Guest post by Ginanne Brownell.
If it weren’t for my friends Ben and Offir, I may have never become a mother. When I was told I had unexplained infertility and that I would likely never be able to carry a baby to term, I reached out to the Tel Aviv-based gay couple, who were in the early days of doing a surrogacy journey in the United States. They guided me through what the process was going to be like and, when I later found out I no longer had viable eggs, they also helped me process my angst and hangups around egg donation. Ben and Offir weren’t Bollywood superstars or Silicon Valley billionaires, which is often the stereotype of people who choose surrogacy, they were just a normal couple who decided to use surrogacy to expand their family.
Breaking those stereotypes around surrogacy, like who pursues surrogacy, who surrogates are and how children born through surrogacy feel about the process, are just a few of the themes I cover in my new book Elusive Mommyhood: An Investigative Reporter’s Personal Journey IVF and Surrogacy. The book is both a personal memoir— my twins were born in 2018 via a surrogate in Illinois—and a journalistic deep dive examining assisted reproduction and surrogacy in a broad international context. In the book, I explore the global history of surrogacy and IVF, the feminist arguments for and against the practice, discussions and debates around donor conception, and the fight for parentage rights for LGBTQ+ families.
I also look at how countries are currently re-examining their IVF and surrogacy laws. While Israel has recently opened up surrogacy to gay couples and Denmark has this year made it less difficult for couples to pursue cross-border surrogacy, in Italy in 2024 the government created a total criminal ban on surrogacy, which many saw as a way to prevent same sex couples from expanding their families.
The last chapter of the book details my deep involvement with the Michigan Family Protection Act, which last year legalized surrogacy in my home state and also made it so that children born through assisted reproduction will, from birth, have a secure legal tie to their parents. This is particularly important for LGBTQ+ families, which allows families to forgo lengthy and expensive second-parent adoptions.
I hope this book will be a resource and reference for anyone who is thinking of expanding their family through surrogacy.
Ginanne Brownell is an award-winning author and journalist. Her work has been published in outlets including New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Foreign Policy. She has worked on staff at CNN, Newsweek and UNICEF. She holds a BA in history from Michigan’s Albion College and an MA in history from the London School of Economics. She is a mother of twins born through surrogacy in 2018.
