The Kids Are Alright: Surrogate-Born Children Are Speaking Out
Gee Roberts, born through traditional surrogacy, has been speaking out about her lived experience (photo: Gee Roberts)
In June 2019 the American Bar Association’s family law section, along with Cambridge Family Law Centre and the International Academy of Family Lawyers, put together a conference in Cambridge, England focused on international surrogacy. Experts from across the globe came to discuss a variety of topics around the topic and one of the speakers was Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, who at the time was the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children (2014-2020). The Dutch lawyer had spent her career working in human rights, having at one point delved into the subject of illegal adoptions. Partly because of her experience on this subject and wanting to show her interest in the intersectionality of child’s rights and bioethics, she told me, “I decided it was important to address the [complex] issues of surrogacy.”
And address it she did, releasing in 2018 a statement on the subject that rankled many within the surrogacy world. She warned in that report that commercial surrogacy, as it was practiced in some countries, “usually amounts to the sale of children” and that there was an urgent need for surrogacy to be regulated. It was, as one expert who helped plan the conference later said to me, “a harsh report” and there was concern by many that she was only hearing one side of the surrogacy story: from those who opposed the practice. (Her follow-up 2019 report was more nuanced). The Cambridge conference organizers asked her to give a presentation on how she developed her initial findings. After she spoke, one father “went after her,” said the conference organizer. “He said, ‘my daughter read in a newspaper that she is chattel and that I bought her. You have diminished the self-worth of these children.’”
For the many debates that are held around surrogacy, it seems that oftentimes it is the actual children who are either completely left out of the conversation or they are included but portrayed as victims or chattel, as the father in Cambridge poignantly stated. As Barbara Collura, the director of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, told me there is a lack of awareness by those who speak out against surrogacy, that the very children they are saying they want to protect are actually being upset by what they are hearing and taking in. “How are you making people feel by basically delegitimizing their life?” she asked rhetorically. “These folks are saying that publicly all the time, and that there needs to be some sort of reckoning around that.”
Doing research for my book, I spoke to a handful of surrogate-born kids about this and asked them how they had worked through questions around their conception and birth. Fiorella Mennesson, who wrote a children’s book on surrogacy called Ma famille, la GPA et moi (“My family, surrogacy and me”), finds it “really inappropriate” when people ask her if she ever has doubts as to who her parents are. “I am not really comfortable with the question because it is absurd and it hurts,” she told me. “It is so weird to be questioned about my parents and who my ‘real’ mother is.’” Meanwhile, Gee Roberts, a British medical student who was born through traditional surrogacy in 1998, says that it gives you a different view on family. “For me,” she told me, “family, it’s not really about genetics.” She has always known the background of her birth, and it was something that her parents had made natural from the start.
Gee Roberts speaking at a UN conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 2019
When she was in her first year of primary school, her teacher gave the class an assignment to draw a picture of their families. Gee drew a picture of her mom, dad and her “tummy mummy”, Suzanne, who has always remained a part of her life. The school’s head teacher asked Gee’s parents who this mystery extra woman was in the artwork. When they explained, the teacher got emotional because she had been adopted. She told Gee’s parents how fantastic it was that they had normalized it for Gee from such an early age. “I think we really underestimate how clever children are,” Gee told me in an interview after doing her medical rounds in a clinic. “Children are not innately anything, we teach them everything they know. So for me [my circumstances are] just as normal as having one mom and one dad to other people.”
For years there have been arguments around what would the long-term ramifications be for surrogate born children: Would they be confused? Would they be angry? Would they wonder who their ‘real’ parents were? Would they feel like they were chattel? And for years, there was not much research so assumptions were that children born through surrogacy would, like research that came out on adoption, possibly struggle with grief, loss or issues of abandonment. The outlier is the research that has been done by Susan Golombok, who runs the Center for Family Research at the University of Cambridge. She has done a 20-year-long longitudinal study –the only one of its kind in the world—examining what impact surrogacy has on children born through those arrangements. She writes in “Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms” that with surrogacy differing from other types of ART it could “conceivably result in greater problems for surrogacy families” than for those created through more traditional procedures like sperm or egg donation.
However, her research, which has followed 42 British families at different times throughout the children’s lives, found the opposite: that children born through surrogacy were doing well and had good relationships with their parents. “And the answer to the question of who they saw as their ‘real’ mother was crystal clear,” Susan wrote in “We are family: What really matters for parents and children”, published in 2020. “It was the one who raised them.”In their first assessment when the kids were one-year-olds, contrary to numerous concerns that have been voiced about surrogacy, “the differences identified between surrogacy families and the other family types indicated greater psychological well-being and adaptation to parenthood by mothers and fathers of children through surrogacy” than by a comparison group of parents through natural conception. Parents through surrogacy showed greater warmth and attachment toward their children and a greater enjoyment overall than those natural conception parents. They also reported lower levels of stress associated with parenting with mothers specifically showing lower levels of depression.
Susan and her team of researchers found that overall, the kids at 14 weren’t troubled by the fact that they had been born through surrogacy. “They would say things like, ‘this doesn’t really mean a lot to me and there are much more interesting things going on in my life than how I was born,’” Susan told me. Others, meanwhile, talked more positively about it, saying it made them special or it was something different about them. “It just turned out to be not at all true, the things that people were predicting about the angst that these children would be suffering in adolescence,” Susan said. “Because they actually, genuinely, weren’t very interested in the whole thing. It just wasn’t a big deal to them.”
While Susan and her researchers did not specifically ask the 14-year-olds about money or compensation for the surrogate, they were asked about the way they were born and how that made them feel. “They were completely fine about it,” said Susan. “They certainly did not seem obsessed, ruminating over these kinds of issues.” That research runs contrary to the rhetoric put out by those who have issues with surrogacy who claim children born through these arrangements will feel like purchased products.
Both Gee and Fiorella articulated their feelings on this to me. Gee told me she finds it very upsetting that people “almost disapprove of me innately” because of how she happened to be born. Most of them, she assumed, had never been through surrogacy so it felt a bit rich for them to be “speaking” on her behalf. “If people are saying things like that from a place of opinion, where they have experienced something, then I can validate that,” Gee said. “But if people are saying it from conceptual abstract things that they just decided with no experience, like where have you got that from? You don’t know.” Fiorella, meanwhile, said she’s often found that those against surrogacy aren’t interested in getting the opinion from surrogate-born kids, yet they claim to talk for them. “We have a lot of extremist people in France who fight against surrogacy,” she said. “They claim that it’s in the children’s interest and it’s really ironic because there is nothing towards the children in what they do.”
When I asked Jill Rudnitzky Brand— born in Michigan in 1986 she was the first baby in the world born via a gestational carrier— how she felt about comments that surrogate-born children were chattel, she scoffed. By and large, she said, “you are giving a viable option for people who otherwise couldn't have a biological child. And making that blanket statement is just like whenever you make a broad, gross generalization: you miss the nuance, you're going to make a lot of really cataclysmic errors.”
--This essay is excerpted from Ginanne Brownell’s upcoming book, “How I Became Your Mother: My Global Surrogacy Journey.”