surrogacy and the commodification of motherhood
Is surrogacy a good solution for infertility? Or is it exploitative all the same?
The topic of surrogacy is an interesting one because it’s often propositioned as an altruistic thing. Instead of suffering from infertility, you can just pay another woman to carry your baby!
But in reality, unless you’re part of the top 1%, you’re probably not going to be able to pursue surrogacy.
According to Illume Fertility, “The average cost of surrogacy in the U.S. in 2025 (including professional fees, carrier fees and expenses, and insurance costs) ranges from $100,000 to $140,000.”
Already, we can deduce that the people who are more likely to choose surrogacy are wealthy. I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t sit right with me that the wealthy can just use the bodies of poorer, more vulnerable women in order to have babies. There’s something inherently sinister, maybe even a little dystopian, about that.
But then there’s the argument, “well, there’s a lot of money involved so the surrogate mother wins all the same.” But does she? I imagine there’s a great emotional cost involved in giving away the baby you grew, nurtured, and bonded with for nine months. Nothing about that is natural and no money in the world seems appropriate in accepting those circumstances. It brings to mind Matthew 16:26, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
The fiction book that I’ve recently read that made me think, read, and research more into the topic of surrogacy is Lisa Jewell’s Then She Was Gone. It’s a mystery/thriller following the story of a young girl’s disappearance in Britain, mainly focusing on a mother’s plight dealing with her youngest daughter suddenly vanishing from her life and later being found dead.
The main twist within this novel is that the young girl was kidnapped by her former math tutor and forcefully used as a surrogate so that the tutor could “baby-trap” her boyfriend who didn’t want anything to do with her. Considering the tutor was in her 40s and she had miscarried multiple times, she decided that kidnapping this young girl and artificially inseminating her was the best option to have a baby.
The tutor keeps the young girl in a basement as the baby grows. Finally, when the baby is born, the tutor just stops caring about the young girl in the basement, leaving her down there to starve and not letting her see or care for the baby she just gave birth to.
The young girl, Ellie, still cared for her baby, despite everything, which is a natural, biological thing. Us humans are hard-wired to feel and do certain things—for mothers, we have an innate desire to care for, nurture, and protect our babies. So ripping a baby away from the mother is an exceptionally cruel thing to do.
This made me reflect more on the ethics of surrogacy as a whole. As mentioned before, we only really see wealthy people pursuing surrogacy due to the high costs involved with the whole process. But at the very core, surrogacy isn’t as altruistic as it’s made out to be. In reality, it’s actually quite selfish.
We’ve already established that ripping a baby away from its mother is a cruel thing to do, but why is it acceptable if there’s a monetary cost involved? Does $50,000 suddenly make it okay or make it hurt any less?
Even in cases of gestational surrogacy, in which a donor egg is used so that the baby technically isn’t genetically related to the surrogate, it’s false to claim that there still isn’t a connection between surrogate mother and baby. Maternal microchimerism ensures that the mother and baby exchange cells while the baby grows in utero, thereby linking the two for life.
What’s especially fascinating is the villainization of the women who want to keep the babies they carried after giving birth to them. In my eyes, this is an absolutely natural reaction. She grew the baby, she bonded with the baby, she risked her life for that baby because being pregnant is an inherently risky thing. And she is looked down upon for wanting to keep the baby in the end despite the “contracts” and the “money” involved. A mother wanting to stay with her baby is the most natural thing to come out of this unnatural process of surrogacy.
At the end of the day, we have to call this for what it is. The wealthy are allowed to buy babies from other women, and once those babies are here, the surrogate mother’s thoughts, feelings, opinions are all invalidated for the sake of the “law.”
Baby’s Here! Move Aside, Mama.
This brings me back to the book, Then She Was Gone. In abandoning Ellie in the basement, the math tutor essentially demonstrates that Ellie is now useless and disposable after she gave birth to the child. This is why she had no issues letting Ellie starve to death in her basement, even though the young girl was crying out and in distress for her newborn baby.
When juxtaposed with real-life surrogacy circumstances, I can see many similarities. If the surrogate feels a bond with the baby, that’s just too bad. It’s not her baby anymore, according to the contracts and laws involved. The new parents have every right to deprive the mother and baby from being together anymore.
My issue with surrogacy is that it reduces a woman down to her reproductive organs: her womb. And once she has done the job, she’s brushed away while the new parents can gush and coo about “their” new baby.
And when we reduce women down to their reproductive organs, we only see more atrocious acts committed upon women as a result. Because their wombs, their eggs, are valuable. But the lives, feelings, and emotions of the women involved? It doesn’t matter. This is dehumanization. This is what happens when we commodify human bodies.
Human Egg Farms
According to the Human Rights Research Center, “Surrogacy remains a controversial industry with significant ethical and human rights concerns, particularly in transnational cases. The stark economic divide between wealthy prospective parents in the Global North and surrogate mothers in developing nations creates an imbalance of power, increasing the risk of exploitation.”
This is in regards to the story of the three Thai women who were rescued from a human egg trafficking operation in Georgia. They were lured to Georgia under the premise that they would be surrogate mothers, but instead, they were kidnapped and their eggs were stolen from them against their will.
Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the first or last time something like this happens to women who are desperately trying to escape lives of poverty. A woman’s body is essentially “rented” for a certain time for a certain service. It’s dehumanizing in the same way prostitution and sex trafficking is—women are reduced down to their body parts, with their inherent worth depending on what they can physically give to their buyers.
We should not have to life in a society in which women have to resort to these horrific circumstances in order to get by. When we begin to normalize these things, the exploitation comes along close behind. And I refuse to support or condone an industry that harms so many women just so that wealthy clients can get their hands on a baby that never should have belonged to them in the first place.