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Surrogacy is often discussed through the hopes of adults seeking children. Meet the woman, born to a surrogate herself, who says the debate should begin instead with the experiences of surrogate mothers and children separated at birth.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has completed a review of the nation’s patchwork of state laws on surrogacy. It will be tabled in Parliament in November.

The most controversial issue is whether or not commercial surrogacy should be legalised — that is, whether Australian women should be compensated for bearing other people’s babies. Currently, both gay and straight couples typically engage women overseas in countries such as the United States, Colombia, Ukraine, Kenya, or Georgia.

This often involves legal complications because the child is not automatically an Australian citizen. Proponents say the process would be much simpler and safer if commercial surrogacy were permitted here.

One of the world’s leading opponents of commercial surrogacy is Olivia Maurel, a product of the first generation of children born after IVF enabled a worldwide US$14 billion surrogacy industry. She was born to an American surrogate mother engaged by a French couple.

Today Maurel is a 34-year-old married mother of three living in southern France and the executive director and spokesperson of The Casablanca Declaration Association, an international coalition of opponents of surrogacy. Spinifex Press, an Australian imprint, has just published the first English edition of In Search of My Mother.

She is campaigning for the complete abolition of surrogacy. In some circles, this sounds extreme.

But as she contends in her book, “Fifty million people are currently still enslaved, worldwide. Does this mean we should bring back laws regulating slavery? No. Never. Even if abolition remains imperfect, it is still our aim. And the same goes for surrogacy.”

Joyful couples and gurgling, smiling babies feature in most articles published about surrogacy.

Olivia Maurel’s story is different. She writes from a place of pain and darkness. Harrowing is the best word to describe the psychological, moral, and physical trauma which ensued after her discovery of her origins.

Olivia Maurel’s Story

Maurel was born in 1991 in Kentucky but grew up in Florida. Her parents were wealthy and indulgent but distant. She had an intuition that something about their family was amiss and eventually discovered that her legal mother was not her birth mother.

She fell into a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse, self-harm, promiscuity and abusive relationships. When she confronted her parents about the circumstances of her birth, their relationship collapsed. In her memoir, she explains why.

“I was born with a gaping wound that my parents believed either did not exist, or would heal through my resilience. They were encouraged in these beliefs by a complicit society.

“My entire body bears scars that will never go away. No matter what I do, they will be with me for the rest of my life,” she writes.

“No surgery, psychotherapy or medication will ever be able to erase [them]. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no understanding of what those of us born to surrogate mothers around the world — thousands and thousands of us — are going through.”

Eventually Maurel finished a Master’s degree in taxation law in France and rebuilt her life, thanks in part to the kindness and strength of her husband.

She finally felt ready to track down the mother who had been erased from her life — a Kentucky woman named Catherine who had carried her for nine months for the money.

“Dispossessed of her own body, she was nothing but a slave,” Maurel comments. Catherine used her fee to take her kids to Disneyland.

“How could they all have done this? I was disgusted. I was not a handbag but a baby, a living being with conscious mind and a soul! How could these adults have played with me?” Maurel writes.

An Interview with Olivia Maurel

The Catholic Weekly recently interviewed Maurel by email. We asked her why finding the missing half of her parental heritage was so important for her.

“For years, I felt that a piece of me was missing without really knowing what that piece was,” she said.

“When I found my biological relatives, I suddenly saw things in other people that I recognised in myself, and there was something incredibly grounding about that,” she responded.

“A loving family can give you love and security; however, it cannot give you your biological roots. For some of us, knowing those roots is an important part of knowing who we are.”

The commissioning couples who engage surrogate mothers often give their child a comfortable home and a good education. Why isn’t that enough, we asked.

Maurel said that she was grateful to her legal parents for her privileged upbringing, but children need something more.

“A child also needs truth, identity, a coherent understanding of where she comes from and, I believe, the right not to have fundamental relationships decided for her by contract before she is even born,” she said.

But a child brings so much happiness, supporters of surrogacy argue. It seems wrong to frustrate that longing to be a parent. As a mother, Maurel is sympathetic, but she disagrees.

“I completely understand the desire for a child, but no one can have a right to another human being. A child cannot become the remedy for an adult’s suffering, however genuine that suffering may be,” she says.

“For me that is one of the central problems with the surrogacy debate: the story usually begins with the adults who desperately want a baby.

“I think it should begin with the woman and the child whose bodies and relationships make fulfilling that desire possible.”

Beginning Life as a Commodity

In the process of preparing its review of surrogacy, the ALRC received several submissions from young teenagers. They all said that the best thing about surrogacy was that “I exist”.

Maurel said she is happy those children exist, as well.

“I am glad I exist, too! But saying ‘I exist’ does not prove that surrogacy is right,” she added.

“When I criticise surrogacy, I am not saying that children born through surrogacy should not exist. I am saying that adults should not have the right to organise in advance a pregnancy, the separation of a child from the woman who carried him, and his transfer to other adults.

“We also have to be careful not to listen only to the children who say they are happy with their story. Their experience matters, but so does mine, and so does the experience of others who have struggled with what was decided for them before they were born.

“Being happy to be alive is not the same thing as approving of surrogacy.”

One of the most painful things for Maurel was the realisation that she had begun life as a commodity.

“It touches something very deep,” she said, “the feeling that my value, at the very beginning of my life, was linked to what adults wanted from me.

“To discover that money had been paid as part of the arrangement that led to my birth made me feel less like a person who had simply been welcomed into the world, and more like the result of a transaction.

“That is a very difficult thing to carry. It affects the way you look at your own origins and even the way you ask yourself: was I loved for who I was, or was I first something that had been wanted, arranged and obtained?”

Surrogacy is novel, but children have been torn apart from their birth families for decades — through adoption, anonymous sperm donation, or policies like the Stolen Generation in Australia. We can learn from their experiences, says Maurel.

“Adults and institutions have repeatedly underestimated how important origins, kinship and identity can be to a child,” she says.

“Being loved and well cared for does not necessarily erase the loss of knowing where you come from or who you belong to.

“I think there is an important lesson there for surrogacy: we should be very cautious about creating, deliberately and in advance, a separation that we already know can matter deeply to some people.”

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Republished with thanks to The Catholic Weekly. Images courtesy of The Casablanca Declaration.