When a famous person announces the birth of a child through surrogacy, the story is often framed not just as joy fulfilled, but as the “only option” for starting or expanding a family. Headlines glow with gratitude. Social media fills with congratulations. Interviews emphasize miracles, resilience, and “the journey.” When Meghan Trainor recently shared that her newest child was born through surrogacy, the most of the news was met with exactly this response—warmth, admiration, and applause for a woman who, after medical struggles, had found a way to grow her family. However, we at the CBC noticed a small shift, a changing tide, a more critical response to this celebrity birth announcement.

Meghan Trainor is not unique. She is simply the latest in a growing number of wealthy, influential figures who have the means to outsource pregnancy and the risks of assisted reproductive technologies. What makes celebrity surrogacy culturally powerful is not just its visibility, but its influence. When famous people normalize paying for reproduction, the practice is reframed as compassionate, aspirational, or medically necessary—something to be admired rather than examined.

But what about the child? From the very beginning, a child born through surrogacy begins life in a body that is temporarily rented and legally bound to be returned. Often, they are conceived using donor eggs or sperm, meaning their biological parentage has been intentionally divided, anonymized, or erased. Love does not undo the fact that money, contracts, and technology have overridden the natural bond between mother and child, treating women’s bodies as a service and children’s beginnings as a transaction.

Consider Olympian Alysa Liu, a remarkable young athlete whose story is often told as one of triumph. Less often mentioned is that she, like her siblings, was conceived through an anonymous egg donor and carried by a surrogate mother. Her origin story involved deliberate separation: one woman whose body produced her, another whose body carried her, and a child who would one day grow up knowing that neither woman was meant to remain fully hers. This is not Alysa’s fault, nor is it Meghan Trainor’s child’s fault. But it is their story. It is a story that asks questions no legal agreement or social media post can answer: Who carried me? What did she feel when she handed me over? Why was I separated from half of myself? Does Alysa wonder if her biological mother was a figure skater? Does she wonder if she was an athlete?

Fame has a way of dulling our moral instincts. When children appear happy, healthy, and successful, we assume the story ends there. But human beings are shaped not only by outcomes, but by beginnings—by bonds formed, or deliberately broken, before we ever speak our first word. To question celebrity surrogacy, or surrogacy in general, is not to shame parents or reject children. It is to take these children seriously, to imagine life from their side of the story—not the spotlight, but the womb; not the applause, but the unanswered questions.

Because no matter how famous the parents, and no matter how successful the child, every child begins the same way: dependent, vulnerable, and deserving of a beginning that puts their needs first. These children do not need our silence. They need our honesty, our courage, and our willingness to ask whether paying for reproduction—especially on the world’s most influential stages—comes at a cost we are asking the most vulnerable to bear.

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