My “Before”

Friday 7 August 2026

End of Phase 1. The map exists. I have a Google Doc that catalogues every organisation, person, book, podcast, paper, and policy document I have found in the past five weeks, with one line each on what they do and one line on what they don’t.

I am writing this post because tonight I need to do the thing I have been avoiding: write down, in one paragraph, what specifically I am proposing.

So here it is, the version that survived this evening’s swim training:

The thing I am proposing — it does not have a name yet — would be a website by and for people born through surrogacy, roughly ages 12 to 25. Run by us, not by parents or agencies or campaigners. Not for surrogacy, not against it. It would have four pieces. A plain-language glossary and a country-by-country map of the rules, written for someone my age. An interview series — surrogacy-born kids and young adults answering the same five questions, so over time you can see how different the answers are. Meetups, but run under an established organisation’s child-safety rules, never by me. And, eventually, some kind of yearly report on what the world looks like for people like us, although I still do not know how to make one. As far as I can tell after five weeks of looking, nothing with all four pieces exists anywhere, for this group.

Reading that paragraph back is uncomfortable. It reads like I am claiming something. I keep wanting to soften it. I keep telling myself: a fifteen-year-old does not get to propose this.

But I have spent five weeks checking, and I cannot find it. Maybe someone will read this and tell me it already exists. Honestly, part of me hopes they do — that would save me a lot of work and prove somebody cared enough to build it.

So the paragraph stays. I have read it three times and I have not made it smaller. Phase 1 is done. Phase 2 — testing the gap — starts Monday.

— D.