Illustrations by Molly SneeWhen Shoshannah Roberts talks about the four babies she’s given away, she glows. “When I think about it now, it still feels emotional,” she told me. “Those moments are so magical.”For many women, the thought of handing over a newborn to someone else is almost incomprehensible—they feel a deep revulsion at a primal sundering. But for Roberts, acting as a surrogate four times is the most meaningful thing she has done with her life. “I’ve seen the parents hold their babies right away, skin to skin. I mean, like, raw,” she said. “Baby’s off me, cord is cut, and Mom is just holding her baby and sobbing. It’s amazing.”The first time I saw Roberts, who lives in Santa Barbara County, California, she was speaking at the Men Having Babies conference in downtown San Francisco. Men Having Babies does exactly what its name promises: The organization helps gay aspiring fathers find women who are willing—eager, even—to carry their children. For one weekend every year, more than 200 men from across California and beyond fill the ballroom at the Marines’ Memorial Club & Hotel and listen to panel discussions and keynotes, with a special breakout session for single dads.Since the legalization of same-sex marriage, male couples have become the big growth market for American surrogacy, but the practice is booming among aspiring parents—married or single, straight or gay—who can afford the cost of hiring someone else to carry their child. In 2024, 11,821 embryos were transferred to surrogates in American clinics associated with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, up from 8,461 three years earlier, and the United Nations estimates that the global worth of the industry is almost $15 billion. Most surrogacy in America today is commercial, meaning that the carrier is paid, and gestational, meaning that the carrier has no genetic relationship to the child.Marissa Leshnov for The AtlanticShoshannah Roberts, photographed in Los Angeles, is pregnant with her fifth child. She has carried four more babies as a surrogate.Barely a week passes without another celebrity posing with their new baby on Instagram—perhaps in scrubs or doing skin-to-skin contact—and thanking their heroic surrogate. Kim Kardashian, Anderson Cooper, Meghan Trainor, and Chrissy Teigen have all used surrogates. Some celebrities, citing medical risks, hire a surrogate to take on the dangers of pregnancy for them. Others want more children than they can have biologically. Hilaria and Alec Baldwin had a sixth baby via surrogate five months after Hilaria gave birth to their fifth child. (She has since carried their seventh.)But just as paid surrogacy is becoming a more conspicuous part of American life, so, too, is the backlash. When the actor Lily Collins, then 35, announced the birth of her baby, Tove, and her “endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate,” she and her husband were bombarded with messages describing them as “human traffickers” and “baby buyers.” In the past year, multiple horror stories—fraudulent agencies, human trafficking, elderly parents who are unable to take care of a newborn—have emerged, complicating what is usually presented as an uplifting narrative. If your primary concern is reproductive freedom, most surrogacy stories will seem inspirational. But if you factor in the risks to carriers, or simply feel skeptical of unregulated commerce, your doubts will multiply.In my experience, many liberal Americans are surprised to discover that their country is an outlier in its enthusiasm for commercial surrogacy. In Britain, where I live, a ban on the practice enjoys substantial support among feminists, who worry about the power differential between paid surrogates and wealthy would-be parents. (Altruistic surrogacy, in which the surrogate carries a baby solely out of generosity, is less controversial and is permitted.) A recent UN report went even further, declaring that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and that “surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery.” In one recent scandal, Thai women who answered an advertisement for work as surrogates in the nation of Georgia had their passports confiscated and were coerced into donating their eggs.Several developing countries that have become hubs for surrogacy tourism have enacted laws to protect women from exploitation by wealthy foreigners. Thailand banned commercial surrogacy in 2015 after the “Baby Gammy” case, in which a surrogate was left caring for a disabled child. She alleged that she had become pregnant with twins and refused a request by the intended parents—one of whom was a convicted sex offender—to abort the twin with Down syndrome.Because so much can go wrong, every country in the European Union has banned commercial surrogacy. France’s centrist liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the practice as “not compatible with the dignity of women.” Italy’s right-wing populist leader, Giorgia Meloni, has enacted one of the strictest anti-surrogacy frameworks in the world. Not only is domestic surrogacy banned, but any Italian citizen who brings home a baby born to an overseas surrogate risks jail and a fine of up to 1 million euros. Many other developed countries have either tightly restricted surrogacy or chosen, as Britain and Canada have, to allow only the altruistic version. Israel allows surrogacy but imposes a raft of conditions: The commissioning parents must not have more than two children already, must not have serious criminal convictions, and must be of the same religion as the surrogate.In general, Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable. The piquant difference, however, is that surrogacy is a cause of the American left rather than the right. Red states tend to have tighter limits on surrogacy. Louisiana, for example, restricts surrogacy to married heterosexual couples using their own sperm and eggs. By contrast, when New York legalized commercial surrogacy in 2020, LGBTQ activists hailed it as a triumph for “fertility equality.”The debate cuts across political traditions and defies easy categorization. When surrogacy goes well, the result is a happy family that would not otherwise have existed. When it goes wrong, however, it can do so in unpredictable and emotionally crushing ways. At its core, the ethical question is this: How much physical and emotional risk should individuals be allowed to take on in the name of a commercial transaction?California, the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is the undisputed center of American surrogacy, and the practice there is infused with a distinct blend of crunchy vibes, social liberalism, and straightforward capitalism. Surrogacy costs in the state begin at about $150,000 for a single baby, according to promotional materials for a variety of agencies doing business there. The percentage paid to the surrogate varies widely.Many, many enterprises want to help make gay couples’ dreams of parenthood come true, and the Men Having Babies conference was underwritten by a number of them: IVF clinics, genetic-testing companies, and surrogacy agencies. If the sea of Zegna sneakers and stylish down jackets didn’t tell you that these guys have money, the brochures offering future fathers “white-glove service” and VIP packages made it clear. In the exhibitors’ hall, I passed an abundance of merch designed to reel clients in—candles bearing the instruction LIGHT ME WHEN MATCHED, onesies with I LOVE MY DADS on them, canvas bags with the legend DADDY VIBES, and my own favorite: multiple iterations of sperm-shaped stress balls. Some were dyed rainbow colors.This was aspirational parenthood, right here. Pictures of happy dads and adorable kids abounded, including on a banner featuring two ripped, waxed, shirtless guys draped in a Pride flag and cradling a newborn. Words such as bespoke, boutique, and concierge appeared frequently in the literature. Words such as episiotomy and mastitis did not. It was here that I learned the industry’s preferred term for a surrogate pregnancy: a journey.At its best, surrogacy showers happiness all around. Intended parents—or IPs, in industry jargon—receive a longed-for baby; their surrogate is well compensated and well treated, and has the satisfaction of knowing that she has helped create a family. A few days after the conference, Roberts told me over Zoom that she had been interested in surrogacy ever since Phoebe on Friends carried triplets for her brother, Frank. Her first experience was blissful: She carried for a single mom who met a partner midway through the pregnancy, and Roberts later attended their beach wedding, in Florida. When she went back to work at a corporate job, “it felt a little hollow,” she said. She joined the surrogacy agency Hatch as a coordinator. In addition to four surrogate pregnancies, she’s had four children of her own. “My grandmother had 12,” she said. “So I think I’m built for it.” In mid-June, she announced her ninth pregnancy—another baby of her own.In the United States, the only serious opposition to surrogacy comes from an unlikely coalition of radical feminists and socially conservative Catholics. The former see surrogacy as exploitation: In 1983’s Right-Wing Women, the feminist author Andrea Dworkin described surrogacy as part of the “brothel model” of society, where “women can sell reproductive capacities the same way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones.” Catholics, meanwhile, have doctrinal objections to any artificial interference in pregnancy. The more typical American view, though, tends toward individualism, in line with the “My body, my choice” slogan popularized by the abortion-rights movement, and an instinctive suspicion of government regulation: If the surrogate is okay with it, what business is it of anyone else? Although you can’t legally sell a kidney—even America has its limits—consent is treated as a universal solvent for many other tricky ethical issues.Well-heeled intended parents can also dodge practical constraints faced by biological or adoptive parents. Many agencies place no hard restrictions on the number of children any single person or couple can commission. Some parents want to get to a “double-digit number,” Men Having Babies’ founder, Ron Poole-Dayan, said at the conference. In 2023, a court in Los Angeles discovered that the Chinese video-game billionaire Xu Bo was simultaneously seeking parental rights for four babies born via surrogacy and was in the process of fathering at least eight more. The children (all boys, at his request) were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine until they could be taken to him in China, The Wall Street Journal reported.There are also no legally enforceable upper age limits on intended parents. In August 2025, two 6-year-old children were found in a caged-off section of a San Francisco apartment. Their father explained that he had commissioned twins as a single dad at the age of 67, and when one of the babies was diagnosed with severe autism, he found himself struggling to cope. The locked gate stopped the neurodivergent twin from injuring himself during tantrums or running out of the building into the road. “I’m a senior, first-time parent, single parent, to twins, without domestic help,” the 74-year-old told The San Francisco Standard after he was reported to child services. (To which I might respond: And you didn’t think about this earlier? ) Difficulties like these are why many adoption agencies suggest an upper age limit of about 50.The surrogacy industry does not have a regulator that enforces a “fit and proper person” test of the kind given to people who want to adopt a child. Last year, Pennsylvania lawmakers proposed closing a loophole in the state’s law that had allowed a sex offender—who was legally barred from adopting or fostering—to commission a baby. There are no restrictions on Americans commissioning a baby abroad, even if the other country’s health services or human-rights laws are far worse than those in the United States.America also stands virtually alone as a rich country that permits incoming surrogacy tourism from elsewhere. Many of these international intended parents are from China, where surrogacy is banned and where, until recently, family size was limited by the one-child policy. These customers have exacting standards. “They want a Caucasian surrogate to carry the baby, with preferably blond hair, blue eyes,” Dee Gulati of Surrogacy4All, in New York, told me. “And they want an egg donor who looks like a cheerleader.” The resulting babies are automatically American citizens. (Hoping to change this, President Trump in August signed an executive order denying citizenship to children born to foreign citizens through commercial surrogacy.)In the U.S., no federal laws regulate surrogacy, and contracts related to the practice are unenforceable in many states. The Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy provides a “self-regulation framework” for agencies, but its greatest sanction is removing membership. The lack of regulation means that success depends more on luck and personal benevolence than on industry standards or legal guardrails. The primary question asked of parents attempting this new American way of birth is: Can you afford it?For some surrogates, handing over the baby is far harder than it was for Shoshannah Roberts. Last fall, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I met Erika Jones, a quiet, self-contained woman who wore a discreet gold cross around her neck. She told me that her three ambitions in life had always been to visit Ireland, to be a surrogate, and to see a koala in person. She had wanted to be a surrogate since she was very young, before she’d even had her own two children. A few years ago, when she found herself settled in Fairfield, Ohio, with a good job and a stable income, she registered with an agency. The story of one couple particularly moved her.The wife, whom I’ll call Priya, had lost her brother to cancer in 2020. He’d banked his sperm before he died, and his family hoped to use it to fertilize a donor egg. The resulting embryo would then be carried by a surrogate and raised by Priya and her husband, allowing a part of her brother to live on.After Jones, then 34, learned the baby’s sex, she spent $40 on a balloon filled with pink confetti and had it sent to Priya, who recorded her reaction when she opened the box. But Jones didn’t see what she had hoped to see. “You could tell that she was disappointed that it was a girl,” Jones said. “I think she wanted a boy, to closely remind her of her brother.” Would the baby inside her be treated with respect, Jones wondered—or as second-best?From that point, in Jones’s telling, the relationship between the two women began to sour. Jones found Priya fussy and controlling, and felt that she was being blamed when a scan found that the fetus was growing unusually slowly. “I was like, I’m not a slave,” she said. She even wondered briefly about trying to keep the baby, but decided that wouldn’t be right.When Jones found mold and detected carbon monoxide in her apartment, in Ohio, she decided to move back home to Tennessee, closer to her family. That would violate her 57-page “gestational carrier agreement,” in which she had agreed to “take all necessary and reasonable steps” to give birth at UC Health in West Chester, Ohio. The intended parents told her that if the baby was born in Tennessee, they would face “significant legal challenges.” Because of the state’s more restrictive laws, they feared, the contract might not be valid there. Priya and her husband suggested that Jones stay put and send her children to Tennessee to stay with a friend or relative for the remaining five months of the pregnancy.Jones declined. She moved back to Tennessee but agreed to keep traveling to Ohio for medical appointments and then give birth there. She was being paid $45,000 plus expenses for the pregnancy but found that the frequent back-and-forth between states, in addition to her time off work while sick, had eaten into that payment. She cut off direct contact with Priya and emailed the agency asking that she not attend the birth. “I know I signed the contract—I am well aware and I intend on honoring it,” Jones wrote, “but it does not need to continue to be thrown in my face every other day.” She also bought a puppy, aware that she would soon be coming home from the hospital empty-handed; she wanted, she later wrote in a memoir, something “alive, soft and ours.”Aileen Perilla for The AtlanticErika Jones, photographed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Jones had wanted to be a surrogate since she was very young.When Jones went into labor, she brought her two children, then ages 10 and 12, to the hospital, along with Susan Harris, a trusted friend, who alerted Priya and her husband. The labor was long—37 hours, 22 of them without an epidural. When Jones told the midwives that she wanted to push, the room suddenly filled with people. Earlier in her labor, Jones had asked for five minutes with the baby before handing her over. But the moment the little girl was delivered, she said, someone shouted, “No contact!” All she saw was a glimpse of dark-brown hair as the baby was taken away. She was not even told her birth weight. (Harris confirmed this account.) Priya told The Atlantic that she wasn’t “in any way disappointed” that the baby was a girl. She felt that because Jones had signed a legal contract agreeing to not have any skin-to-skin contact with the baby, she didn’t have to honor Jones’s request to hold her. “Maybe if you were nicer,” she thought. She has since ignored Jones’s request to talk through what happened. “At the end of the day, this is a business. We’re not friends,” she told The Atlantic. “You’re not doing me a favor. You’re getting paid $5,000 a month.” Both parties had fulfilled their side of the contract, she said, and it was time to move on.Jones has not found that so easy. She told me that the experience kept playing in her mind: “I felt like I was treated less than a human, and less than an animal.”According to the industry, unhappy surrogates are extremely rare. The owner of the surrogacy agency that Priya used told me that Jones’s experience was an “outlier,” one of only three cases out of the hundreds she had overseen that had “gone south.” At the Men Having Babies conference, an agency director assured the attendees that almost all of the “horror stories” reported in the press involved traditional surrogacy, in which the woman carrying the baby uses her own egg. (She added that the traditional approach now accounts for only 5 percent of American surrogacies.)The sales pitch to intended parents for gestational surrogacy—involving an egg from either the commissioning mother or a separate donor—is precisely that the surrogate has no legal claim to custody. That makes it legally safer for the rich couples who pay the bills than a traditional surrogacy. But it may be more physically dangerous for the surrogate.At the Men Having Babies conference, the first audience question was a stark one: How many surrogates die giving birth? Deaths are very rare, Poole-Dayan, the organizer, assured them. A 2020 study found that gestational surrogates were no more likely to die in childbirth than any other pregnant woman. Yet early evidence suggests that carrying a child who is not genetically related to you could increase the risk of complications: A 2024 study of more than 850,000 pregnancies over a decade in Ontario found that “severe maternal morbidity and adverse pregnancy outcomes” were three times higher among gestational carriers than in conventional pregnancies. When the mother and the fetus are not genetically related, the developmental biologist Emma Hilton has written, “Mum’s immune system may ramp up to fight against the wholly foreign tissue. In response, placental invasion becomes more aggressive.” (A systematic review from 2015 found that “most studies reporting on surrogacy have serious methodological limitations.”) Because of the elevated risks associated with twin pregnancies, most reputable agencies now implant only one embryo at a time, but—a recurring theme in this story—no law or professional regulation requires them to do so.To Poole-Dayan, the value of a contract and of compensation is that it forces both parties to have uncomfortable conversations while the risks are still theoretical. “I always tell people, ‘Imagine yourself at the funeral of the surrogate,’ ” he told me.I found Poole-Dayan’s forthrightness a refreshing change from the cloying online culture around surrogacy, with the staged hospital shots and cutesy euphemisms designed to play down the toll of pregnancy and birth. In one video, a little girl born via surrogacy describes the woman who carried her—who built her, cell by cell, inside her own body—as an “Easy-Bake Oven.”When Jones concluded that she had been mistreated, she turned to Kallie Fell. A perinatal nurse by training, Fell works out of an office the size of a janitor’s closet in a co-working space in Pleasant Hill, east of San Francisco.Fell is the executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, which was founded in 2000 to campaign against “Big Fertility” but in recent years has also opposed youth gender transition. The CBC has only two full-time employees; Fell told me that it is “lonely work.” Her inbox is full of questions, unhappy stories, and requests for legal help: a surrogate left with medical debt after the intended parents ghosted her, a man who regrets being a sperm donor, women who don’t want to abort a fetus with disabilities but have signed a contract promising to do so. “I’m a little bit of a magnet,” she said.One of the most frequent problems, Fell told me, is the financial imbalance between a surrogate and the intended parents. Ethical agencies will ask the IPs to pay for an independent lawyer to read the contract on their surrogate’s behalf, but no law or regulation enforces this. Contracts therefore tend to be written with the protection of the IPs in mind rather than the carrier. Surrogates can be asked to sign nondisclosure agreements, to protect the privacy of the IPs and the child, but these can also prevent them from speaking honestly about bad experiences. Mental-health troubles can be grounds for disqualification for potential surrogates, but IPs typically face less scrutiny. Last year, Wired reported on a woman with bipolar disorder who blamed her surrogate for having a stillbirth; in a fury, she sent a photo of the corpse to an iPad belonging to the surrogate’s 7-year-old son.The same imbalance is true of criminal records: Another woman who’d contacted Fell, Amanda Misbahu, told me that midway through her surrogate pregnancy—arranged via Facebook—she began to worry that the IP, a gay single father, hadn’t been entirely honest about his criminal history. To me, Misbahu’s story sounded like a surrogacy nightmare, but she cheerfully insisted that she would be willing to act as a surrogate again.Misbahu’s upbringing had been turbulent. She had been taken away from her own mother when she was six months old, she said, with “maggots in my diapers and Pepsi in my bottles,” and had been raised by a traditionally minded, religious family. The turmoil continued into her adulthood, in successive marriages that didn’t work out. By age 23, Misbahu had given birth to five babies, but none of them lived with her full-time; some were being raised primarily by relatives.Courtney Pedroza for The AtlanticAmanda Misbahu, photographed in Tempe, Arizona. For her, becoming a surrogate was “a way to help me through some of my own trauma.”In her 30s, her thoughts turned to surrogacy. “It was a way for me, in a sentence, to help me through some of my own trauma,” she said. Giving up her own children had left her distraught, she said, yet “with this one, I knew the outcome, I knew it was going to happen, and it was a situation that I knew would be traumatic but I could control.” Two agencies turned her down: the first because of her weight, and the second after her early psychological trauma came up in a medical screening. So she went on Facebook to advertise her services directly to would-be parents.When a man whom I’ll call Cameron got in contact with Misbahu, she wrote her own surrogacy contract, and “he let me pick the egg donor—it was like online dating,” she said. She and Cameron wanted two embryos transferred, but the fertility doctor advised only one. “We said, We’ll take our $100,000 and we’ll go next door,” she told me. The doctor relented but made her sign a waiver. Only one of the embryos implanted. At eight weeks, she was hospitalized for life-threatening blood clots. She needed blood thinners for the rest of her pregnancy. “I thought she was gonna die,” her fourth child, Alyssa, told me. “So I would just start freaking out randomly when I thought about it—like, at school, sometimes I’d be crying in lunch.”Although Misbahu didn’t know it, Cameron had once pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter in California after injecting a friend with a fatal dose of Benadryl in his apartment. He then moved to Kentucky and practiced as a physician’s assistant without a license, a deception that came to light after patients claimed that he had botched their cosmetic surgeries. In 2001, he’d been sentenced to 20 years in prison for five counts of second-degree assault and 112 counts of wanton endangerment, although he was released early. In learning about his past, Misbahu also discovered that he had an adult daughter. In the end, she concluded that he’d turned his life around and that there was nothing she could do except go through with the contract.Cameron and his new boyfriend were present for the birth, for which Misbahu had an epidural for the first time in her history of deliveries, “because I’m like, I don’t want to have to feel any of this,” she told me. She cried—from the hormones, she recalled—and saw the baby a few hours later: “And I was like, She’s so pretty, but I really just can’t even touch her.”Courtney Pedroza for The AtlanticMisbahu shows a photo of two embryos that she sought to have implanted.Misbahu attended counseling sessions for six months after the birth. “You felt like you lost a baby,” she said. “And I wouldn’t stop pumping milk.” Eventually, a friend told her that she had to move on, and so she donated the breast milk to a local bank for premature babies. Her counselor wasn’t much help, she said: “She thought it was the coolest thing; she had never met a surrogate. She just wanted me to paint pictures in her office. And I was like, Ma’am, I feel like I want to blow out my fucking brains.” Misbahu told me that she even gave her gun to her brother because she was so worried about her mental health.A few months after we first spoke, I met Misbahu in a pancake restaurant on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. She turned up bearing a knitted kangaroo that her mother had made for me, and she wore a medical-alert bracelet around her wrist. Her clotting condition had convinced her that she could not advertise herself as a surrogate again. However, she had married a Ghanaian asylum seeker whom she’d met on a dating app, and was trying for a baby with him to strengthen his claim. (They have since split.)For a time, Misbahu had remained in contact with Cameron—and had even helped him find his next surrogate. But eventually, their relationship broke down. She had asked him to buy a present for her daughter, and he’d told her that she couldn’t treat him as an ATM. “Finally, I wrote him back, and I was like, Look, I almost literally died giving birth to your kid. Like, it doesn’t mean you owe me anything. But that was pretty disrespectful,” she told me. (Cameron did not respond to questions from The Atlantic.) He blocked her on Facebook. But one of her friends could still see his page, so she used that account to secretly watch his daughter—the baby she had carried—grow up. She showed me a photo of the little girl and her siblings on her phone. “The girls are so pretty,” she said with pride.Surrogacy has a supply problem. There are not enough ethically motivated, healthy, middle-class American women to meet demand. Speakers at the Men Having Babies conference repeatedly stressed that reputable agencies accept only 5 percent of applicants as surrogates. Good agencies screen women for health and psychological problems, and question them about their finances and the supportiveness of their partner. Those safeguards are reflected in the high costs.Look abroad, though, and it’s a different story. Some agencies offer “guaranteed baby” packages for as little as $50,000. Surrogacy destinations pop up anywhere the local laws are lax, such as Northern Cyprus, a territory that exists in a legal limbo and is recognized only by Turkey. (The problem is that babies born there can end up stateless.) For parents from Russia, nearby Georgia is a similar no-questions-asked destination.India used to be the most favored low-cost destination, but in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing fears of exploitation, banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners. Ukraine’s appeal as a surrogacy destination has diminished since Russia’s invasion in 2022, although the leading agency there, BioTexCom, told me that the company is still handing off one baby born via surrogacy every day on average, at a cost of about $60,000. A representative of the agency initially told me that it was planning to open a clinic in Kazakhstan, to cater to the growing Asian market. In July, however, that country abruptly banned foreign surrogacy amid concerns about exploitation.BioTexCom takes a more unsentimental approach to surrogacy than American agencies. When I asked Denis Herman, the legal director, what his best day on the job had been, I expected him to tell me about uniting a baby with happy parents. Instead, he talked about business metrics: “I’m really focused on the KPIs, on getting the milestones done.” BioTexCom’s founder, Albert Tochilovsky, told me that he worried about falling birth rates, and presented surrogacy as an alternative to immigration.BioTexCom agreed to let me speak with one of its current surrogates, a 40-year-old whom it identified as Nana, and assigned an employee to translate our conversation. This was Nana’s third surrogate pregnancy since 2021, and she had two much older children of her own. During the first surrogate pregnancy, she was given an apartment to live in with her kids, she told me, so she’d decided to do it twice more; it was her only job. (Compensation for BioTexCom surrogates begins at $23,000, according to the company. The average yearly salary in Ukraine is about $8,700.) The image that Nana and the agency presented was of surrogacy as a sensible economic option and a morally good one. “In Ukraine, we say: Children are a flower of our life,” the translator told me.Mexico is more convenient for Americans, and a journey might cost $100,000 less there than in the States. But babies born in Mexico through surrogacy are given a Mexican passport by default, which can cause problems at the U.S. border. The State Department warns Americans that “there is no legal framework to protect parents who pursue surrogacy in Mexico, despite agencies and clinics promoting Mexico as a safe, legal destination for commercial surrogacy.”Wes Johnson-Ellis of the British firm My Surrogacy Journey has sufficient faith in the Mexican system that he and his husband, Michael, had their third child through a surrogate in Mexico City. Yet he acknowledges the concern that carriers in the country are taking on medical risk out of economic need. “Let’s not be naive,” Johnson-Ellis told me. “In Mexico, the compensation that we offer is three times the average wage, so it is a significant amount of money for them.” He estimated that his team accepts only 20 percent of the women who apply to be surrogates, and he said that they filter out anyone who is motivated only by money.Several surrogacy agencies told me that they worry deeply about the booming market in Mexico, and Johnson-Ellis expressed doubts about his company’s competitors there. “They don’t operate in an ethical way,” he said. “They don’t safeguard everyone; they don’t look after everyone.”Gulati, the practice director of Surrogacy4All, which arranges approximately 200 surrogate pregnancies every year, said that his favored destination for a low-cost journey is now Ghana, where he charges intended parents a flat rate of $49,000. Those carriers are under close watch. “The great thing about doing surrogacy in Ghana is that they live in a dormitory which is right near the hospital, so they can’t drink, they can’t smoke, they can’t do drugs,” he said. “During that period of time, they are monitored 24 hours, seven days a week. And as a result, the success rate with surrogacy is very, very high.”Molly SneeEven in California, the regulation of agencies leaves much to be desired. In May 2025, the caregivers of a two-month-old baby were reported to social services for potential abuse. When the police raided their mansion in Arcadia, a small city northeast of Los Angeles, they discovered another 15 children, who were being homeschooled by a platoon of nannies. “There were probably anywhere from six to eight at the time that we were there,” Captain Kollin Cieadlo of the Arcadia Police Department told me.Footage from surveillance cameras showed that the children were being drilled in English and Mandarin and forced, as a form of discipline, to do squats and other physical exercises that the police considered “above and beyond what a normal punishment would be.” Further searches revealed six more kids whose birth certificates declared them to also be the children of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan, who owned the house. The couple had been running an agency, Mark Surrogacy, with only one client—themselves.In 2023, one of their surrogates had been obligated, thanks to the prebirth order she had signed, to hand over a newly delivered child to people she had never seen before, who arrived at the hospital with power-of-attorney documents. The sheer number of parental orders obtained by Zhang and Xuan during this period triggered an investigation ordered by a judge, but no further action was taken.As news of the mansion raid spread, surrogates then currently under contract with Mark Surrogacy—and still pregnant—began finding one another in Facebook groups. They all told similar stories, of being commissioned by a woman who said that she was unable to conceive and desperately wanted a child. When Zhang and Xuan were questioned by the police, they denied that anything was amiss. “They simply said they just wanted a large family with a lot of kids,” Cieadlo said. The children went into foster care, and one of the surrogates, Kayla Elliott of Corpus Christi, Texas, started a GoFundMe to try to win custody of the child she’d carried. (She has since said that she believes the baby should be left with the foster parents, for continuity of care.)No charges have been filed against Zhang and Xuan, who have since commissioned even more babies. Although they could face police action over the allegations of child abuse, the startling fact is that their baby-creation spree is legal in California. (Their lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.) The Wall Street Journal reported that the police were investigating the couple for possible trafficking, but Zhang told the newspaper that she intended to raise all of the children: “We never sell our babies. We take care of them very well.”After speaking with Jones and Misbahu, I spent hours turning over their stories in my mind, trying to reconcile their bad experiences with the many upbeat counterexamples I had seen at the Men Having Babies conference. None of those women had needed surrogacy to stay solvent, and more than one had joked to me that they could have earned more as an Uber driver. For Veronica Bowers, a two-time surrogate who now works for the Northwest Surrogacy Center in Oregon, surrogacy was a way for her to be with her own kids while still contributing to the household finances. (For similar reasons, military wives are actively recruited by surrogacy agencies.) “It is a badge of honor,” Bowers told me. “I feel really proud that I did this.”The happiest surrogacy experiences I saw resembled open adoptions, where the process is transparent and the birth mother can stay in touch with the child. (Bowers and Roberts are in contact with the children they carried—like an aunt rather than a mother.) The bad stories involved parents who behaved as though they were ordering a baby from a mail-order catalog. I was also left deeply uneasy by the realities of international surrogacy: Why should California be a place where Chinese parents go to find blond, blue-eyed surrogates for status reasons—and why should American parents have the right to acquire a cut-rate child by employing a Ghanaian woman to live in a dormitory under 24/7 monitoring? To protect everyone involved, states should impose upper limits on the age of commissioning parents and on the number of children any couple or individual can commission, as well as an equalization of the disclosure requirements. If surrogates must reveal their medical and criminal histories, then so should the rich people employing them.Something that surprised me was that many of the women I interviewed who had found surrogacy to be a traumatic experience were ambivalent, rather than flatly opposed, to the practice. Jones said that she hadn’t ruled out another journey, although she was still suffering medical complications from the difficult pregnancy and birth. She also worried that the baby girl she had carried would never know “three pertinent people in her life”—the biological father who had died before she was conceived, the egg donor who had provided half of her DNA, and the surrogate who had carried her for nine nausea-filled months. Jones had watched videos online of children born through surrogacy who opposed the practice, and she wondered whether she had been selfless to become a surrogate—or selfish.At the end of our meeting, she said—just as Amanda Misbahu did—that she had carried on pumping breast milk for months after the birth, even though she’d had no baby to nourish. She had also asked friends to check Priya’s social media to see what the baby she’d carried looked like now. On her phone, she showed me a photo of the little girl smiling alongside Priya’s other children.Other than that picture, Jones said, her hospital bracelet and blanket are her only mementos of carrying the girl. She still feels the loss: “Truthfully, even though she’s not my child, she’s my child.”This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Mothers for Sale.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.