The time, travel, emotional turmoil and expense of entering into a surrogacy agreement with a woman in another country can only suggest that the baby born at the end of the process is a much-wanted child.
However, that assumption has proved tragically false in shocking cases, where parents have abandoned the newborns they claimed to want when circumstances changed after the birth.
They include the much-publicised case of Baby Gammy, who was carried, by a Thai surrogate mother for an Australian couple – who took his twin sister and left him behind after it was discovered he had Down’s syndrome.
Surrogacy, when a woman gives birth to a baby for another person or couple, has been flung firmly into the spotlight again this week after Emily in Paris star Lily Collins and her husband Charlie McDowell announced the birth of their daughter, Tove.
Film director McDowell later penned an emotional Instagram post saying they’d been the victim of a ‘hateful’ response to their newborn’s arrival – and they are not the first celebrity parents to come under scrutiny for using a surrogate.
The process – legal in the UK since the Surrogacy Arrangements Act came into force in 1985 but practised for centuries – involves a surrogate undergoing IVF to become impregnated with an embryo using the egg of an intended mother or donor with sperm from the intended father or donor.
For many, it has provided a precious chance at parenthood – but it also remains a highly controversial approach; the harshest criticism has suggested its a form of ‘human trafficking’ and ‘rich people renting women’s bodies’.
Others have suggested that if surrogacy is abused, it has echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale; Margaret Attwood’s dystopian novel about fertile women who are forcibly impregnated by the husbands of the ruling class.
Baby Gammy, born to Australian parents using a Thai surrogate, became a global news story in 2014 after he was born with a heart condition and Down syndrome, and left with his birthing mother
Khloe Kardashian, who gave birth to her daughter, True, herself in April 2018 but chose a surrogate to have her son Tatum, born in August 2022 has spoken about how hard bonding can be with a newborn you haven’t carried yourself.
On the Good American podcast after his birth, she told co-host Dr Thaïs Aliabadi: ‘I wasn’t carrying him, I didn’t really feel anything.’
While celebrity surrogacy arrangements do come under scrutiny, regular parents from Western countries have also faced criticism for making surrogacy arrangements abroad where the women are often poorly paid and the system is highly unregulated.
Indeed, the most controversial cases seem to have arisen out of cases where surrogacy arrangements have been made with women in countries such as Ukraine, India and Thailand.
In 2015, India announced a clamp down on the booming trade of foreigners struggling to conceive hiring young surrogate mothers after controversy over the ‘rent-a-womb’ exploitation of poor women.
It came after a case in 2012 where an Australian couple were accused of leaving one of their twins behind in India after a surrogate birth because they ‘already had’ a child of the same gender and didn’t want another.
The Down syndrome twin – Baby Gammy – left behind by his Australian parents, who chose to KEEP his healthy sister
Baby Gammy: The little boy’s Thai surrogate mother, Pattaramon Chanbua with Gammy in August 2014, shortly after the controversy erupted
David John Farnell and his wife Wenyu ‘Wendy’ Li (pictured) took one of their surrogate’s babies home, a healthy girl named Pipah, but not the other, Baby Gammy
The little boy with Down Syndrome lives with his birth mother, Pattaramon Chanbua, and attends school thanks to the support of an Australian charity
In 2014, Australian couple David John Farnell and Wenyu Wendy Li paid a Thai woman, Pattaramon Chanbua, who lived 90km south of Bangkok, $16,000 AUD to act as their surrogate.
The couple paid an extra $1673 AUD when they first realised – three months into the pregnancy – that Ms Chanbua was having twins for them.
But the arrangement promptly fell apart leaving two twins separated, and the story made global, heart-wrenching news.
Ms Chanbua, then just 21, had given birth to twins Pipah and Gammy but the Farnells quickly found themselves at the centre of huge controversy when their birthing mother accused them of abandoning baby Gammy because the infant, born prematurely, had Down syndrome and a heart condition.
Not long after the birth, the couple flew out of Thailand and returned to their home in Bunbury, Western Australia but only with one child, Pipah, who was born healthy.
The family’s decision sparked outrage, and in the days and weeks after his birth, little Gammy was moved to Samitivej Sriracha Hospital in Bangkok for specialist care, after being transferred from the provincial hospital he was born in in southeastern Thailand.
Ms Chanbua vowed to care for the critically-ill baby she had given birth to, with Gammy’s parents heavily criticised for leaving their young son behind.
The birthing mother, who already had two other children aged three and six – told the ABC she felt sorry for baby Gammy.
‘This was the adults’ fault. And who is he to endure something like this even though it’s not his fault?’ she said.
In this photo released by the Hands Across The Water charity in 2017, Gammy is seen playing with blocks. He was born premature, with Down syndrome and a congenital heart problem
‘Why does he have to be abandoned and the other baby has it easy?
In another interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, the young mother warned other women about acting as surrogates, saying: ‘I would like to tell Thai women – don’t get into this business as a surrogate.
‘Don’t just think only for money… if something goes wrong no one will help us and the baby will be abandoned from society, then we have to take responsibility for that.’
The fury against the Australian couple was further stoked when it was revealed Mr Farnell had historical child sex abuse convictions dating back to the 1980s.
A judge had been scathing about Mr Farnell on sentencing, saying he had ‘robbed’ two young girls of their childhoods by molesting them in 1982 and 1983.
The couple quickly found themselves in the eye of a media storm, hiding in their home as journalists and photographers camped outside.
Mr Farnell eventually gave an interview to Australian news programme 60 Minutes, telling host Tara Brown that any ‘urges’ he had to abuse children had gone.
At the time of Gammy’s birth, Ms Chanbua warned other young Thai women against offering to become surrogates for money
He said his daughter ‘will be 100 per cent safe. I will do everything in the world to protect my little girl.’
The Farnells went on to live a quiet life raising their daughter and David Farnell died in 2020, after a long illness fighting an asbestos-related illness from exposure as a young tradesman.
As for Gammy, he is now known by the nickname ‘Grammy’ and has benefited from the’ extraordinary generosity of Australian donors in Thailand.
More than $240,000 was donated to support the little boy and his mother and it was spent to buy a permanent home for him to live in, to be held in trust until he is 21.
In 2017, Ms Chanbua told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the money ‘made all the difference’.
‘He got a new house to live in. He’s able to go to kindergarten and live in better conditions.’
The little girl whose twin didn’t survive abandoned by her US parents when they were told she would be disabled
Bridget Irmgard Pagan-Etnyre was born to a 22-year-old surrogate in Ukraine in 2016 but her health conditions meant she was adopted by another family after being rejected by her birth parents
In the US, the case of Baby Bridget was dubbed ‘America’s Baby Gammy’ because of the parallels in the two children’s stories.
Bridget Irmgard Pagan-Etnyre was born in Ukraine in early 2016, the daughter of American couple Matthew Etnyre, a Hollywood producer, and Irmgard Pagan, a wind turbine technician.
Their young surrogate, 22, had been arranged via an agency in Kiev, and had fallen pregnant with twins.
After the couple paid a reported fee of 29,900 euros, the surrogate gave birth to the twins at just 25 weeks’ into her pregnancy.
Bridget’s brother died six days after birth and the little girl was born weighing just 810 grams with serious health complications including mental and physical impairments.
German publication Spiegel reported that Matthew Etnyre and Irmgard Pagan asked the ICU doctors caring for their daughter if she would be disabled; and when they replied ‘yes’, the couple’s attitude changed. They left the country and didn’t return.
The infant was placed in an orphanage in the country after being discharged from hospital.
Three-and-a-half years’ later, the toddler was located by Australian broadcaster ABC in an orphanage in the city of Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine.
Her story caught the attention of the Graves family, from Maryland in the US, and she finally got a happy ending.
On their website, the family says they were officially registered as her parents in December 2021 but the invasion of Ukraine by Russia meant she couldn’t join her new family until the following April.
They wrote on philandkirstie.com: ‘God has it on our hearts to adopt Bridget. We were able to go to Ukraine, though Poland, in April of 2022. We got home in May of 2022 and have been working to make the transition to our family as easy as possible for her.’
The little girl is now known as Briella ‘Brizzy’ Claire Graves.
The Italian couple who never came back for their 16-month-old daughter – and the nanny left heartbroken when she was adopted
In 2020, the Italian Red Cross made a mercy mission to collect a little girl who had been born by surrogate in the Ukraine, and then abandoned by her Italian parents
The little girl, by then 16 months, had been cared for by a Ukrainian nanny who told authorities she couldn’t afford to raise her
An Italian court ruled she should be raised in Italy and the Red Cross escorted her to Malpensa, where she was placed in foster care while awaiting adoption
In 2020, Italy was gripped by the case of a couple who’d paid a Ukrainian surrogate but appeared to change their mind when their daughter was born.
Surrogacy in the Ukraine remains commercially led, with many agencies offering their services to prospective parents overseas.
The couple had travelled to the country in August 2020 after flight restrictions during the pandemic eased.
However, once their daughter was born, the couple apparently had a change of heart about parenthood. They were alleged to have said they would return to get the baby, leaving her in the care of a nanny in the meantime…but the Ukrainian woman never heard from them again.
Highlighting the fragility of a surrogacy commitment, when the Italian authorities contacted the couple, they confirmed they did not want to raise the child.
The court deemed that she should be put up for adoption in the couple’s native Italy, leaving the nanny heartbroken.
A Red Cross team then flew to Kiev to get her, and the toddler was flown back, with her favourite teddies, to the Italian city of Malpensa before being placed with foster carers.
Volunteer pediatrician for the Italian Red Cross, Carolina Casini, said the little girl had made the journey asleep in her arms, and said she’d been well cared for, adding: ‘the nanny who looked after her until yesterday loved her very much and took great care of her.’
How a cancer diagnosis during pregnancy led to two dads-to-be asking for a termination
In 2023, Californian mother-of-four Brittney Pearson, 37, from Sacramento told DailyMail.com she was told to terminate her surrogate pregnancy at 24 weeks by the child’s prospective fathers after she was diagnosed with breast cancer
Pearson claimed the gay couple who were paying her to carry their child used legal threats to pressure her into terminating the pregnancy – after stating they no longer wanted their DNA out there
Another US case saw a surrogate claim that a couple had asked her to terminate her pregnancy after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In 2023, Brittney Pearson, 37, from Sacramento, told DailyMail.com that she had been diagnosed with HER2+ cancer while 22 weeks’ pregnant.
She said that after a full body MRI revealed the extent of the disease, the two prospective dads who were paying her to carry their child used legal threats to pressure her into terminating the pregnancy.
The unnamed gay couple, Pearson claimed, wanted the baby ‘immediately terminated’ and ‘erased’ as they believed it had no chance at life.
They did not want a baby born before 34 weeks because they allegedly feared the infant would have considerable health problems, it is claimed.
The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, an anti-surrogacy group which first reported on Pearson’s case, claimed at the time that the prospective fathers also sought to bar Pearson from carrying the child to term, then giving it up for adoption.
They’re said to have told her that they didn’t want their ‘DNA out there’, being raised by someone else. DailyMail.com was unable to contact the prospective dads to verify that claim.
Pearson told DailyMail.com of the distress she felt after the prospective fathers allegedly ‘threatened everyone they could with a lawsuit’ including Pearson, her agency and Sutter Health.
At one point, she claimed, her oncology team, after being threatened with legal action, said they were not sure they could give her chemo and would need to consult their own lawyers.
‘It was frustrating because I wanted to give them a family’ she told DailyMail.com, ‘they said they cared but they didn’t. I felt betrayed and heartbroken.’
The baby was born prematurely and Pearson, who already had four children, confirmed later that the infant had sadly died.
Jennifer Lahl, president of The center for Bioethics and Culture Network said of the case at the time: ‘I often say, there are plenty of reasons to get people to see how surrogacy is wrong, is harmful, and is bad for women and for children.
‘This case highlights many of the problems with contracted, largely commercial, pregnancy.’
