Olivia Maurel

And today I speak not only as someone who was born through it, but also as a mother, and I cannot accept a system that treats women as reproductive vessels for the rich and children as outcomes that are to be delivered to those who can afford it.

So that's why I reject it.

Not from ideology, but from lived reality.

I was not raised by my biological mother, but I was raised by my biological father.

In gestational surrogacy, sometimes the egg and the sperm of the commissioning parents are used to create the child, but you have to understand that even in gestational surrogacy, that child is going to bond with his mother inside the womb.

He's going to want her at birth, and that's the only person he's going to want at birth.

Her smell, her voice, her milk, everything, she's the one that he was living in for nine months.

And that separation is what causes the trauma of abandonment, the primal wound, as we call it in adoption.

Well, very simply, you've got a couple, a commissioning couple, or a single parent can actually go through surrogacy.

A single father, a single mother can buy themselves a child.

They go to an agency, they put a check on the table, and they go through a catalog of women that are to become the surrogate.

And so they can choose her based on her physical appearance, if she went and did studies.

They can also choose the egg or the sperm if they need.

Once that's done, the fertility clinic is going to create the embryo in a lab and then insert the embryo into the surrogate mother.

Meanwhile, they're going to insert one embryo, or more if you're in other countries than America, and all the other embryos that have been created are either going to be put into the trash, if I can say, or they're going to be frozen for other surrogates to come.

So the surrogate mother is going to have to follow a lot of rules that are very well listed in the contract between

herself, the surrogacy agency, and the commissioning parents.

And once the whole process is over, once she gives birth to the baby, she has to hand over the child to the commissioning parents immediately.

No, that's one of the clauses is she signs over and she waives over her rights on the child.

So she cannot at some point in the process say, well, you know, I want to keep the baby.