(Originally published at LifeSite)
I knew nothing about Robbie Williams and Ayda Field before reading the article “Robbie Williams and Ayda Field welcome surrogate baby.” But from the headline I already knew one thing about their new baby, Colette (Coco) Josephine Williams: she was grieving.
Their Instagram announcement doesn’t say why Coco was born of surrogacy. Perhaps Field had difficulties with her other pregnancies or perhaps she just needed to squeeze into that glittering gown. Whatever the perceived challenges or benefits that led the celebrity couple to outsource this pregnancy, it’s baby Coco who is paying the price.
While it may fulfill the desires of adults, surrogacy is always harmful to children. Even in the “best case” scenario like this one, where the genetic mother and father are also the “intended parents,” surrogacy forces the child to sacrifice a critical bond with her birth mother. Williams and Field may be her biological parents. But on her birthday the surrogate is the only parent Coco knows.
It’s the unnamed surrogate’s body and voice that Coco longs for; it’s her smell that Coco recognizes. It’s her milk which provides the baby-specific nutrients that not only fill Coco’s tiny stomach but satisfy her little heart as well. We don’t immediately place newborns on the chests of random women so they can forge a bond. We place them on their mother’s chest because they have an existing bond. Someday it will matter to Coco that she is genetically related to Williams and Field. But today, they are just two strangers in a foreign world.
Last summer, the entire country was seething over the separation of children from their parents at the border – because tearing a child from her parents is cruel, and we all know it. A petition to end the border policy, signed by 12,600 mental health professionals, explained, “to pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma…” Yet, I assume that many who decried separations at the border would celebrate the arrival of Chicago Kardashian-West and Robert Ray Black-Daley via surrogacy despite the fact that parental separation was central to the birth plan all along.
And lest you believe that it’s traumatic for a two-year-old to lose her mother but an infant doesn’t know any different, you’ve got another thing coming.
In my quest to establish the children’s rights organization Them Before Us, there has been one demographic which has been difficult to win over. It’s not the kids with same-sex parents who need a place to process their fatherlessness or motherlessness without being called a bigot. It’s not the children of divorce who, even in their 40’s, are still trying to keep both parents happy on Christmas day. It’s not the donor-conceived children whose stories reveal that being “loved and wanted” doesn’t compensate for their missing parent.
It’s the adoptees.
There are some adoptees who won’t endorse our mission because we support adoption as a means of repairing a broken situation. Many who were adopted at birth feel they suffered a “primal wound” when they were separated from their birth mother, even if they were subsequently placed in a loving home. They’re not wrong. Studies show that maternal separation is a major physiological stressor for the infantand even brief maternal deprivation can permanently alter the structure of the infant brain.
Even though adopted children tend to be raised in homes with above-average incomes and more highly-educated parents, they still have more academic and behavioral challenges than their peers raised by their married, biological parents. Many adoptees argue that the trauma they suffered at birth has manifested itself as depression, abandonment/loss issues, and emotional problems throughout their lives. Given their ongoing struggles, some adoptees can’t imagine a scenario where separation from one’s birth mother and subsequent adoption is ever justified.
The experience of adoptees gives us a glimpse into how surrogacy, a booming global industry, will impact countless children. And while it will be decades before most children of surrogacy will be able to share their perspective, one surrogate-born woman doesn’t mince words in her condemnation of the practice:
“Children of surrogacy, just like children of a traditional adoption, deal with all the traumas that go along with adoption. We want to know where we come from. We want to know who our biological mothers are. We want to know who gave birth to us and what they are like… When we have children in this world who already need homes, why are we intentionally creating children [via surrogacy] to go through adoption traumas?”
While both surrogacy and adoption involve significant loss for children, there is one critical area where the two family structures differ: adopted children are raised by adults who are seeking to mend the wound inflicted by tragedy or hardship. Surrogate-born and donor-conceived children are being raised by the very adults who inflicted the wound. One family structure supports children’s rights, the other violates them. One requires adults to support children in their loss, the other forces loss on the child to support the desire of adults. When it comes to the best interest of the child, there’s a big difference between seeking to mend parental loss and paying six figures to create it.
At this point, the only thing that would assuage Coco’s suffering would be to remain with her surrogate forever. Of course later in life she would wonder, as many donor-conceived children do, about the identity of her genetic mother. Like all children, Coco craves attachment with the woman who carried her, as well as the biological identity passed down from Field. But for Coco to be raised by one mother, she must lose the other. It’s almost as if those two roles – genetic mother and “gestational carrier” – were meant to be the same woman.
Whether the “intended parents” choose surrogacy because neither possesses a womb, or because they don’t want another celebrity judge to replace them on the X Factor, surrogacy is, by its very nature, an injustice to the child. Birth is intended to be a continuation of the mother/child bond, not the moment at which the child suffers an intentional, primal wound. It’s the day when a baby should see the mother she already loves for the first time… not the last.
“But from the headline I already knew one thing about their new baby, Colette (Coco) Josephine Williams: she was grieving.”
And you know this… how?
Here’s some advice lady. Stop making shit up.
and You know it’s made up how?
What is your expertise? What is your experience? Adopted? Surrogate? Surrogate child?
What a mean awful comment.
God help you
uhh, hello?
does this lady know colette (coco) josephine williams?
no, right?
and this lady just comes out of no where and states that the baby is grieving? and this lady knows this how???
right, she doesn’t know shit.
that’s the definition of making shit up, Thekidscomefirstnotyou.
this lady is making shit up, and speaking for people she knows nothing about. she needs to seriously learn to shut the fuck up.
You’re right that she presumed I the specific case of Coco. However, based on the presented data, in both the article and the links, is a fair assumption for her to make. Those forced into situations similar to Coco’s do grieve.
Your argument is frivolous, trivial, and a red herring.
Are you a surrogate? Adopted? Abandoned? You must be in awful pain to say such mean evil things. Here is someone speaking the truth and she does know her “shit”. And in fact study upon study is showing that the primal wound exists and it is bad. Look up Nancy Vermeil, Paul Sutherland, Anne Heffron for more truthful information.
The rights of children will always trump the desire of “parents”. Helpless as they are, they need our protection. Thankful that Them Before Us is out there telling the truthful side of the story not the “fantasy”.
I’m living proof of the primal wound….every single day.
Please tell …what is your story?
My mother died suddenly at the age of 30 from complications of pregnancy and delivery. I was four years old. My youngest brother was 17 days old. My father had lost his mother at six, and his father died on his tenth birthday. There was a lot of pain in our home.
My little brother was sent to live with a family friend for a month or so because everyone was overwhelmed with grief. My father was beyond broken and had three other children to care for.
Eventually, his friend called and asked my father to take my little brother back because his wife was getting too attached. He was afraid for her mental health. My father’s sister came to live with us. My little brother came home. The couple who cared for him for that month had another child that they never intended to have.
I don’t pretend to feel the pain and loss that adoptees and children born through “donors” or surrogacy feel. I do know the longing for a mother I can barely remember and will never know…not in this lifetime, anyway. If you read a little…there are support groups out there…you might understand that these children are grieving well into adulthood…some for their entire lives.
Last year, my cousins put together a video montage (made from old film) for their mother’s 75th birthday. She is my mother’s youngest sister. For the first time since 1965, I saw my mother move. The film was silent, though, so I couldn’t hear her voice.
People had always spoken of her great beauty and wit and both were apparent in the video. I watched my little brother watch the video and wondered how he felt when he saw his three older siblings interact with a mother he only knew for 17 days. I don’t pretend to understand his pain and sense of loss. I don’t equate it to mine. I don’t think his pain is less simply because he was younger. He may not have been able to articulate his loss the way I did, but he felt it.
We used to have a small record with our mother’s voice on it. She made it in a recording booth at the Jersey shore when she and our father were newly married. In it, she’s reading an article from a woman’s magazine on how to be a good cook. I found it and listed to it once. Years ago, my little brother asked me about it; he wanted to hear her voice. Unfortunately, the disc had disintegrated. It broke my heart. He really wanted to hear her voice.
The connection between mother and child is primal. Clearly, that is true whether the child in utero is genetically related to her or not. The mother’s (or gestational carrier’s ) heartbeat has been the rhythm of the child’s world. Her voice is the only voice the child has ever heard. Did you know that infants turn to their mother’s voice shortly after birth? Did you know they recognize her smell?
Unless you have walked in the shoes of these children, you have no idea how they feel. You have no right to judge them.
When you become a parent, your child’s welfare supersedes your desires and needs…at least it should. When you have to go through some hoops to achieve parenthood, your child’s welfare should inform every choice you make before your child even exists.
When is it ever in a child’s best interest to deny him a relationship with his mother and father as a fact of existence? When is it ever in a child’s best interest to confuse her about who her mother and father actually are? Why should “donor” conceived children have to pretend they don’t long for their genetic parents to protect the parents who raised them?
Parenthood requires sacrifice and selflessness.
Claire,
Unless you’ve walked in the shoes of someone unable to become a parent you shouldn’t judge them for being selfish in your mind.
This reply is for “G”, not for Claire. Couldn’t find a “Reply” button to reply to “G”.
G, I’m both an adoptee, and a woman who bore a child, lost two children in utero, then suffered years of secondary infertility. I do, indeed, know the pain of infertility. While some people might minimize in their minds the pain of secondary infertility, research suggests all the pain is similar, with the difference that people with primary infertility receive more social concern and support.
“…both samples report similar levels of self-compassion, subjective well-being, and global fertility-related stress and that women with primary infertility report greater levels of fertility-related social concern.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0361684315576208?journalCode=pwqa)
I suffered BIG TIME from not being able to create the family I’d always dreamed of. However, rather than to adopt, my husband and I went to therapy to work on resolution of our broken dreams with professional help. It was really hard, agonizing work. I wrestled with God as Jacob did. It was gut-wrenching. But in the end, we did conquer the pain and were able to walk into the future with renewed joy, purpose in living, and contentment.
So I’m qualified to tell you that there is happiness available to you even if you never have a child…And that it’s completely ethically wrong of anyone to adopt a baby to serve as a Band-Aid for their infertility trauma. I *was* harmed by my relinquishment and subsequent adoption, even though my adoptive parents were magnificent. I did sustain brain damage and this is documented by a neurofeedback therapy screen shot of my brain wave patterns. He called these patterns “indicative of early childhood trauma”.
Please don’t adopt if you haven’t already. If you have, please seek C-PTSD treatments for your child(ren) such as somatic therapy, neurofeedback therapy, EMDR, or brainspotting therapy, to maximize any possible healing they can do while still young so they can have as successful a life as possible. And, by “successful”, I don’t mean just in terms of career success, but especially, relationship success. There is so much you don’t know because you’ve never had the curiosity to learn about it.
I would also like to just add a gentle correction of two of the names recommended above by “Children First”: the two names in need of correction are: Nancy Verrier and Paul Sunderland. I’ll link here for you a seminal presentation by Sunderland which is free and available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e0-SsmOUJI It’s only 53 minutes long but will help you begin to recognize why the baby needs its first mother.
G, you read Claire’s lived experience response and still believe that ‘wants’ trump ‘needs’? Wowww!!!
You might want to have a read of this one for a start. If you think people are making ‘shit up’ maybe you should do a quick google search before being so derogatory. It just makes you look well … actually, you go ahead and make something up.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/how-mother-child-separation-causes-neurobiological-vulnerability-into-adulthood.html
It’s true that infants experience trauma separated from their birth mother. Scent is a HUGE factor for newborns. They recognize their birth mom’s scent AND voice from birth! I once read an account of a couple that had an infant through surrogacy & it cried incessantly the first months of its life. Finally, 2 months in, they had the non-biologically related birth mom come visit & AS SOON AS THE BIRTH MOTHER TOOK THE INFANT IN HER ARMS the infant stopped crying.
It’s clear you believe non biological parents are inferior and shouldn’t be allowed to ever raise children.
I am a 52 year old adoptee, and have done a lifetime of psychological study into the issues involved with adoption, as adoption of newborns was at its peak in the late 1960 s and early 70 s these children are now in their 40 s and 50’s .. it is only now becoming apparent to them how adoption has shaped their lives and usually not in a good way… developmental attachment disorders have caused huge problems with relationships and how they feel about fitting in with society… they also have issues because when adopted they needed to form their identity around what their adopted parents expected and not who they could truly mirror to … when the baby gets taken away from their birth mother who they have been with for 9 months yes they are grieving and others a celebrating … a lot of adopted adults feel grief when there is celebration. We say it’s cruel to take a puppy or kitten away from its mother for the first 6 weeks of life yet we condone taking a baby away from its mother at birth … I suggest any surrogate or adoptive parents have a full time psychologist working with them from the age of three until the child is 18 … this would at least lessen the psychological issues in adulthood.
Just saying don’t you think it’s selfish to ask another women to carry your child when there is a chance the surrogate mom could die? There are many things in life that are unfair but to pay a women to have your child with even the slightest chance of death or horrible outcomes not to mention the mental is selfish period. Adoption even though can be difficult is the way to go. It’s not natural and of course the baby knows the surrogates smell and voice . Money can buy anything it should not be happening.
I know people are desperate and pay big bucks for this service but seriously what about if that woman dies ? maybe she needs money and has kids of her own and then dies because they needed to have a biological baby. This happens then what? Everyone talks how great it is but it’s a very high risk pregnancy and there is a chance of death because of the Drugs they put you on.. is a womens life only worth $50,000? Nobody wants to talk about the moral issue and the health issue.
This reply is for “G”, not for Claire. Couldn’t find a “Reply” button to reply to “G” under her comment to Claire, but I found one a few comments beneath the comment to which I’m replying, so I’ll share with “G” here.
G, I’m both an adoptee, and a woman who bore a child, lost two children in utero, then suffered years of secondary infertility. I do, indeed, know the pain of infertility. While some people might minimize in their minds the pain of secondary infertility, research suggests all the pain is similar, with the difference that people with primary infertility receive more social concern and support.
“…both samples report similar levels of self-compassion, subjective well-being, and global fertility-related stress and that women with primary infertility report greater levels of fertility-related social concern.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0361684315576208?journalCode=pwqa)
I suffered BIG TIME from not being able to create the family I’d always dreamed of. However, rather than to adopt, my husband and I went to therapy to work on resolution of our broken dreams with professional help. It was really hard, agonizing work. I wrestled with God as Jacob did. It was gut-wrenching. But in the end, we did conquer the pain and were able to walk into the future with renewed joy, purpose in living, and contentment.
So I’m qualified to tell you that there is happiness available to you even if you never have a child…And that it’s completely ethically wrong of anyone to adopt a baby to serve as a Band-Aid for their infertility trauma. I *was* harmed by my relinquishment and subsequent adoption, even though my adoptive parents were magnificent. I did sustain brain damage and this is documented by a neurofeedback therapy screen shot of my brain wave patterns. He called these patterns “indicative of early childhood trauma”.
Please don’t adopt if you haven’t already. If you have, please seek C-PTSD treatments for your child(ren) such as somatic therapy, neurofeedback therapy, EMDR, or brainspotting therapy, to maximize any possible healing they can do while still young so they can have as successful a life as possible. And, by “successful”, I don’t mean just in terms of career success, but especially, relationship success. There is so much you don’t know because you’ve never had the curiosity to learn about it.
I would also like to just add a gentle correction of two of the names recommended above by “Children First”: the two names in need of correction are: Nancy Verrier and Paul Sunderland. I’ll link here for you a seminal presentation by Sunderland which is free and available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e0-SsmOUJI It’s only 53 minutes long but will help you begin to recognize why the baby needs its first mother.
G, actually I do … if that is God’s wish. Why are your ‘wants’ any more important than someone else’s ‘needs’? That comment alone tells me you are not fit to parent.
Basic attachment theory states the trauma of the primal wound. I am a clinical mental health counselor and adoptee specializing in this proverbial trauma. The grief is real. The trauma can be managed but takes a lifetime of ongoing work.
The kids are not fine. And if you cared, you would’ve cared more to investigate it. Surrogacy is wrong, and exploits women and children.
As a child of a surrogacy pregnancy, you should maybe a little more cautious with your words if it’s really the kids you care about. My surrogate mom will never be my mom. My mom is the person who raised me. I have not been exploited by the woman who has loved and cared for me my whole life. It’s harmful for you to try to spread this narrative of “exploitation” of kids.
Abi,
I can understand your feelings on this. Adoptees like me who are/were “in the fog” feel similarly.
Then one day, all of a sudden it smacks us upside-the-head what has happened to us, and we find out we WERE harmed by adoption even if our adoptive parents were magnificent, as were mine! (My adoptive dad died ~3 years ago and I mounted his picture in my Facebook profile picture, and even now, haven’t been able to bear taking it down despite thinking several times that I should. We both adored each other, and Mom and I were also very close and cherished a very special connection.)
I understand your loyalty to your mother, I believe it is true and real, and that she well deserves it.
I also understand that you don’t realize how much you needed your surrogate mother during your early childhood and that it harmed you to not be with her as your primary parent.
I’m not asking you to believe any differently than you do; only that you remain open to the very real evidence out there that surrogacy is actually harmful to the child.
Do you have:
* ADHD, or ADHD-like distractibility
* people-pleasing even to the point of agreeing to do things you don’t want to do, hurting yourself or your own energy/time demands, just so you won’t disappoint them?
* tension stored by default anywhere in your body, such that you need to consciously think of releasing it in order to do so…But then it creeps right back in
* shallow breathing
* you suffer enormously whenever a romantic partner breaks up with you – more than it seems like you should suffer
* your grief when your mother dies ends up being seen by those around you as “too long” or “too severe” to be healthy
* over-achiever
* have a hard time confronting people whose words or behaviors hurt you or made you angry
* sabotage your career or your intimate relationships
* low self-esteem
* acted-up as a youth to “test the waters” with your mother and see if she would reject you
* OTOH, were overly compliant, maybe even never entering a normal teenage rebellion period (either of these two, acting-up or being overly compliant, can be a sign of maternal-infant separation at birth trauma)
* pulse runs fast
* cortisol levels run on the high side of “normal”
* have an autoimmune condition
I’m sure there are other trauma impacts that I’m just not remembering right now.
These are just some of the ways adoptees and probably surrogate children manifest our mother-child separation at birth trauma without recognizing any harm came to us from our separation at birth. We think these parts of ourselves just “happened”. But no, they’re actually the brain damage caused by being taken away from our gestational carrier at birth.
Following the logic that Katy Faust is talking about on this blog, no one should have children. Cannot wait for her children to grow up and blame her for her parenting.
No, she would say that only people who can bear their own children should have children. They won’t be separated at birth, causing a lifetime of brain damage with which to deal.
Thank you for writing this article. I was adopted as a baby and chose to be a surrogate for two gay men. I carry the Primal Wound every day and I know that my surrogate baby does too. This topic needs more consciousness, thought and healing.
Thank you so much. I want to share a story that broke my heart.
For background, I had no idea how smart babies were until I had my own. My children knew exactly who I was the moment they were born. As soon as I held them, they were quiet.
A gay couple I knew was expecting a child from a girl who was giving the baby for adoption. They shared pictures on Facebook of them holding the baby on their chests. In one post, they said, “So cute, but she just cries and cries. We’ve been up all night.”
My heart broke for that baby. I knew exactly what those cries sounded like. I knew exactly who they were for. The baby girl was mourning a mother who would never come.
Yes.
I have heard in several places that back in the 1960s when I was born, many of us were given the addictive drug phenobarbital to sedate us into sleep so we wouldn’t keep screaming for our mothers at and after birth.
We were kept, by law, for six weeks for observation before being taken to our adoptive parents. This was to ensure “nothing was wrong with us”. (Presumably, our parents wouldn’t have adopted us if something was wrong with us?)
Where I was kept, I don’t know. Supposedly we were either at hospitals, orphanages, or in foster care homes. I don’t know where I was for that first six (actually for me, it was almost 7) weeks of my life!
Six weeks is a very long time for even a 10-year-old to be away from home at summer camp! But if they do it, they go with the inner security of knowing Mom and Dad are still around to take them home if something terrible happens or they get very homesick or will otherwise help. They go with the inner security of knowing they’ll be returning home in 6 weeks.
I had no inner security and for me, it was a terror-filled, unbearably confusing, grief-filled total loss, with only a baby’s maturity level to try to understand what was happening to me and not even the ability to speak of it to ask for someone to help.
And people think this is not a harmful experience!
My adoptive parents said I vomited regularly for the first four weeks I was with them. I’m sure I was likewise vomiting for my first seven weeks, as well. The doctors couldn’t figure out why I was throwing up. I’m sure it was mother-loss-grief-etc. Eleven weeks of this before giving up!
I want to make one caveat about adoption because there’s some misswording. It SHOULD be treated as mending. But legally and socially it is not. You were correct in the idea that it is justifiable to have some guardianships which respect the uncrc. Adoption is no such thing. Adoption is currently legalized human trafficking. I hate that this organization pretends like we already have humane uncrc guardianships in place.
The motives behind guardianships are better than surrogacy. But as an adoptee I was trafficked, your site here would have people believing I wasn’t and that hurts. Your word choice matters. You’re talking about guardianships here not adoption.
Very true!
And they wrote as though the adoptive parents KNOW there is a trauma the child has experienced and is experiencing, and set themselves about the task of healing it.
Actually, hardly any adoptive parents know their child has suffered trauma if adopted as a baby. The “blank slate theory”, while proven entirely false, is still believed by nearly all adoptive parents. Hence, their defensiveness in discourse about the primal wound. ALL. THE. TIME.
They just simply cannot admit it.
How are these people who cannot admit it actually trying to heal it?
This left me completely befuddled. Where is Katy Faust getting her information that adoptive parents are devotedly acknowledging their baby’s trauma, loss, grief, and pain, and are trying to heal it?
Even if they’re the most loving adoptive parents, it first takes knowing and acknowledging the existence of this primal wound to be able to then study-up about how it may be addressed. (Very specific therapies are required and even then may not entirely resolve it, but can help!)
I felt as though Ms. Faust had two heads when I read her statements about adoptive parents. I engage with adoptive parents regularly on #AdopteeTikTok and the overwhelming majority of them are in huge denial, defiance, and defensiveness whenever an adoptee creates a video exploring the nature of the primal wound and evidence for it.
The American Academy of Pediatrics instructs to its member physicians to “Assume every adoptee and foster child has experienced trauma.” But is this information getting out by the pediatricians to the adoptive parents? No! And the doctors are supposed to be conducting trauma screenings of all adoptees. I cannot believe they are actually doing this or adoptive parents would almost all be aware of the trauma.
I was separated from my mother from the moment I was born, until 3 days later.
The reason was, she delivered with C-section and by mistake, the doctor wounded my head with his scalpel really badly. It was a dodgy time in our country, so to hide their mistake, they stitched me up and kept me away from her for three days so my wound could heal and the damage was lessened.
Both my mother and my father are incredible parents and they made sure I had a beautiful childhood, however, my deepest, most primal feeling has always been one of loneliness in the world and resentment towards my mother.
I had 0 idea where this came from and why I was like this, as here it’s believed that what happens to you when you were a baby has no impact on your adult life, as you don’t remember it. I blamed myself for feeling perpetually lonely and dissatisfied, it made me feel so ungrateful.
I always approached relationships with the feeling that no matter what, I will be abandoned and that I need to be absolutely perfect for people to even consider staying around me. I felt as if I needed to ‘trick’ people into loving me.
It wasn’t until I connected the dots and related it to the first three days of my life, spent with a throbbing wound on my head, in a hospital room, surrounded by unfamiliar people, that I could start to heal and all fell into place.
Babies feel and know everything, a person’s spirit has a record of each second of their experience, from start to finish.
Thank you for this wonderful article because there is almost nothing about the child’s right. Good on you and keep up the good work! About time we started to think not just of women’s reproductive desires and/or rights but equally the rights of an innocent, fail and powerless child!
As being an adopted baby at birth. I totally agree with this post.I was wounded at birth I found my biological mom at 16. I recall my adopted mom telling me it was hard to bond with me, because California state law says that the biological mom has 6 months to change her mind about the adoption. It effected me my whole life. As a married woman and a mother of five children, I can honestly say I couldn’t imagine surrogacy. There’s something about those long nights bonding with your bump , and feeling the baby move. The babies know. It’s a spiritual bond as well as a biological one.
I am an adoptive parent to a toddler who was adopted from foster care. Her mother fled the hospital and could not be found; the child has been with me since she was a few days old. While I don’t think of myself as an “inferior” mother (as a prior commenter mentions), I do acknowledge that there are some things I couldn’t give this beautiful baby. I will spend a lifetime trying to compensate for her losses…but the first step is dropping the defensiveness and acknowledging the pain. I’ve always been baffled that we aren’t discussing these losses with respect to surrogacy. After all, it is no consolation at all to the newborn that her mother was a consensual party to the whole situation, and that the child’s entire conception came with a contract. All the child knows is that she is being ripped away from the person who carried her.
Any comments on here in disapproval come from a place from fear of the truth.
The truth is that surrogacy violates human rights.
It is traumatic to the most vulnerable: the woman in need of compensation, and the child. Women are not breeders. And children are not products from an easy-bake oven.
With the upmost compassion and respect for those suffering from infertility and loss… your desire to raise and parent a child of your own cannot supersede the basic psychological rights of the child.
You will never be inferior, your wound is so real but it is not ethical to create a child of someone else’s womb.