I’d rather be honest than impressive

Thursday 25 June 2026

I did what people my age do when they don’t know what to do. I opened a tab and typed.

I started with the simple words. Surrogacy. How surrogacy works. Surrogacy California. Surrogacy law. And the internet gave me what the internet is good at giving you: a lot of words, organised mostly into three big piles.

Pile one: the agencies. Glossy websites. Smiling families and cute babies on the homepage. Lots of useful information — types of surrogacy, the legal process, the cost (a lot), the timeline. All written in a friendly, professional voice. All written for the people who are about to start the journey. So, for adults.

Pile two: the law firms and the clinics. Slightly less glossy. More words like parental order, pre-birth order, intended parent, Hague Convention. I learned a lot. I added words to my vocabulary I didn’t have a week ago. None of it talked about me. It talked about a category of person — the surrogacy-born child — but it talked about us the way a school admissions page talks about the student. As an idea.

Pile three: the campaigners and the policy people. This is where it got more interesting. The UK Law Commission has been working on a big surrogacy reform. UNICEF published something in 2022 about children’s rights and surrogacy. Italy just made surrogacy a crime in 2024 — which, by the way, is the reason my baby sisters can’t have Italian passports the way I do. So this is not a theoretical issue in my family. This is a real thing.

But even in pile three, the people writing the documents are adults. The people lobbying the parliaments are adults. The “child” in children’s rights and surrogacy is, in most of these papers, a child of zero years old. A baby. An unborn baby in some of them.

I am not zero years old. I am a teenager.

I closed my laptop. Tomorrow night I’ll keep looking.

— D.