Sunday 1 November 2026
This week I sent the beta.
It went to Ms Shafqat first, as I’d always promised, and then to the two surrogacy lawyers, one in the UK and one in the US, each with the pages for their own country. It’s the end of October. I said I would send it by the end of October, and I did. Writing that down feels better than I expected.
But the thing I keep thinking about this week isn’t the beta. It’s an email from Rome.
A week ago I wrote to a family lawyer in Italy. She helped my family when Italy changed its law in 2024, so she knows exactly how complicated it gets for families like mine there. I asked whether she’d be willing to look at the Italy page of the legal map. I wrote it carefully and then mostly expected nothing. She’s busy, she owes me nothing, and I’m fifteen.
She replied the next day. She said yes. Then she offered to answer my questions and to talk on a video call. A day after that she sent the page back with her corrections: places where I’d made things sound simpler than they are, and places where the law on paper and what actually happens in a town hall aren’t the same thing. I would never have found those in an article. I’ve fixed every one, and the Italy page is much better and much more honest for it.
What stopped me, though, was something else she said. Like the two lawyers in the UK and the US before her, she said she didn’t know of anything like Co-Authored. Not in Italy, and not anywhere she knew of.
That’s three now, in three countries. Three people who have spent their careers around surrogacy, and none of them knows of a place made by and for the people who were born through it.
When I started in June, the gap was just a feeling: I’d gone looking for something written for people like me and couldn’t find it. Over the summer it became a map of what does exist, and of the space nobody fills. Now people who would know have looked at the same space and said the same thing. It’s real.
I want to be careful with that feeling, because it would be easy to make it bigger than it is. Being told a gap exists is not the same as filling it well. A beta is not a launch. Nobody my age has read a single page yet. Three reviewers are about to tell me what I’ve got wrong, and I want them to. There’s still no safeguarding lead, the inbox only just started working, and the family still has to decide how much of my own story goes public.
So this isn’t the finish line. It feels more like the first time I’ve been allowed onto the track.
What happens next is slower and less exciting: corrections, dates, a safeguarding statement, more checking. Then, if everything I promised myself is in place, a careful launch at the end of December for anyone between twelve and twenty-five who goes looking, the way I did, and finds nothing.
Next time they won’t find nothing.
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