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When a surrogacy agency sent Carole-Anne Kelly* a profile of a couple who were desperate for a second baby, she felt “an immediate bond”.
Today, Kelly, 40, feels deceived and utterly betrayed. Because after giving birth to baby M in the summer of 2019, she made a number of shocking discoveries.
Rather than helping a desperate couple unable to have a baby, she found out that Lisa was, in fact, pregnant herself. What’s more, she discovered that neither the sperm or the egg that produced baby M had any biological connection to Todd or Lisa.
And, most shockingly of all, she learnt that, once born, baby M had been sold for $100,000 (£75,000) to another couple – Mark and Chrissy* – in the UK, who already had three children and were expecting a fourth – the very last people she would have offered to help. But Mark was the sperm donor and therefore baby M’s biological father.
Kelly, who lives in the US, was distraught. “It was a lie from start to finish,” she says. “I can’t trust anything any more. The surrogacy industry preys on vulnerable women, it grooms them and uses their bodies for money, yet you’re not allowed to talk about it. I know I’m not the only woman to have something like this happen and I want to speak out to show others that they’re not alone.”
While her story may sound like an anomaly, anti-surrogacy campaigners say otherwise.
Women are financially incentivised by agencies who don’t tell them that surrogacy pregnancy carries increased risks, including severe pregnancy complications such as sepsis, pre-eclampsia and postpartum haemorrhage. Surrogacy dehumanises them and reduces them to a ‘useful carrier’.”
Looking back, she says she was “love-bombed” by the agency in those early days. “I have since found out that I have something called ‘toxic empathy’ where I’ll put myself at risk to help others and I think the agency recognised this in me,” she says.
After a 24-hour labour, she needed an emergency C-section and is still traumatised today with memories of being drugged with morphine and tied to the bed before being wheeled into theatre. When she woke up, baby M was born.
“I said that I was sorry and that I hoped to be a part of his life and then he was gone. Todd had brought me flowers, said thank-you and took him away. Going home without a baby, I was lost.”
“But then I discovered that in fact, a man in the UK was M’s biological father. An associate of Todd’s called Mark had donated the sperm and it was his child. M was now in the UK with a family I didn’t know existed. I suddenly felt panicked and really uncomfortable.”
It was at this point that Kelly realised she had been deceived. “All this time I thought M was going to live only a few hours away from me but he’d been taken to England,” she says. “He’d been put into foster care while there was this huge investigation into what was going on. It seemed that the authorities were not happy with this situation either.”
After a protracted legal battle, she discovered last year that M would remain with Mark and his family. Despite being sent pictures of the little boy and updates in the first few years of his young life, she has heard nothing for over a year.
Kelly says: “I don’t even know if that little boy knows he was born by surrogate. I went into this journey hoping to help a family with their dream of a baby. Instead, it’s shown me a side to surrogacy that is really sinister. It has to stop.”
Source: Surrogacy scandal: I helped a ‘desperate’ couple have a child, but they sold my baby to someone else