My “Before”

Tuesday 30 June 2026

I have been swimming a lot, when the internship lets me. I do my best thinking in the pool. Coach gave me a 4 × 400 free set on Friday and somewhere around the third one I realised what had been bothering me about all the Googling.

Here’s what I’d seen in nearly a week of evening and Tube-journey reading:

• Intended parents writing about their journeys. Blogs. Books. Podcasts. A lot of these.
• Surrogates writing about their experience. Also a lot. More than I expected.
• Doctors and clinicians explaining the process.
• Lawyers explaining the contracts.
• Activists arguing for or against the whole thing.
• Children’s books for ages 2 to 8 — sweet ones, picture books about how families are made.

And then nothing. Or almost nothing.

There is no equivalent of the parents’ Substack or the surrogate’s TED talk, written by a kid who was actually born this way. There is no podcast called Surrogacy from the kid’s chair. There is no Reddit thread that isn’t either advice for intended parents or someone yelling at someone else about ethics. There is no place where a thirteen-year-old who has just thought of a question about the surrogate who carried them can go and read what another fourteen-year-old wrote about the same question last year.

The conversation about surrogacy is happening at full volume. Just without us in the room.

That is a strange feeling to discover. I keep going back and forth between two reactions.

The first is: okay, well, we’re a small group. Surrogacy isn’t that common. Maybe there just aren’t enough of us to make a community.

The second is: Yes there are. There are thousands. I just don’t know them.

I think the second one is closer to true. I just don’t know how to find them.

And then a small, slightly stupid third thought arrived: maybe the way you find them is by being the first person to speak.

I am going to sleep on this one. Tomorrow is a busy day at the internship.

— D.