’t experienced before left me reeling. Afterwards, my life began to blur as I traveled from location to location, sometimes not talking for days on end and sometimes in a state of marathon socializing. I binged meditation sessions like some might with a Netflix show to try to fall asleep and stay asleep yet still I woke around 4-5 am each day in a pure panic. Sharp suicidal thoughts promptly took over and I felt lucky that this wasn’t my first bout of facing them. In my free fall, I forced myself to find something to grip onto. 

With a small blade that I had previously used as a young teenager to self harm against my wrist, I demanded of myself: either be done or be here. I chose to be here and from that choice I examined what would keep me here. My curiosity is a strong force in my life and the moment the blade touched my skin, I felt the tug of wondering about my birth mom. I didn’t yet understand how deep my abandonment trauma ran from being born through traditional surrogacy and how that was resurfacing so strongly in the aftermath of a breakup but I could feel how deep my desire to know her was. It became my remaining curiosity about life. I’d ask myself over and over what I would regret if I were to leave this world and the deep resounding answer was trying to know her. 

I was born in 1993 in Panorama City, California. Within less than 24 hours of being born, I was on a plane hurtling towards Florida. My parents tell the story of my brother, who was two years older than me and fully related to the parents who raised me, saying excitedly “Go get Anne!” on the way over. “Parents who raised me” is a fun phrase I repeat over and over throughout my life to try to draw the lines between my identity. I’d take that line over the detailed explanation of my dad’s sperm flying across the country to my birth mom. My parents joked about calling me “Delta Dash” after the mail service they had to use. 

After I was born, the hospital put me in the photocopier room next to the nurses’ station as a way to separate me out from the other kids who presumably all had more normal births and parents waiting for them. My dad stayed in the room most of the night singing to me. My birth mom left very quickly after my birth and, the following day, when it came time for me to leave the hospital, a bureaucratic nightmare ensued–where is the mother? I’d spend my life asking that same question. By hospital protocol, they needed my birth mom to wheel me out. As my dad tells the story, he offered that he could as the biological father. In the wheelchair he went with me in his arms as a large orderly pushed him to the entrance. I was born a week late but an induced labor ensured the flight wasn’t missed. 

Being born in California seems like a simple and explainable detail: It’s where my birth mom lived. In truth, it was one of only a few states that was favorable to surrogacy agreements with many more banning or restricting surrogacy at the time. More commonly, no laws existed directly addressing surrogacy and its legality as it was so new on the fertility industry’s scene. I have tried calling and asking repeatedly, including involving my parents, around which number baby I was that the surrogacy agency helped facilitate the creation of. They hung up on me the first time, were rude to me the second time, and didn’t truly help my mom when she called. All of it is both a likely reflection of how poor the record keeping was in the early days and how much they don’t think about the children they create turning into real people with real lives and real stories. It was the second agency they went through, the first going bankrupt in 1988 and the second surrogate they worked with, the first dropping out likely due to “family issues” that my parents never elaborated on. Surrogacy wasn’t their goal but the end of a long procedure-filled, heartbreaking road. My mom who raised me (I will refer to her as mom going forward) told me they would have adopted if they could but, being older parents, knew their chances were slim. In a document she put together at my request many years ago before an interview with a writer interviewing families born via different means, she shared the following:

“Our experience with adoption was that birth mothers were not thinking of placing their baby with a couple where the mother was very possibly older than their own mothers. Did not feel like a long-term viable avenue for us. Our experiences with adoption included an element of rejection that was disconcerting – we would have thought that we were the “perfect” adoptive couple…”

By the time she miraculously got pregnant with my brother, they were already two years into working with my soon to be birth mom after she had her own miscarriage in early 1990. There are many twists and turns and details to my parents’ story – it’s a terribly hard path but familiar in today’s world. There have been countless stories of fertility pathways but how many have you read from the people brought into this world in these new ways? Whose perspective is centered the most? 

Beyond the 2008 movie Baby Mama and the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah, the cultural stories around surrogacy are incredibly limited. Growing up, I didn’t know how to make sense of myself and how I came into the world. I have a snapshot of how disorienting it all was to wrap my head around thanks to an overly meticulous doctor who took substantial notes on our visits. I found these notes as an adult and was floored reading them over, knowing that these storylines that have played through in my head and heart ran deeper than I realized: 

[Mom says she is a surrogate baby.] At first I thought I was adopted, when I was 2 I thought, “I don’t look like either of them”. I really feel like I might have been adopted because I’m the only one in the 2nd grade who’s a surrogate baby. [O: she is baffled by the logistics of it, but more by the feeling that she is different which means she might not be loved.] First I thought they didn’t care about me when I broke my arm, because for a couple of seconds they didn’t react. I don’t get why (enter birthmom’s name here) gave me to you and dad, it’s like “Free baby, 12 cents.” It’s sort of like she was trying to give me away because she didn’t want me.

I have spent the last decades adding adult words and framings to what is laid bare in seven year old words and logic. My sister, who I didn’t grow up with as she was my birth mom’s kid (I am too but welcome to the complexity of explaining this), was six when I was born and remembers not understanding where I had gone. I found out later she was so devastated about it that my birth mom and her then husband even considered adopting another child. To this day, she still often calls me “Baby Anne”. Sometimes I think that’s the issue is that everyone only saw me as a baby being born and not as an adult that would grow up wondering about their place in the world. 

The first time I read “Free baby, 12 cents”, I burst out laughing. It felt like an absolutely absurd statement and like a naive one from a child who doesn’t understand the nuances of the world. It wasn’t until I read it over again that the pain hit me as the statement wasn’t made to be funny. I said it with unwavering innocence and sincerity–I truly wanted to know. I feel for my seven year old self and how confusing this must have been. I can see my little brain and heart trying to make sense of it all. 

Being a product of this technology has left me inextricably tied to it. It’s similar to how I feel about being LGBTQ+. It becomes a forced larger part of my identity than someone who is heterosexual because it’s not the norm. My parents can walk away from surrogacy, not paying attention to how it’s evolved, while I don’t feel I have that option. I can’t stop my ears from perking up at the mention of surrogacy or fertility problems. This past summer in one of our now endless conversations about surrogacy with my parents, I made a comment about gestational surrogacy, where the surrogate isn’t related to the child she’s birthing. My dad looked confused and it took me a moment to realize he didn’t know the difference between gestational and traditional surrogacy. Again and again, I’m met with the fact that my parents’ story with surrogacy ended after I was born and I am the sole squeaky wheel in their idea of what surrogacy is. 

In 2019, my mom called to talk to me about an article she read on an incredibly conservative website about how surrogacy messes with the will of God. This conservative perspective wasn’t news to me, having seen what the Catholic Church has said for years around surrogacy, yet for my mom anti-surrogacy sentiment and ethical concerns finally reached her door in the form of a conservative news outlet. Ironically, when they were deciding whether to move forward with surrogacy they went to their Episcopal priest for advice who referenced the story of Abraham and Sarah. On this call, I heard for the first time my mom grappling with questions I had my entire life and suddenly expressing concern that perhaps what they did wasn’t right. It was both a relief to finally have her begin to understand the questions I’ve posed and heart wrenching to speak about how I came into this world being suspect. “What are we supposed to do? Hire a hitman to take you out?”, my mom joked. My battle with suicidal thoughts suddenly made more sense. It’s hard to want to be alive at times when you don’t agree with how you were born and you can’t make sense of why someone signed up to give you away. 

The lack of critical engagement in the process was and still is by design of the fertility industry that has only exploded since my parents pursued this path starting in the late 80s. I used to blame my parents, pushing them hard over the course of a decade about how I was born and why they didn’t put more thought into it. In the last few years, I’ve come to see that they too were in a position to not be properly informed about the impact during the process of having me. They thought if they just loved me enough it would all be okay–something I still hear repeated from parents pursuing similar fertility technology paths. They  were never told or encouraged to look further into what happened next for me rather than for them. We must do better as a society. The refrain of being wanted by them doesn’t overshadow the harm of being abandoned. It’s as if my parents forget that I had to be left in order to be given away. 

I was never meant to meet my now dead brother, and by the time I came along, my birth mother had “completed” her family (a disturbingly common requirement despite the result being another child born). The pain of being born this way and all I’ve lost from it does not go away, does not budge, does not ease. The disconnect is profound, beyond words. The cost is a lifetime of not knowing someone–many someones. Two aunts, an uncle, three brothers, a sister, grandparents. Those who prioritize having children at all costs often overlook the impact on those same children. The most you can do is harm reduction. No one wants to hear that though in pursuit of a baby, whether using a surrogate, sperm donor, egg donor, or adoption. The path has already been difficult to get to the point of needing to use broader technologies and fertility agencies want their return on investment.  

Being queer only complicates this. In the last few years, I’ve watched as numerous queer friends and acquaintances have started using the fertility industry to have kids. Yet when I talk to most folks wanting to have kids, including loved ones, about the toll it takes on my soul being born this way, I’m met with blank looks, changing topics, and an immediate centering of their perspective. Over beers, I sat with a best friend of mine at the time, his wife, and a lesbian couple they were friends with. Having kids came up. Despite the panic welling inside of me, I’m well versed at how to intellectually have a conversation about something that’s impacted me so much. I started asking questions about their knowledge of the sperm donation world, if they’ve ever talked to anyone born via donor sperm, whether they would choose to have contact with the sperm donor to give their kid the option to be in contact later, on and on. No one wanted to hear or talk about it. No one wanted to hear about how they could do right by their kid by giving them options, having hard conversations now, and doing the work today to emotionally prepare for the feeling that will inevitably come up. Within a few calm questions, everyone except me was so uncomfortable that someone jumped in to change the topic. 

In another instance, I met two older lesbians at a Seattle Reign soccer game. In between cheering on Megan Rapinoe and sounds of booing for an apparently homophobic player, they lamented how hard of a road it had been to adopt and how upsetting it is that they have to jump through so many hoops just to build a family. In my head, a voice screamed, “It should be hard to take someone else’s child”. Why won’t people talk about the reality of what they say they desperately want? I’ve come to learn that I’m not allowed to be uncomfortable, upset, too direct, etc in these conversations–the intended parents’ perspective again is upheld and I’m tired of it. It does not center the kid. There’s something profoundly disappointing to see queer people not engage more deeply in trying to approach having kids in a different way, often opting instead to copy/paste what straight people do and not hear from those born this way. 

This doesn’t just happen in one on one conversations. After hearing about a new benefit at work where folks could have access to a virtual clinic dedicated to women’s and family health, I saw surrogacy mentioned as one of the pathways they could help with. Repeatedly I have tried to get in touch with them and ask a list of questions I have. Two years later and the limited answers I have been given via HR as a mediator underscore the lack of a focus on the child with therapy only offered for a child until the age of 10, no therapists specializing in surrogacy for the child, and parental education solely focused on how to navigate the surrogacy process rather than what happens after. When I was told by HR that they felt confident they could match me with a therapist who specializes in surrogacy issues thanks to this new benefit, I had to bite my tongue and hold back tears. I knew one didn’t exist and I was later proven right. 

This is part of the complexity of my identity. I was born a woman (I identify as being more agender/genderqueer these days) and can recognize the feminist perspective in both the direction of protecting women against a brutal industry, especially in certain countries, and the empowerment for women to do what they want with their bodies. I’m queer and can recognize the desire to have access to the same technology as straight people to have kids in a way a generation ago was hard to dream of. I’m a product of traditional surrogacy and know the industry does not center the rights of kids. I work in tech and can see the profound impacts of new technology on society, good and bad, along with how uneven access to technology can be. It’s confusing and a mess with attacks coming from all sides everywhere I look. Amongst adopted kids, there’s often two main pathways folks walk down: a path of perfection or a path of destruction. I chose perfection for the first two decades of my life thinking it would protect me from rejection and further abandonment not recognizing the ways it only reinforced the same fear I was trying to avoid. I must resist this now. 

My perspective, knowing it is only mine and evolving, is this: Imagine being able to ease your child’s life from the start. Imagine someone came to you and said, “Your child will suffer a deep wounding and, before they are even born, there are very real steps you can take to ease that greatly. What will you do?” This all sounds really hard, right? It is. It can be hard for you or it can be harder for your kid (it’ll already be hard regardless). Make it easier for yourself, for them, and for your future relationship. How you handle this will undoubtedly impact your bond. Do not expect the fertility industry to help with this. Do not expect them to understand the nuance. They don’t prioritize the well-being of the future adult, the child yearned for. I’m a “perfect product” of that industry, and from their perspective, everything went smoothly. I know because I spent a day with the president of the agency my parents used to pepper her with questions and heard all about how great I was as a product and how compliant my birth mom was. You must take on educating and expanding yourself on your own. You must build relationships with others who you could bring a kid into the world with rather than relying on anonymous pathways. There are no easy answers, just a hard path someone must take: you or your child. Choose a different path to parenthood, one that prioritizes the child you long for. Otherwise, the burden falls on them, not you. Choose childlessness if you cannot find an ethical way forward. No one wants to hear they don’t have a right to a child. No one wants to hear about Custodial Rights Agreements or Legal Guardianships. More need to hear the perspective of the children born in these myriad of ways. 

I have struggled to find any stories from those born through surrogacy, even after starting a meetup group, digging through Facebook groups, posting publicly on my blog asking for help, sharing on LinkedIn, showing up at a book event about adoption asking for help finding folks, on and on. The algorithm gods recently blessed me in the form of a YouTube video being recommended to my girlfriend of a woman in France speaking out about her experience of being born through traditional surrogacy. My girlfriend brought it to my attention and I was immediately emotionally hijacked by it. 24 hours later, I tracked her down relying on my years of internet searching for family members. As is often the case in engaging with thoughts and feelings around surrogacy, I couldn’t watch her speech when I first reached out. My compartmentalization runs so deep, having had to live my life with these separate storylines, that sometimes I just simply get stuck and let my brain bury what is overwhelming for it.

Four days later over a homemade whiskey cocktail, complete with blackberries picked alongside a bike path in Seattle, I finally watched the 14 min and 34 seconds of her speech. Everything she said resonated. As of writing this, we’ve exchanged a simple few messages and I’m actively trying to temper my expectations. I cannot turn off the part of me that is so driven to increase my understanding of the confusion and hurt that surrounds my introduction to the world. Until this last month, I have never found, or spoken to, anyone else born the way I was. My grief finally feels like shared grief, 31 years later. I have been longing for it to be shared. My story should not be the first or last story you read about people born through surrogacy. I can offer you one other and I hope you witness it. 

Since I was born in 1993, the fertility industry has continued to balloon and those created babies will turn into adults with stories of their own. Years ago, I created this website you’re reading in hopes of finding and curating a space for stories like mine. My story here is for those coming up behind me just as much if not more than it is for people longing to be parents. As I wrote here:

I imagine myself at 12 years old searching on the internet trying to find people like me. I imagine what a relief it would be to find a small spot on the internet like this. This is for you, 12 year old Anne.

I write this to create another small spot for those born via surrogacy to find, my version of a virtual breadcrumb trail. I have more questions than I do answers but, inspired by a quote from Rilke, I’ve learned to love the questions themselves. After all, the answers will not happen for my life–it’s too late.