Image – Shutterstock: Garun.Pdrt
Another surrogacy story is in the news. The Telegraph recently carried the sad and sorry tale of Carole-Anne Kelly (not her real name) who lives in the US. Here are the events as reported.
Carole-Anne, who comes across in the report as a warm and loving mother of three, felt moved by seeing couples struggle with infertility to become a surrogate. A US surrogacy agency sent her the details of Lisa and Todd who were looking for a surrogate. Carole-Anne thought they seemed like ‘a beautiful couple on paper’ and she felt an ‘immediate bond’ with them. She was ‘only too happy to help’. Carole-Anne gave birth to baby M, a boy, in the summer of 2019.
Shocking events
However, things turned out to be very different from the compassion-driven surrogacy journey which Carole-Anne had imagined. After baby M’s birth, a series of shocking events came to light.
Firstly, it turned out that Lisa, far from being infertile, was pregnant, which accounts for why Carole-Anne never actually met her in person. Then Carole-Anne found out that neither the sperm nor the egg which created baby M came from Lisa or Todd. In addition, she found out that another woman was pregnant with another of Lisa and Todd’s embryos. And then she discovered that after he was born, little M was sold to a couple in the UK, Mark and Chrissy, who already had three children and were expecting a fourth. Finally it transpired that Mark’s sperm had been used to create Baby M. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up.
Baby M bought and sold
Perhaps the most shocking and sinister aspect of this tragic episode is that little baby M was bought by Lisa and Todd for approximately $40,000 (the expenses paid to Carole-Anne) and then sold for £75,000 to Mark and Chrissy. So around £105,400 had exchanged hands soon after baby M was born – the price of a priceless baby. (We might also wonder about the price tag on the baby which the other surrogate was carrying and what became of him or her.) There is really no such thing as ‘altruistic’ surrogacy. It’s about buying and, in this case, selling babies.
There are so many aspects of this story which are deeply troubling to the pro-life community. Let’s start with Carole-Anne. She has told her story because she wants this surrogacy racket to stop. She realises now that she suffered from ‘toxic empathy’. She says the surrogacy agency ‘love-bombed’ her at the start and incentivised her to continue with frequent payments.
Finding surrogates is an issue. Earlier this year, Kim Cotton, the UK’s first surrogate mother, said she was closing the surrogacy agency she founded because she was ‘overwhelmed’ with pleas from ‘desperate’ couples wanting a baby, and too few surrogates coming forward. This makes the stakes for surrogates very high. Women deciding to be surrogates in the UK are likely to be desperate themselves. Receiving anything between £12k-£35k for nine months’ ‘work’ could seem attractive.
Ugly reality
Carole-Anne told herself that she wasn’t doing it for the money, and she wasn’t being insincere. But she admits that the money was useful, as she was out of work and her husband was fighting a lawsuit to get custody of his children from a previous marriage. In the UK the ugly reality of surrogacy is masked by the fact that technically commercial surrogacy is illegal. But as the campaign group Stop Surrogacy Now states: “‘compensation” and “expenses” are words used to disguise what is a payment for the purchase of a child.’
We might think Carole-Anne’s case is unusual and that, surely, not all surrogacy cases could have so many twists and turns. But surrogacy is such an unnatural process that there can hardly be a plain-sailing surrogacy story. And, indeed, recent research shows that surrogacy is not without its risks.
A 2024 Canadian study found that there are increased risks in gestational surrogate pregnancies (‘gestational’ meaning that the baby is not genetically related to the surrogate). The news source The Conversation reported on this study saying: ‘women who agree to carry and birth babies in surrogacy arrangements face a higher risk of complications than other pregnant women. These women were at two to three times the risk of health problems such as postpartum haemorrhages and pre-eclampsia. They were also more likely to give birth prematurely.’
It’s worth remembering that gestational surrogacy is only possible due to IVF. There are significant risks to both women and children in that process. Once the IVF genie was out of the bottle, surrogacy on a global and lucrative commercial scale was inevitable.
Difficult pregnancy
Sure enough, after three smooth pregnancies which made Carole-Anne think that her body was a ‘vessel that can give birth easily’, her surrogate pregnancy was extremely difficult. Carole-Anne had bleeding and was put on bed rest. She had weekly blood transfusions for two months. Her blood-pressure soared and she developed pre-eclampsia. Two weeks before her due date, she went into labour and after a 24-hour labour had an emergency C-section.
How many surrogacy agencies are telling women about the risks they face? The UK surrogacy agency Brilliant Beginnings says it is ‘dedicated to creating families safely’, but it’s highly likely that, as with abortion, women are not being given the full picture.
Then we come to the poignant moment when Carole-Anne had to part with the baby she had nurtured in her womb. “Going home without a baby, I was lost,’ she said.
Despite stories of surrogates who say that they never think of themselves as the baby’s mother, proposed changes to the law in the UK would mean that the intended parents’ names would go on the birth certificate as soon as the baby is born. Currently, the birth mother’s name and that of her husband or partner, are put on the certificate. Intended parents have to apply for a parental order, which can take up to six weeks.
Could it be that the largely unreported reluctance of surrogates to part with the baby is the driver behind getting the intended parents’ names on the certificate straight away?
Deceived
Carole-Anne realises now that she was deceived from the beginning and about almost every aspect of the agreement she thought she was entering into. She had thought that the baby she would give birth to would live a few hours away from her. After a legal battle, in 2024 she finally heard that baby M would be staying in England. She received a few pictures of him initially. That has now, apparently, stopped.
A baby is a human being who cannot be bought and sold. A woman’s body is ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ and not a machine. First and last Carole-Anne was a mother. She was told that she mustn’t love the baby because it was not hers. But as she said: ‘How do you stop loving a little heart that’s beating next to yours? I did a great job of keeping my feelings a secret for a long time. You’re not allowed to say this stuff in surrogacy.’ It’s time that secret came out.
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