My “Before”

Tuesday 14 July 2026

A bad evening for swim training. Coach gave us a set I didn’t want. Hard intervals on 100s. I did it badly. So I came home angry and to take it out on something I sat at my desk and wrote out what I had been finding all month.

Here is the pattern, as clearly as I can put it. Every resource I have found about surrogacy is aimed at one of three audiences:

1. The adults doing the surrogacy — intended parents, surrogates, donors, clinicians, lawyers.
2. Very young children of the people doing the surrogacy — picture books, ages 2 to 8, written to be read aloud at bedtime.
3. The general public, via policy or campaigning channels — UK Law Commission consultations, UNICEF position papers, Italian newspaper debates.

I could not find a fourth pile. I kept looking for something aimed at people in between — old enough to have their own questions, but not adults yet. I have not found much.

That does not mean nothing exists. I may be searching badly. Some groups may be private, which would make sense. I also found organisations for donor-conceived people — Donor Conceived UK and We Are Donor Conceived. Their work looks serious and I want to read it properly. But donor conception and surrogacy are not exactly the same thing. We overlap. We’re not the same.

So my current guess is that there is a gap for surrogacy-born teenagers. It is a guess, not a conclusion.

At the internship I learned that when something looks missing, the first question is not “how do I build it?” The first question is “does it already exist somewhere I have not looked?” That is what I am going to find out next.

— D.