“When most people hear the word surrogacy, they picture an act of generosity—a woman helping another family experience the joy of parenthood. That was the vision I believed in.”

I never imagined that my decision to become a surrogate would leave me deceived about who the intended parents really were, caught in an international custody battle, and facing years of emotional, financial, and legal consequences.

My name is Christian Ross. I am the mother of three children, and I also carried a fourth child as a surrogate. I share my story because it exposes a troubling reality: America’s commercial surrogacy industry operates with far too little oversight, leaving surrogate mothers and children vulnerable when transparency and accountability are absent.

Like many surrogate mothers, I entered the process out of compassion. I contacted a large California-based surrogacy agency hoping to help a couple struggling with infertility. I was matched with a foreign couple living on the East Coast who claimed they had two children and could no longer conceive naturally. I was told the pregnancy would involve the husband’s sperm and a donor egg.

Looking back, there were warning signs. The couple failed to attend a scheduled meeting before the process began. After the embryo transfer, only the intended father appeared—accompanied by an assistant. I never met the intended mother. I later learned they had simultaneously hired another American surrogate in hopes of achieving two pregnancies at once. By then, I felt trapped by contracts I didn’t fully understand and an agency that gave inconsistent answers whenever I asked questions.

The pregnancy itself was physically grueling. I endured countless hormone injections, severe bleeding that required emergency hospitalization, a subchorionic hematoma that placed me on strict bedrest, debilitating morning sickness, and eventually preeclampsia that led to an emergency cesarean section.

Even after delivery, something felt wrong. The intended parents relied on a hired representative to care for the baby, and my chance to say goodbye was brief. A nurse quietly mentioned that the baby’s birth certificate was being prepared under a last name that didn’t match the intended parents. Recovering from surgery and overwhelmed by childbirth, I wasn’t in a position to investigate.

The emotional toll after returning home was profound. I struggled with grief and postpartum separation anxiety. Astonishingly, within three months of giving birth, the agency contacted me to ask whether I wanted to become a surrogate again.

Then, eight months after delivery, everything unraveled.

An attorney contacted me requesting that I sign adoption paperwork. That was when I learned the couple I believed I had been helping were never intended to become the child’s parents. They had merely served as proxies for the baby’s actual genetic father. The child had already been taken to England, where the sperm donor and his partner intended to adopt the baby.

Because United Kingdom law recognizes the birth mother as the child’s legal mother until a court rules otherwise, the child was removed and placed into foster care while the legal dispute unfolded. I found myself hiring British legal counsel and traveling overseas to participate in custody proceedings over a child whose legal status had become entangled because I had been misled from the very beginning. The British courts ultimately granted the adoption to the child’s genetic father.

The consequences have lasted far longer than the court case. I required psychiatric care for severe anxiety, the strain contributed to the collapse of my marriage, and I continue to carry significant financial burdens from the legal and medical costs associated with this experience.

“My story is not about opposing families who long for children. It is about asking whether an industry responsible for creating families should be allowed to operate with so few safeguards.”

Commercial surrogacy has become a global marketplace involving agencies, attorneys, fertility clinics, and international clients. Yet meaningful protections have failed to keep pace. When intended parents can conceal their identities or intentions, when surrogate mothers have little practical recourse once a pregnancy begins, and when children become entangled in international legal disputes, the system has failed everyone it claims to serve.

My experience should never happen again.

Lawmakers have an opportunity to establish stronger legal protections, greater transparency, and meaningful accountability for everyone involved—especially the children, whose best interests should never take a back seat to contracts or commercial arrangements.

Compassion inspired me to become a surrogate. Today, that same compassion compels me to speak out. No woman should have to learn after giving birth that the family she believed she was helping never actually existed. And no child should become the subject of an international custody battle because an industry failed to tell the truth.