Tuesday 6 October 2026
Two weeks ago I wrote down a rule: three weeks, one follow-up, then move on. It was written for a professor. It has turned out to be needed for nobody else.
Since the last post I have written to two people who know more about surrogacy than almost anyone — one in the UK, one in the US. Not academics, not campaigners: people who have spent their working lives in the rooms where families like mine are made legal, and who have seen more of us than anyone else alive. I wrote to them because they were the two people most likely to tell me that the thing I want to build already exists and I had simply failed to find it. That was the question I was most afraid of, and I wanted it answered by the people best placed to say no.
Both replied within a day. Neither said no.
The first said she is not aware of anyone else doing this, that there is a definite gap, and that it is important. The second said the project is exciting, unique, and very much worth building. Since June the honest sentence has been ‘as far as I can tell, this does not exist’. As of this week it is ‘two people who would know say it does not exist’.
Both offered to help with the legal map — and both, independently, warned me about it. Laws are complicated and keep changing; in USA for example there is not one answer but fifty. So the map is going to be smaller and more honest than the one I imagined in July: a few places done carefully, checked by people who actually know, dated, and saying on every page that this is a starting point and not advice. The July version was the ambition of someone who had not yet spoken to a lawyer. I have now spoken to two.
What else changed. One of them pointed me to a piece of research I had missed — the only UK study that asked surrogacy-born children themselves what they think — and may be able to introduce me, with their consent and their parents’, to some of the young people in it. Fourteen weeks of looking and I had not found it, because I was searching for peers and it was filed under law reform. Lesson noted, again, and written into the map so that future me cannot pretend otherwise.
What did not change. Nothing is built. The glossary is still twelve entries. Episode 1 is still not written, and I now have fewer excuses than I have ever had, because the question that was stopping me — is this real? — has been answered by the people I asked it of.
Professor McLean has still not replied. The follow-up goes on Thursday. For the first time it does not feel like the thing everything else is waiting on.
Three emails out in September. Three yeses in by the first week of October — a teacher, and two people who co-authored me in the literal, legal sense and have now, fifteen years later, offered to do it again.
— D.
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