Pop star Meghan Trainor posted a photograph this week skin-to-skin with her newborn daughter, ‘Mikey Moon’, who was still slick with fluids from the birth canal. The image was tender and maternal. What changed the dynamic was the caption. Trainor revealed she had not actually delivered her daughter, but had her gestated by another woman via a surrogacy arrangement. The online reaction was deeply uneasy and critical.
This would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Surrogacy used to be framed as glamorous, progressive, even beautiful. Magazine spreads showed radiant celebrities cradling babies ‘made possible’ by another woman’s womb. The story was celebratory: science plus money equals miracles. Everyone wins. But in 2026, nobody seems convinced anymore.
Some of the backlash to Trainor, who already has two children she carried herself, was personal. Had she indulged in this arrangement so that she could prepare for her upcoming tour, flaunting her Mounjaro-assisted waistline? But for many, the discomfort was about something much deeper: a growing cultural recognition that surrogacy is not the fairytale we were sold. It is a transaction that depends on separating a baby from the only mother she has ever known.
What adults call a miracle, the child experiences as loss. Psychologists warn that early separation can produce lasting harm in infants – post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, attachment disorders, developmental delays and behavioural issues in later childhood. We don’t allow puppies or kittens to be separated from their mothers until at least eight weeks following their birth. The commodification of newborn humans is striking by comparison.
Supporters of surrogacy compare the process to that of adoption. In adoption, a willing couple sacrificially step forward to help to heal a separation wound unwillingly inflicted on the baby – putting the needs of the child first. The surrogacy trade, on the other hand, deliberately inflicts a severance wound on the baby as part of the arrangement’s design – and then places the same child in the care of the adults who commissioned its trauma, so that they could fulfil their own wish to have a genetically-related child. Adoption heals pain. Surrogacy causes it.
Surrogacy used to be framed as glamorous, progressive, even beautiful. But in 2026, nobody seems convinced anymore
This isn’t to cast surrogate parents as intentional villains. Infertility is hard. There are many childless couples who would make excellent parents. The desire to procreate is not a bad one. But the first duty of parenthood is to make sacrifices for the good of the child; not to satisfying one’s own dreams and wishes.
And what of the surrogate mothers? Some argue it is ’empowering’ for a woman to make money from the use of her reproductive organs. But a commercial surrogacy contract can lead to power dynamics that expose this argument as a sham. The arrangement can involve a more vulnerable party – a woman increasingly sourced from low-income countries like Mexico or Nigeria if the commissioning couple don’t want to pay a premium for an American surrogate – selling her body to serve the desires of the wealthier party. How many celebrities do we see lining up to be surrogates, versus those who tap their cards to receive a child?
In the UK, surrogacy is only allowed if ‘altruistic’ – that is, a surrogate mother cannot be paid beyond reasonable ‘pregnancy expenses’. There’re no legal maximum on the expense sheet, which has been known to stack up as high as £60,000. But the number of zeros on a cheque can’t change the moral equation. An unborn baby knows her gestational mother’s voice, her heartbeat, her smell. That’s who she reaches for the minute she’s born. She doesn’t know about social politics or reproductive technology – she just wants the mum she knows. That bond is not symbolic, but biological. And whether ‘altruistic’ or ‘commercial’, surrogacy is the only reproductive arrangement that deliberately designs its destruction.
For years, surrogacy survived on sentimentality and celebrity endorsement. But sentiment collapses under scrutiny. The more people understand what surrogacy actually entails, the harder it is to celebrate. And so the mood is shifting. From UN reports calling for abolition, to European nations banning the practice, to ordinary people recoiling online – we can no longer deny that surrogacy violates something deeply human that ought to be preserved.
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