My name is Brian and I am the son of a traditional surrogate, a biological father, and an adoptive mother. I think all of you here need to know how I feel about surrogacy. I have read a certain popular surrogacy board since I was 16 and I am almost 18 now. I was going to wait until I was 18 to open my mouth but I just can’t stand reading all of this stuff anymore. It was something in one TS’s post that really set me off. And it was not just her, it’s everybody attitude.
“if you go into this feeling that this is “your” baby then you should not be a TS. This baby is NOT yours. It is your egg donation that instead of the IM carrying … you have to carry. Thats it. plain and simple. So it is no different than a GS. You are carrying someone ELSE’s baby, regardless of the genetics. so yes you should get comp to cover your pain and suffering “babysitting in utero” THEIR child.”
What about what the kids of traditional surrogacy think? What do we think about what you think? What you think doesn’t even make sense to most of us. It doesn’t make sense to the majority of people and that’s why surrogacy is so controversial! Do you expect us to have this sort of delusional thinking that you do or do you expect us to think like 99.9% of the general population who thinks that it is wrong to have a child in exchange for money or give away your biological child. How do you think we feel about being created specifically to be given away? You should all know that kids form their own opinions. I don’t care why my parents or my mother did this. It looks to me like I was bought and sold. You can dress it up with as many pretty words as you want. You can wrap it up in a silk freaking scarf. You can pretend these are not your children. You can say it is a gift or you donated your egg to the IM. But the fact is that someone has contracted you to make a child, give up your parental rights and hand over your flesh and blood child. I dont care if you think I am not your child, what about what I think! Maybe I know I am your child.When you exchange somehing for oney it is called a commodity. Babies are not commodities. Babies are human beings. How do you think this makes us feel to know that there was money exchanged for us?
Lets look at this from our point of view. Here is our biological mother our flesh and blood the woman who would naturally be raising and loving us totally denying that we are her child. I’m sorry but you just cant do that. We are your kids. We’re your kids just as much as your own kids, but yet you only think of us as some sloughed off egg that you are giving to a substitute mother who no matter how much love she has just can’t be the same as you? For 25 thousand dollars or whatever? You don’t bond with us when you are carrying us and you deny that we are yours because you have deluded yourselves and deny who and what we really are. That is so totally not right that I can’t believe anyone would think this is normal!And why are you doing this? For the most part its money from what I understand. Some of you have already admitted that in other posts. Would any of you do it if you did not get compensated for it? Or maybe if you didn’t get that feeling of belonging or acceptance that you never had as a kid? How do you think that makes us kids feel? You may be able to deny us but we don’t want to deny who you are. That makes us feel very rejected. That leaves a hole in our hearts whether we admit to it or it manifests some other way like in depression or a fear of getting close to someone else.
Sometimes it doesnt show up until we are in our teens or young adults and like me sometimes it shows up as a baby when I scream my head off for 6 weeks and they call it colic. They call it stomach gas or an immature neurological system. Nothing can console us. Bull. The truth is that nobody is able to explain it because babies can’t talk. It’s the only way a baby knows how to express itself and its rage and grief and morning is to scream. I wanted my mother and she wasn’t there. I just had to accept it after a few weeks so I quit crying. Just wait. The evidence of babies having stress and knowing who their mothers are at birth is just beginning to come out. You can’t just substitute mothers and expect us to be okay with it. You can have all the love and good intentions in the world but that doesn’t make it okay with us…
Read more at Son Of A Surrogate
So the family that are your parents, do you still love her as a mother or not?
What would you do if in the future you cant have babies?
I’m trying to learn about you and also trying you to show the other part.
What is the other part you are trying to show him? It sounds to me like you are trying to justify something? If you are considering surrogacy, don’t!! He sounds exactly like the thousands of adult adoptees that ARE also talking. People who are unable to conceive really need to find meaningful ways to impact children without needing to destroy the child’s first family to do so. I seriously don’t know how people are willing to knowingly traumatize a child, and then he the Gaul to expect the child to grow up and and love them. I am a mother. Mothers don’t traumatize a child to fill their own needs.
And there isn’t another side of trauma!
Margot,
Clearly as a mother you’ve missed Barbara’s point about asking what a person would do if they can’t have children. But it just goes to show the arrogance that parents have when it comes to judging those unable to have children.
You’ve not take in a single word that young man has told you about his experience. You are still fixated on “what if a woman can’t have a baby”- then that’s a terrible tragedy but here’s the choice, either you suffer or the child does- that’s what we’re learninb here and any mother would tell you that she would give her life in suffering if it spared her child from suffering. That’s not elitist or judgmental- that’s what being a mother means.
No one is entitled to a child, and they are certainly not entitled to purchase one. Children are not accessories to a lifestyle.
I don’t think anyone take lightly on the pain of those not being able to have children, but the question is are their pain more important than that of the child? That is the whole thing about this page, that the child’s need and wellbeing is always more important than the want of an adault.
I wonder Barbara? What if some people are just not supposed to have children? What if that in and if itself should be accepted by them, lived by them? Perhaps the denial itself serves a purpose. There are other ways to help children.
What a ridiculous and dismissive comment! His love or lack of it for his adoptive mother is not an issue here. The issue is that his biological mother agreed to create him with the purpose of selling him, all while denying that he is her child. Not to mention the trauma that was inflicted upon his separation from her at birth.
You want to show him the other side??People are not entitled to have a child. If he can’t have one in the future, then he can get a puppy. Just as other couples should do.
Brian,
Congratulations on finding your voice and the courage to speak out. You took a big, albeit important, risk fro yourself and for so many others who feel as you do but are afraid to speak out.
YOU and your fellow surrogate produced people are the experts and must be heard! You had no say in the contract that created you; your feelings growing up in this bizarre arrangement are real and need to be heard and weighed heavily as lawmakers make decisions regarding the future of surrogacy.
Keep speaking your truth to power!
Questions: Do you know who your surrogate was? Do you have her UPDATED medical history? Are you able to know your half sibs?
Brian, You might be interested in: http://www.stopsurrogacynow.com/
Just as the overt selling of babies is illegal, so too should surrogacy in all its forms. Surrogacy is selling off one’s child, simply stated. Anyone who supports surrogacy or pre-matching for infant adoption need to read The Primal Wound. What are we doing to these babies?
Anyone who doesn’t understand why couples and people use surrogacy or adopt to have families almost always had no trouble conceiving their own children. These people just judge and look down on those unable to have children.
And here YOU are, focused on the adults who have agency and choices, while ignoring the child, who has neither.
The trauma of separation is real. Why should anyone’s problems conceiving be more important than that?
If what you want is to raise a child, there are literally THOUSANDS of kids in foster care with TPRs that would give anything to be adopted into a forever family.
I believe babies and children have a human right to their actual mother and family,
Babies should ever be a commody. We are not heartless creeps for calling out the sale of babies.
As mentioned above, what it boils down to is adults accepting their lot in life (with or with out kids) because otherwise the commodified child is the one that suffers. Loving parents would never inflict agony on their child to avoid facing their own grief!
Brian C, it took courage to express those raw emotions. Thank you for speaking up. I was adopted at birth and have similar feelings about my experience. I’m so sorry for the trauma and grief you’ve experienced from being rejected by your mother. Have you attempted reunion or told her how you feel? I was almost 40 before the fog of denial lifted for me. I’m glad you’re able to express your deep feelings at such a young age. The enormity and complexity of your loss must be overwhelming at times.
One thing that I’ve learned that has really helped is that talk therapy doesn’t heal trauma. Trauma is stored in the amygdala of the brain, so we need therapy that can clear that part of the brain. My therapist used Timeline Integration therapy and some EMDR. It’s brutal and draws things to the surface that make you wonder if you’ll survive, but then things start to clear.
This website is solely focused on negativity. It’s sad. Should people who are happy to be alive, and are alive because of surrogacy/ivf/etc…. not also be considered?
Jesus Christ was adopted by his father Joseph and raised by his biological mother. Did he disparage his birth or the role that his adoptive father Joseph took in his life?
Negativity is addictive. Being angry and sad can feel good in a strange way. It’s important to fight the urge to give in to it. Be thankful for the opportunity to exist and be who you are if at all possible. The people hemming and hawing over your “misfortune” of being donor conceived are ghouls getting high off of your despair.
I’m sorry…what? Unless you are a child of a traditional surrogate, you have no idea how Brian feels. You have no right to judge his pain or call it “negativity”. Brian, like many children of surrogacy, is hurting. Children’s rights and needs should always come before a woman’s desire to have a child. Period. The first rule of parenting: it isn’t about you. Intentionally creating a child who will be cut off from one of his or her biological parents is the very definition of selfishness.
Anonnete, Jesus knew who His real Father was all along and that He would return to Him. That is a ridiculous comparison. Babies are made and sold and that is a travesty. Stop gaslighting people’s genuine feelings. With DNA, people are finding their real biological parents now. Some men fathered dozens of kids. The chances of somebody marrying a blood brother or sister is getting bigger the longer these hideous practices continue.
Anonnette- you’ve just dismissed the valid feelings of a person who has lived through something you’ve never lived through. Even if you somehow were conceived through surrogacy, you’re not in his shoes. You’re not living his life. God was always with Jesus. The writer’s mother is not with him. Infants really do cry out for their bio mothers. It is trauma. It is science. Adoptions is necessary sometimes, but it’s always, always a trauma for the baby. Even in the best scenarios. I have also seldom seem such a lack of empathy and such grandiosity from another person. You are telling someone how to feel. I expect you may have repressed some of your own feelings in the name of “positivity.” True positivity comes from truth. When we express our real thoughts and feelings, we begin to heal. We get clearer, stronger, wiser. This young man’s feelings are, again, valid. You had no right to dismiss them. Check out what Brene Brown says about empathy versus sympathy. She has a video on it. You won’t regret it. It’s possible the writer is a positive person who is honestly sharing his pain. Stop calling him a ghoul, pray for him, and tend to yourself and take your positivity into your own life without telling others how to feel. And to the young man who wrote this- I see you, and thank you.
No. No he wasn’t. Jesus being raised by Joseph is not at all like what happens to those who are donor conceived, born of surrogates, or adopted. Jesus always knew who his father was, he was not separated from his mother, he was not even separated from his father as he himself was also God who is his father, he was not lied to about his origins, his name was not changed, his birth certificate was not altered, he was not expected to be grateful….
.
Jesus also had 100% participation and agreement in the arrangement. God didn’t just throw him to earth and say “good luck! I’ll see you in 30 years when you die a horrific death! Joseph will be your dad until then, have a great trip!”
Jesus knew His Father’s plan, he submitted himself to it and was a willing participant in it – knowing the full details of what would happen, no surprises. Unlike the children who are being sacrificed for the desires of the adults. They had NO opportunity to agree to it, they didn’t know what the ramifications would be. Totally different situation and not comparable at all.
For those of you who could not have children, life is not fair. None of us are entitled to get every single thing he or she wants in life. And certainly, an innocent child is not your consolation prize. Each time you lift your finger to the keyboard to tell me or people like me how insensitive we are, ask your self, “what entitles YOU to have children?” “How sensitive to others’ feelings are you, really?” ‘” Why are YOU so special that if you don’t get what YOU want, YOU can USE another to satisfy yourself and bash others for not agreeing with you?”