The number of single men seeking children through surrogacy is rising on both sides of the Atlantic. In my home country of England, 170 single men have applied for parental orders since 2019. In the United States, where commercial surrogacy is a multibillion-dollar industry, the trend is even more pronounced. I read these developments with a sinking heart.
As a foster carer and adoptive parent with over 20 years of experience, I’ve met many people living with the grief of infertility. The longing for a child can be bone-deep. I do not underestimate it. But wanting something desperately is not the same as being entitled to it, especially when fulfilling that desire requires another woman to carry a child she will surrender, and a baby who will lose his or her mother at birth.
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I have seen up close what separation from a birth mother does to a child. My adopted daughter came to me at three weeks old, withdrawing from heroin and crack cocaine. I held her through the painful cramps and tremors, sang to her through the night, and loved her with everything I had. She is fourteen now. We finish each other’s sentences, bicker, laugh, and swap clothes. Yet there is still a void in her life that no amount of love can fully fill, because I am not the woman who carried her.
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This is biological reality. Infants recognize their mother’s scent, voice, and heartbeat from the womb. The trauma of early separation, often called the “primal wound,” creates toxic stress with lifelong effects on emotional regulation, mental health, and physical well-being. The body keeps the score.
Of course, sometimes the state must intervene to protect a child. I have waited outside maternity wards while police prepared to remove a newborn. But we never pretend this is anything other than a tragedy. Adoption is treated as a last resort.
Those of us who adopt children who have already lost their birth mother face intense scrutiny. We are trained to help children process their story and are encouraged to speak honestly about their birth family. We explain that the separation was necessary to keep them safe.
So what do we tell the child deliberately created through surrogacy? That their mother was removed not because of abuse or neglect, but because an adult (or adults) chose to design a life without her? That their loss was not an accident of circumstance, but part of the plan?
I once fostered a baby boy who was adopted at 12 months. When he was three, during a visit, he looked at me and asked: “Wosie, which shop did you buyed me from?” His innocent question stayed with me. How is a child supposed to make sense of the knowledge that their entry into the world involved a transaction?
Children have an innate need to know where they come from. Anyone who has raised an adopted child understands that. The longing may recede for months, then surge back with force, triggered by something small — a school project, a birthday, a passing comment from a friend. It does not disappear because it is inconvenient. It is an essential part of their puzzle, a deep emotional need.
The entire adoption framework is built on that knowledge. Those who wish to adopt receive extensive training on the attachment difficulties that will almost certainly arise — the push and pull of a child who desperately wants to be loved but has learned, at the cellular level, that the person who should have been there first was not. They are also subjected to intense scrutiny, rightly so.
Yet a parental order following surrogacy requires far less, and the asymmetry is glaring. If you want to parent a child who has already lost their mother, the state scrutinizes you intensely. If you want to create a child who will be separated from their mother at birth, the oversight is light. The only real difference is that in the latter case, the loss was the plan.
I wish with all my heart that I were my daughter’s birth mother. But I cannot rewrite her story. My job is to love her while honoring the truth of her beginnings. One day, many children born through surrogacy will have to reckon with the fact that their maternal loss was not accidental, but designed.
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We frequently say that the welfare of the child is paramount. Yet too often we sacrifice it to satisfy adult desires. Turning children into commodities to meet lifestyle choices is not something a moral society should sanction.
When are we going to put children first?
Some names have been changed to protect their identities.
Rosie Lewis is a foster carer and adopter. She lives in London with her adopted daughter and two birth children and writes on Substack about parenting, fostering, and adoption.
