Chapter 1: What are the current global trends in surrogacy?
In recent years, countries around the world have clamped down on surrogacy, in some cases banning it outright and even imposing criminal penalties on citizens who travel abroad to obtain a child. But the practice continues to grow in popularity as the market shifts to more lenient hubs, including the U.S.
In this episode, we speak to an anti-surrogacy activist who herself was born via surrogacy here in the U.S. and purchased by foreign parents. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
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Chapter 2: How did Olivia Maurel's personal experience shape her views on surrogacy?
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Chapter 3: What are the ethical concerns surrounding surrogacy contracts?
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Chapter 4: How does the surrogacy process work from a legal perspective?
Olivia, thank you so much for coming on.
Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Now, I understand you are advocating to end surrogacy. Could you give us a little bit of background about your story and how you got into this?
Sure. I actually like to say that I am a pure product of surrogacy. I was planned, I was contracted, and I was delivered. So I was born through surrogacy in 1991 in Louisville, Kentucky. So 34 years ago now.
Chapter 5: What rights do surrogate mothers have during and after pregnancy?
And actually, I grew up not knowing my origins, not knowing where I came from. At the age of 17, I started making research on internet about the city where I was born in America. and I fell on surrogacy agencies, and that's how I kind of found out that I was born of surrogacy.
And today, I speak as the spokesperson of the Casablanca Declaration that fights for the universal abolition of surrogacy, and they came and found me. They came and found me, and now it's my work. It started as a feeling. I grew up I knew something didn't fit, and even if I couldn't really explain it. And I have to say, I wasn't separated by my mother by tragedy, like an adoption.
I was separated by her by design.
Chapter 6: How do different countries regulate surrogacy practices?
And once you see that clearly, you can't unsee it. So I'm not just someone that's born through surrogacy. I'm its outcome. I'm its product. I was created through a process where a woman's body was used and a child, that's me, was expected to be handed over at birth.
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.
Now, when you say you didn't know where you came from, some people, when they do surrogacy, they use their own genetic material and they implant that into a third party. Were you not raised by your biological parents?
Chapter 7: What psychological challenges do children born through surrogacy face?
What was your situation?
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.
Now, how does the process work with surrogacy? You've talked about how it's basically a bought and sold baby. How does that industry work?
Well, very simply, you've got a couple, a commissioning couple, or a single parent can actually go through surrogacy.
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Chapter 8: What progress has been made in surrogacy regulation advocacy?
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.
Does the surrogate mother have any rights if she begins to have an attachment with the baby or does not want to hand over the baby? I mean, I think a woman who's not pregnant at the beginning of the process may not really have a theory of mind of what it's going to be like nine months later after she's carried this child.
Does the woman have a right at the end of it to say, no, I want to keep my child?
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. She can't. She's bound to the contract.
Are there currently any laws on the books regulating this or trying to rein it in in any country? I mean, are there certain exemplar countries out there that you think have a more ethical standard? Or is this just the Wild West in most of the world?
It's the Wild West in... of the world. I mean, take the United Kingdom or Canada, where they allow what's called altruistic surrogacy. So, in theory, there's no profit, so there's no money handed over directly to the surrogate. But in reality, there's always payments, expenses, compensation, indirect financial support.
And then you look at places like the Ukraine or the US, where you have highly structured contract-based systems. That doesn't eliminate the ethical problem, sorry. It just professionalizes it. And so globally, what we see is cross-border surrogacy.
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