To many, it looked like any other celebrity birth announcement. “Welcome to the centre of our world… we love you to the moon and back again,” the Emily in Paris actor Lily Collins wrote in an Instagram post on 31 January, sharing the arrival of her daughter, Tove. Collins’ posts usually gain a few hundred comments; this one, however, received more than 23,000. While some were congratulating her, celebrating the good news, many responded to one particular line in the announcement: “Words will never express our endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate and everyone who helped us along the way.”
The response, both online and in the media, has been vociferous. Collins’ decision to use a surrogate has been overanalysed and criticised, her reasons for opting for surrogacy questioned by commentators across the media and wider online world. She received plenty of negative feedback, but many jumped to her defence; her Instagram post amassed about as many supporters as detractors. Among the top comments were: “Really cool that the comment section is women tearing down other women,” and, “Do we really understand the whole story before judging? Is it fair to attack someone for the way they decided to start their family?”
Celebrity surrogacy isn’t new and has become exponentially popular over the last decade. (When Kim Kardashian had a child via surrogacy in January 2018, she ignited the debate in the media.) When a celebrity announces a birth via surrogacy, they commonly cite medical issues that made it unsafe to carry their own child, such as their doctors warning of a high-risk pregnancy, post-traumatic stress, or simply “complications”. Despite these disclosures, there often seems to be a widespread scepticism over celebrities’ reasons for choosing this method. The term “social surrogacy” has been applied to those who avoid becoming pregnant themselves in order to avoid weight gain or stretch marks, or to prevent the potential impact a pregnancy might have on their career – instead outsourcing those problems to another woman for a hefty price.
There is a familiar response when surrogacy is revealed: “choice feminism”, which discourages judgement of women’s choices. This response insists that women have the right to choose to avoid the pain of pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum recovery, and suggests that it is sexist to expect women to physically suffer in order to have children (after all, men typically don’t). Equally, surrogates have agency and make the choice to take on this lucrative work. Whoever it is in the equation: it’s their body, their choice.
It’s true that surrogates do have a choice – and that society has an unending desire to see women suffer. But these choices do not exist in a vacuum – and do not affect the individuals in question alone. The reality of surrogacy is that – usually, if not always – a much poorer woman is taking on the burden of pregnancy, possibly out of financial necessity.
This is the problem with surrogacy in theory, and in practice. In the UK surrogacy is legal, but none of the contracts involved are enforceable by law, making them more of a promise than a binding agreement. (Collins lives in the US, where surrogacy laws vary from state to state.) The person who has given birth, even if they are a surrogate, is legally the child’s mother when a baby is born: the surrogate then willingly surrenders their parenthood. In the UK this is done via either adoption or a parental order which is issued to the intended parents by a family court.
Still, discussions of the issues with these laws often focus on the risks to potential parents – who in the UK might pay anything from £20,000 to more than £80,000 – not the surrogates themselves. Parents are comforted by dismissals of the “fiction” that surrogates could take their babies after they are born, or that their parental order could be refused by the court. When studies and surveys are conducted around surrogacy, they are overwhelmingly done so from the perspective of parents’ experiences.
We rarely hear from surrogates themselves – when we do, the views are mixed. In an interview with the BBC in 2023, one surrogate, Shanna St Clair, said that after becoming pregnant with a famous woman’s baby she learned the celebrity had hired concurrent surrogates in case of miscarriage, complaining that a previous surrogate had experienced one after travelling to visit her sick father. “I told her not to travel but she did, and look what happened!… Dead baby.” (St Clair eventually experienced a similar lack of sympathy after she suffered a miscarriage herself). As one study has put it, surrogacy pregnancy “should be considered as high-risk emotional experience” – but a 2022 paper in the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family noted that the well-being of surrogates is sidelined in the conversation around surrogacy reform, which focuses almost entirely on how to provide greater safety and care for everyone involved in the process except the surrogate.
The risks to surrogates are only growing as surrogacy becomes an increasingly popular option, and not just for celebrities. There is no centralised surrogacy tracker in the UK, but we do know that parental orders granted by courts in England and Wales increased by more than 350 per cent between 2011 and 2021. Surrogacy is booming, while the legalities become rapidly outdated.
But these ethical concerns are not driving the emotion provoked by celebrity surrogacy announcements. The anger is largely due to the wealth and access imbalance in the fraught territory of fertility, something that high-profile surrogacy cases highlight. In a survey of 207 people using surrogates in 2018, 147 were in a heterosexual couple unable to get pregnant or carry a pregnancy; 57 were in a same-sex male couple; and two were single. These numbers are reflective of a miniscule portion of the couples and individuals in similar circumstances, desperate for and unable to have children.
Surrogacy is ultimately a service for the mega-rich, who have access to a life-changing opportunity thousands would sacrifice almost anything for. The public anger may be misplaced – many of those who complain about social surrogacy would make the same choices if they had the resources, and celebrities are not the cause of this issue. But it is understandable why these announcements can sometimes trigger deep pain, revealing that the seemingly insurmountable infertility and medical obstacles many people face are possible to overcome, if you have the money.
Lily Collins has been unlucky – a lightning rod for wider, industrial-level anger. The problem we encounter in 2025 is that surrogacy is underregulated and poorly protected – and surrogates take on major risks without a sufficient safety net. But there is a world in which surrogacy could be an ethical lifeline for those who are unable to have biological children alone (be they same-sex couples, single parents, or those born without a uterus). There is ample evidence that many surrogates find the experience safe, secure and fulfilling. A better way must be possible.
[See also: The trauma ward]
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