The Atlantic Dips Its Toes Into Surrogacy—and Misses the Point

The illustration is poignant: the shadowed profile of a pregnant woman fills the canvas. She is hunched over, cradling her pregnant belly, while two men play with a child perched on her back. Paired with the provocative title, “Mothers for Sale,” the image suggests that what follows will be a serious examination of the profound ethical problems at the heart of surrogacy.

Unfortunately, the article never quite gets there.

In Helen Lewis’s attempt to provide a comprehensive look at surrogacy for The Atlantic, her investigation becomes as much a personal journey of discovery as a critical examination of the practice itself. She documents some deeply troubling cases involving the abuse and exploitation of surrogate mothers, both in the United States and abroad. The reader can sense Lewis’s growing discomfort with the industry. But discomfort is not the same as confronting what the evidence reveals.

Indeed, the article repeatedly cushions its most disturbing accounts with positive surrogacy stories—including accounts of former surrogates who later go to work for agencies recruiting other women into the industry. The result is an article that recognizes many of surrogacy’s abuses without fully reckoning with the system that produces them.

And one group is almost entirely missing from the analysis: the children.

The article leaves some of the most fundamental questions about surrogacy largely unexplored:

• Is anyone entitled to a child?
• What rights do children have regarding their biological identity and origins?
• What protections exist for children intentionally conceived through commercial arrangements?
• What are the consequences of anonymous egg and sperm donation?
• How do we protect children from exploitation or abuse when surrogacy operates across jurisdictions with radically different laws?
• And what does it mean for society when the conception, gestation, and relinquishment of a child can all become matters of contract and commerce?

These are not peripheral questions. They are at the heart of the surrogacy debate.

Lewis correctly observes that surrogacy is an unusual political issue, bringing together people and organizations that agree on little else. Yet she largely frames serious opposition as coming from “radical feminists and socially conservative Catholics.” That framing is far too narrow. Lewis herself quotes Kallie Fell, Executive Director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, a secular educational nonprofit that has spent more than 25 years documenting the ethical, medical, and human consequences of surrogacy.

Opposition to surrogacy cannot simply be placed into familiar left-right political categories. Feminists, human-rights advocates, bioethicists, religious organizations, secular organizations, children’s-rights advocates, and former surrogates have all raised serious objections to the practice. What often unites them is not ideology but concern about what happens when women’s reproductive capacities and children themselves become commodities within a marketplace.

Lewis also contrasts the commercial surrogacy environment of the United States with the generally more restrictive approach found across much of Europe. But the European picture deserves greater scrutiny as well. In the United Kingdom, for example, battles over surrogacy law have included proposals affecting the legal status and rights of surrogate mothers at birth. Organizations such as Stop Surrogacy Now UK have documented these debates while attempting to keep attention on the women and children whose interests can easily become secondary to those of intended parents and the expanding fertility industry.

At several points, Lewis comes tantalizingly close to identifying the fundamental problem.

She recounts advice at a Men Having Babies conference that intended parents preparing a surrogacy agreement should imagine themselves “at the funeral of the surrogate.” She also describes an intended parent dismissing a surrogate mother’s desire to hold the baby she had carried by emphasizing that the woman was being paid thousands of dollars each month.

Those moments are chilling because they expose the logic underneath commercial surrogacy.

A woman can die.

A woman can become emotionally attached to the child developing inside her.

A woman can want to hold the baby she has carried for nine months.

Yet the machinery of the transaction must continue.

These stories should not be buried deep within an examination of the industry. They should force us to ask what kind of system requires contracts anticipating a pregnant woman’s death and treats a mother’s emotional connection to the child she carries as an inconvenience to a commercial arrangement.

The Center for Bioethics and Culture is grateful to have participated in Lewis’s reporting. Serious journalism about surrogacy is desperately needed, and her article brings important facts and disturbing practices before a large audience.

But the conversation must go further.

Surrogacy cannot be evaluated only by asking whether intended parents are happy, whether some surrogate mothers report positive experiences, or whether contracts can be drafted more carefully. The ethical question is not simply whether surrogacy can be regulated better. We must ask what surrogacy requires in the first place.

It requires a woman to carry a child with the contractual expectation that she will relinquish that child after birth. Commercial surrogacy places a financial value on that reproductive labor. Gestational surrogacy can intentionally separate a child from the woman who carried him or her and, when donor gametes are involved, from one or both genetic parents as well. The resulting agreements can divide biological, gestational, legal, and social parenthood among multiple adults before a child is even born.

Our culture understandably asks for compassion for those suffering from infertility and for people who desperately want children.

But compassion cannot stop with the adults who want a child.

Where is our compassion for the woman whose body becomes the means by which someone else’s desire is fulfilled? Where is our concern for the risks she assumes during pregnancy and childbirth? And where is our empathy for the child whose biological and familial relationships are deliberately divided through contracts written before that child ever takes a breath?

Those voices must be at the center of the surrogacy debate—not at its margins.

The CBC hopes other journalists will build on the questions Lewis has begun to raise and examine more closely what the global surrogacy industry requires of women and children. Recent international scrutiny has increasingly focused on surrogacy through the language of exploitation, violence, commodification, and the sale of children.

“Mothers for Sale” is a provocative title.

The harder question is whether we are willing to confront the reality those words describe.