After more than a decade working in surrogacy, there are certain things I have come to believe very strongly, and one of the biggest is this: there are no sides in surrogacy. There shouldn’t be a surrogate’s side and an intended parents’ side. There shouldn’t be a donor’s side or an agency’s side. There are simply people entering an incredibly personal experience from very different places, trying to navigate something that requires an enormous amount of trust, vulnerability and communication. When we start thinking about surrogacy as one person versus another, we lose sight of what makes these journeys work in the first place. This is why I can run this program without additional staff.
I understand how it happens. Intended parents often arrive at surrogacy after years of experiences that most people around them will never fully understand. There may have been infertility, pregnancy loss, failed transfers, medical diagnoses, cancer, hysterectomies, financial stress or years of watching everyone else build their families while wondering if it will ever happen for them. By the time they find themselves considering surrogacy, they can be carrying an incredible amount of fear and grief alongside the excitement and hope. For many, getting to surrogacy wasn’t the original plan. It became the plan after every other plan changed.
A surrogate arrives at the same journey from a completely different place. She is choosing to put her body, her time and a significant piece of her life into helping someone else become a parent. At the same time, she still has her own children, partner, job, responsibilities, relationships and everyday life happening around the journey. She has her own boundaries and expectations, and pregnancy may affect her differently than she expected. Neither person’s experience is more important than the other. They are simply different, and one of the most important parts of a healthy surrogacy journey is making room for both of those realities to exist at the same time.
Support Doesn’t Mean Always Agreeing
One of the misconceptions I occasionally encounter about having an agency involved in a surrogacy journey is the belief that our job is to be on someone’s side. My job isn’t to agree with an intended parent simply because they are a client, and it isn’t to automatically agree with a surrogate because she is the person carrying the pregnancy. My responsibility is to look at the entire situation, listen to everyone involved and try to protect the integrity of the journey and the relationships within it.
Sometimes that means telling intended parents something they don’t particularly want to hear. Sometimes it means having an uncomfortable conversation with a surrogate. Sometimes it means slowing things down when everyone desperately wants to move forward. Occasionally, it means recognizing that a match isn’t working or that a journey shouldn’t continue in the direction it’s heading. Those are never the easiest parts of this work, but support and agreement are not the same thing. In fact, some of the most important support we provide happens when we are willing to say, “I don’t think this is okay,” and then help everyone figure out where to go from there.
There are inevitably going to be moments of disagreement in surrogacy because there are moments of disagreement in every meaningful human relationship. People can have different expectations around communication, appointments, expenses, travel, birth plans, contact, boundaries and a hundred little things nobody imagined would matter when everyone was sitting happily on their first video call getting to know each other. The existence of conflict doesn’t mean a match is bad or a journey is failing. The bigger problem begins when that disagreement becomes surrogate versus intended parent, and suddenly everyone starts keeping score.
Who is right? Whose feelings matter more? Who should get their way? Who should the agency defend? Those questions rarely solve anything. The question I would much rather ask is, how do we work through this in a way that respects everyone involved? There may still need to be boundaries. Someone may still need to hear no. There may not always be a solution that makes everybody completely happy. But the goal shouldn’t be for somebody to win, because surrogacy works best when nobody needs to.
Remembering the People Behind the Roles
I think one of the easiest mistakes to make in a journey is to start seeing people primarily through their roles. A surrogate becomes “our surrogate,” and intended parents become “the IPs.” Those labels are useful when we’re talking about the process, but they can unintentionally simplify people who are anything but simple. Your surrogate isn’t just the person carrying your baby. She is a whole person whose life continues while your journey is happening. She still has children to get to school, work responsibilities, family obligations, good days, bad days, fears, stress and exhaustion. Pregnancy can also be unpredictable, even for someone who has been pregnant before.
The same is true for intended parents. They aren’t simply the people waiting for a baby. They may be watching someone else experience something they desperately wished they could experience themselves. They may live thousands of kms away and feel completely helpless when something happens. They may have spent years living from one test result to the next, so an appointment that feels routine to someone else can feel enormous to them. An unanswered message that means absolutely nothing may land differently for someone whose entire journey has taught them to brace for bad news. Understanding where those emotions come from doesn’t mean every reaction is automatically reasonable, but it does give us an opportunity to respond to each other with more understanding.
This is also why I believe so strongly that matching is about far more than finding a surrogate who likes an intended parent’s profile. That’s the introduction. The real match is about the people. Do they communicate well together? Do their expectations align? Can they talk openly when something feels uncomfortable? Do they respect one another’s boundaries? Can they give each other some grace? Most importantly, what happens when something doesn’t go according to plan? Because eventually, something probably won’t. That’s not pessimism. That’s life.
After all these years, I don’t think the goal is to create journeys where nobody ever disagrees or where everything is perfect from beginning to end. I don’t even know what a “perfect” surrogacy journey would look like. The goal is to build relationships that are strong enough to handle the imperfect moments when they happen. Some of the closest relationships I have watched develop through surrogacy weren’t created because everything went smoothly. They became strong because people learned how to communicate, listen, compromise and keep seeing the person on the other side when things became difficult.
What a Successful Journey Means to Me
I care deeply about the people who come into our program. I want our intended parents to become parents, and I want our surrogates to look back on their experiences feeling respected, valued and proud of what they did. I want partners and families to feel included and supported. I want people to have beautiful memories from this experience, even if some of those memories came from moments that were difficult while they were living through them.
That is why I don’t measure the success of a surrogacy journey simply by whether a baby was born. Of course, that baby is an extraordinary part of the story and the reason everyone came together in the first place. But I also care deeply about how we got there. Were people respected? Were boundaries honoured? Did everyone feel heard? When things became difficult, did we communicate? Did we treat each other with compassion? Did we remember that there were human beings on the other side of every decision?
Those things matter to me because this experience becomes part of everyone’s story. It becomes part of the intended parents’ story of how their family came to be. It becomes part of the surrogate’s story and often part of her children’s story as well. One day, it may even become part of the child’s understanding of how many people came together to help bring them into the world. I want that story to be one everyone can look back on and feel good about.
Surrogacy should never be about choosing sides. There will be moments when someone needs more support than someone else, moments when boundaries need to be reinforced and moments when difficult conversations have to happen. But through all of it, we should be able to remember that everyone came into this hoping for something good.
There are no sides here. There are people.
And after more than a decade of doing this work, I still believe taking care of those people is at the heart of what good surrogacy support should be.
M(Other) starring Angela