My “Before”

Wednesday 5 August 2026

After the donor-conceived community, I went looking for the surrogacy-born one. And what I found was not a community at all. What I found was a handful of brave individual adults.

The most visible person I found is Olivia Maurel. She is French. She was born through surrogacy. She is now in her thirties. She has written op-eds. She has stood up in front of parliaments. She might be the most quoted surrogacy-born adult in the world right now — I have no way to measure that, but her name came up everywhere.

I read her work carefully, twice. Some of her arguments I had to read twice just to follow. I want to be respectful, so I’ll say this: she is articulate, she is fierce, and she has lived an experience I do not share but which is hers to describe.

But here is where I get stuck. Olivia is closely associated with something called the Casablanca Declaration, which is a global campaign to ban surrogacy outright as a crime. Her arguments — that surrogacy is harmful, that it should be abolished — were cited in support of the law that the Italian parliament passed in 2024. The law that means my baby sisters can’t get the Italian passports I have. The law that put a real-life shadow on my own family.

I am not going to argue with her. She is an adult. She is allowed her position. I am sitting here trying very hard not to project my view of my own family onto her view of hers, because that wouldn’t be fair to either of us.

What I noticed, reading her and the few other surrogacy-born adults who write publicly, is that most of the surrogacy-born voices I can find are campaigning voices, and mostly on one side. That is not a peer space. That is an argument. And none of it is aimed at someone my age who has nothing to campaign about yet. Who just wants to think.

So now I have the two pictures I went looking for, and I want to put them side by side.

Picture one: the donor-conceived community. Peer-led. Calm. Adult. Serious. Built for a population that overlaps with mine but is different — finding-out stories, not always-known stories. Their model is right. Their population isn’t mine.

Picture two: the public surrogacy-born voices. Brave. Adult. Mostly campaigning, mostly in one direction. Their courage is real. Their politics is not mine. And they are adults — none of them is writing for or with a fifteen-year-old.

Now picture three, the one I was trying to find. Peer-led, like the donor-conceived community, but for surrogacy-born people. Aimed at people roughly my age — call it twelve to twenty-five. Not for surrogacy, not against. Just for. Just with.

I could not find picture three.

I cross-checked over the past two days, in case I am wrong. I tried different search terms, different languages, different countries. I read three more academic papers, or at least their abstracts. I checked Reddit, in two relevant subreddits. Nothing.

I am as sure as I can be from a fifteen-year-old’s laptop at midnight: picture three is not built. Which is a strange thing to sit with. Maybe it means somebody should build it. Maybe it means there is a reason nobody has, and I haven’t found the reason yet. I can’t fully rule that out.

The internship taught me one thing that might be relevant. The reason the rota was still in a notebook was not that nobody had tried — it was that nobody had tried with the right shape. Maybe this is the same. People have tried adjacent things. Or at least, nobody I can find has tried this exact thing.

— D.