As much as it pains me, I watch the documentaries of men fathering hundreds of children and read NYT stories about women who were implanted with the wrong embryos. I want to know every nook and cranny of how fucked the underbelly of the fertility world is in ways that are hard to grasp. While these stories show in a black and white way how horrifying and unregulated the fertility world can be, I worry it centers the ethical considerations only in the extreme. Rage and horror sells as we know but I’d like to encourage everyone to examine even the best case scenarios. I’d argue that my story is one of best case scenario and it has still led to chronic suicidality and immense heartbreak/disorientation/separation. The surrogacy president told me as much when she spoke glowingly about my birth mom and how well everything went. While I hope these larger, more horrifying situations cause folks to question what’s allowed in the fertility industry, I urge everyone to not stop there and to spend time thinking simply about a single situation. 

Think about what it’s like for a child to be born and taken in their first moments of life away from their biological mom, the person whose voice they’ve heard for nine months. Think about growing up and not looking like one of your parents. Just this week, I had someone remark how much I looked like my mom (we don’t really beyond having lighter hair). Again, I’m a best case scenario where they tried to pick someone who could look more like them than not (white!). At other times, the 48 year age difference between us has folks wondering if she’s my grandma. My entire life, whenever someone would remark how I must have gotten my “beautiful blonde hair from my mom”, my mom who raised me would look at me, wink, and say something to the effect of “she sure did”. It was her way of skipping the awkwardness of the explanation while still privately acknowledging the truth to me. I have both come to appreciate this reaction and have also had moments where I know that her reacting that way helped me understand “this is not something you speak of or share”. I’ve raged against that the older I’ve gotten when it’s safe enough (and sometimes even when it’s not but I’m just fed up). Think about what it’s like to find out at some point that you have mystery siblings somewhere else who you can’t get in touch with nor know how to. Surrogates usually have to have successfully given birth and to have a “complete family”. The “complete family” means they don’t want more kids which is an unbelievable thing to write when the entire act of what they are doing is having another child in the case of traditional surrogacy. With traditional surrogacy fading now with the rise of egg donors, I worry it’s so divorced out—someone gives their eggs perhaps to pay off students loans while another is a gestational surrogate to help support her own family. To use a purposefully dramatic example, it’s like a bomb factory where no one builds the full bomb start to finish but simply does their part without thinking or feeling the whole of the experience. It’s easy to bear when you’re just one piece in a larger puzzle. Think about what it’s like to realize you have grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews–layers of people who look like you who remain inaccessible. In the best case scenario, you have lifetimes of loss and doors closed that should remain open. If the entire point is to intentionally have a child, why not extend that intense commitment to intentionality to the whole of one’s life? 

When I look back on my own story, I see so many moments when connections could have been made. Family reunions for my birth mom happened not far from where I grew up. I nearly met my sister the first time I met my birth mom but it didn’t work out for one reason or another. I lived for years in the same city as a first cousin, not realizing I could have run into him by accident nor knowing his name, what he looked like, etc. I also see moments of being brought into the fold: a willingness to meet up over and over again by my birth mom. My sister inviting me to her wedding to meet her and my other siblings for the first time, the only time we would ever all be together before a brother died. If you’re having kids this way, I beg you, down on my knees kind of begging, that you facilitate and that you put ensure these are opportunities available to your child. If you’re born through surrogacy reading this, I send you a massive hug and encourage you to get support before exploring any of this, especially if you’re older. I still have recurring panic attacks that boiled over after meeting my siblings and part of my extended family on my birth mom’s side (nieces, aunts, uncle). It was incredibly destabilizing to sit in a space surrounded by people who looked like me whose names I fought to remember and who I should have known. I couldn’t compartmentalize in the face of what suddenly became clear looking into the eyes of those who looked like me and everything blew open. I felt the awkwardness of how unclear it was how to treat me. I am not adopted (I do have adoption papers). I was not some child that was wanted but given up—I was never wanted at all. No one was looking for me. The entire time it was known where I was. 

This is a glimpse of a good, single story and I hope you can see the flaws clearly, even as I have loving parents, a birth mom who engages, siblings who I now get to try to know, nieces I can text, etc. This is not a New York Times story of some house of surrogacy where a couple commissions dozens of surrogates to create their family. Even still, the ethical considerations are profound and are deserving of attention. View the extreme to see the immense flaws in all their glory but please do not overlook the individual stories to witness how the system when working by design creates suffering for those it creates. It doesn’t need to be like this and do not expect any surrogacy agency to prompt you or guide you to consider this perspective. I have joined webinars with a few different groups and asked questions anonymously that touch on these topics only to have them straight up ignored by the presenters. I find it absolutely cowardly and I hope those questions rattled the folks presenting because I have to live the answers to those. If you’re going to engage in this industry, engage with it fully, with eyes wide open, and with preparation to fight against the flaws baked into its very core. Otherwise, the children and families you say you are so happy to help create are the exact people who will suffer tremendously.