Essay

Surrogacy and the Mother a Child Loses

You may have seen a celebrity announce that a baby arrived through surrogacy, or watched someone you love struggle with infertility and thought, If another woman is willing to carry the baby, why would that be wrong? If wo people desperately want a child and everyone agrees to the arrangement, isn’t that an act of love? Isn’t surrogacy basically another form of adoption? And most importantly, what does Heavenly Father teach about it?

These are questions that a lot of people are asking, and you may be wondering what is true. Heavenly Father’s teaching on surrogacy makes more sense when you begin with His pattern for bringing His children to the earth and not the lens of man. It also makes more sense when you look start peeling back the layers. Let’s take a closer look at what surrogacy means for the most vulnerable of God’s children: babies.

Jesus Shows Us the Way

When Jesus taught about marriage, He took us back to the Creation and told us that “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” and that husband and wife are commanded to be “one flesh” so that they may have children.

This “one flesh” means that a husband and wife and their bodies are perfectly formed for one another in order to create children. God created humanity “male and female” and then commanded them to “be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:27–28). Both the beautiful and complementary designs of both a father and a mother are needed for a baby.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World places the creation of children inside that same pattern in that “children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother.” Elder D. Todd Christofferson also taught that this marriage and family order is not a human invention that mortals are free to reconstruct; it comes “from above, from God” and is “the order of heaven.”

This gives us an important way to understand surrogacy through Heavenly Father’s eyes. Surrogacy intentionally divides the relationships involved in creating, carrying, giving birth to, and raising a child.

Why Isn’t Surrogacy the Same as Adoption?

This is one of the most important distinctions in the surrogacy discussion.

Adoption begins with a child whose original family situation has already been disrupted. For many reasons, that child cannot be raised by his or her biological parents, and adoption seeks to give the child a stable family while responding to a loss that has already occurred.

While adoption responds to a child’s loss, surrogacy intentionally creates a situation in which separation from the birth mother is part of the plan from the beginning.

This difference matters because a baby develops in the womb with the only mother he or she knows, and becomes intimately familiar with her voice, smell, heart, and physical presence before birth. Even what might seem like the “best-case” surrogacy arrangement—where the intended mother and father are also the child’s genetic parents—still asks a child to experience a significant separation at birth. The baby has formed a permanent, biological prenatal relationship with the mother who carried and gave birth to him or her and at birth, the baby is then taken away from the only mother he or she knew. It is

Surrogacy is also different from adoption because the surrogacy contracts are designed to give intended parents significant control over decisions during the pregnancy. Some contracts include provisions allowing intended parents to request an abortion when a prenatal diagnosis reveals a disability or fetal abnormality.

When donated eggs are involved with gay adoption by two men, the child’s family relationships can become even more divided. A child may have one woman who is the genetic mother, another who carries and gives birth to the child, one father, and another man who is not related to the baby.

This does not mean the intended parents will not love the child deeply. But their love does not remove the more difficult question surrogacy raises: Is it right to intentionally create and then separate a child from a mother in order to fulfill an adult desire?

Adoption therefore asks, How can we care for a child after the loss of his or her original family situation? Surrogacy asks a woman to conceive or carry a child with the understanding that the relationship created through pregnancy will be severed after birth so that the child can be given to someone else. One seeks to respond to a child’s loss; the other builds that separation into the child’s conception and birth.

Children Suffer When They Lose Their Birth Mothers

Mothers and babies bond during pregnancy. Studies show that maternal separation, a feature of surrogacy, is a major physiological stressor for the infant and even brief maternal deprivation can permanently alter the structure of the infant brain. Many adoptees argue that their “primal wound” of maternal loss manifested as depression, abandonment/loss issues, and emotional problems throughout their lives. It hindered their attachment, bonding, psychological health, self-esteem, and future relationships. One surrogate-born woman notes:

“Children of surrogacy, just like children of a traditional adoption, deal with traumas. We want to know where we come from… who gave birth to us and what they are like. When we have children in this world who already need homes, why are we intentionally creating children [via surrogacy] to go through adoption traumas?”

Olivia’s Experience of Being Born Through Surrogacy

Olivia Maurel was born through surrogacy and later became an outspoken opponent of the practice. In this first-person interview, she describes learning about the circumstances of her birth and explains why she came to view her separation from her birth mother as a significant loss that affects her every day. Watch Olivia tell her story:

Olivia’s experience reflects countless other children born by surrogacy, and invites us to listen compassionately their real, and often heartbreaking, experiences.

Motherlessness After Birth

Many children born through surrogacy will also grow up without the daily presence of a mother. Research on gender complementarity suggests that mothers and fathers contribute in distinct and important ways to a child’s development, and other research has found diminished outcomes when children are raised apart from those complementary relationships. But research only tells part of the story. Children themselves sometimes describe the absence of a mother as something they felt deeply, even when they were otherwise surrounded by love.

One woman who was raised by two fathers described discovering that absence when she was only five:

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a mother until I watched a movie about a child who lost his mother. My 5-year-old brain could not understand why I didn’t have the mom that I suddenly desperately wanted. I felt the loss. I felt the hole. As I grew, I tried to fill that hole with aunts, my dads’ lesbian friends and teachers. I craved a mother’s love even though I was well-loved by my two gay dads.”

Her experience helps explain why the question is larger than whether a child is loved. A child can be deeply loved and still grieve a relationship that is missing. For some children, the absence of a mother can remain significant long after infancy, affecting how they understand their biological identity and ancestry and leaving them to make sense of family relationships that were divided before they had any voice in the decision.

Those needs do not suddenly appear when a child becomes old enough to describe them. They begin in infancy, when babies naturally seek comfort, closeness, and nurturing from the people who care for them. This simple everyday moment illustrates something children often communicate long before they have words for it—the desire for a mother’s presence and care:

Why Surrogacy Can Sound So Loving

Surrogacy is usually presented through the adults’ stories: a couple longs for a baby, a woman wants to help them, medical technology makes pregnancy possible, and the adults involved agree to the arrangement. From that perspective, questioning surrogacy can seem almost unkind.

But God’s teachings about the family ask us to look beyond adult consent. The Family Proclamation specifically describes what children are entitled to: birth within marriage and the care of a father and a mother. The child cannot consent to the relationships adults choose to separate before his or her conception.

Once adult desire becomes the main measure of what is right, it becomes easier to overlook God’s purposes for marriage, bodies, motherhood, fatherhood, and birth.

Elder Christofferson taught that Satan actively opposes marriage and the formation of families and attacks what is sacred about human sexuality. One way that distortion can work is by taking something genuinely good—the longing for a child—and allowing the goodness of that desire to become the justification for whatever means will satisfy it.

That is why discipleship sometimes requires asking more than Can we do this? or Do the adults agree? We also ask what God has revealed about the purpose of our bodies, marriage, procreation, mothers, fathers, and the rights and needs of children.

What Does the Church Teach Say About Surrogacy?

The Church’s General Handbook points to the family proclamation and explains that the pattern of a husband and wife providing bodies for God’s spirit children is divinely appointed. This means that it this is the way Heavenly Father wants babies come to this earth through both a mother and a father who are married. Because surrogacy breaks those bonds, the Church does not support surrogate motherhood, and children who are born to a surrogate mother are not born in the covenant.

The explanation begins: “The pattern of a husband and wife providing bodies for God’s spirit children is divinely appointed.” That is the doctrinal reason given before the policy. Surrogacy separates this and removes the baby from the only mother he or she will know. The concern is rooted in God’s revealed pattern for how His spirit children receive mortal bodies and enter families.

What Research Shows: Separation Trauma & Lifelong Identity Crisis

Conceiving children through sperm or egg donation and surrogacy can separate children from their biological mother or father. For many donor-conceived children, that separation becomes more important as they grow and begin asking where they came from and who they are connected to. More than [80 percent of donor-conceived children]((https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(08)04835-8/fulltext) want to know the identity of their biological father or mother, and research has found that donor-conceived children can struggle more with questions of identity, depression, delinquency, and substance abuse.

One study of young adults conceived through sperm donation helps show why biological connections can matter so deeply. More than half said they sometimes wondered whether their donor’s family would want to know them, and 65 percent agreed with the statement, “My sperm donor is half of who I am.” Nearly half were troubled by the fact that money had been exchanged in their conception, and many described feeling that other people did not fully understand what it was like to grow up separated from part of their biological identity, as described in Olivia’s testimony:

A Few Questions Worth Thinking About

• When I hear people talk about surrogacy, am I making room to consider the experience and needs of the child as carefully as I consider the hopes of the intended parents and the woman carrying the baby?
• Because the desire to become a parent can be deeply good, have I assumed that every available way of pursuing parenthood must also be equally good for everyone involved, especially the child?
• What experiences, cultural messages, or personal assumptions may be shaping the way I think about a child’s need for both a mother and a father?
• How does my view of surrogacy fit with the Family Proclamation’s teaching that “the means by which mortal life is created [are] divinely appointed”?

References

• The Family: A Proclamation to the World
• General Handbook, “Surrogate Motherhood”
• General Handbook 2.1.3
• Jeffrey R. Holland, “Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments”
• Jessica Kern, “We Want to Know Who Gave Birth to Us and What They Are Like”
• Stefano Vaglio, “Chemical Communication and Mother-Infant Recognition”, Communicative & Integrative Biology 2, no. 3 (2009): 279–281.
• Lorenzo Semeia and others, “Impact of Maternal Emotional State During Pregnancy on Fetal Heart Rate Variability”, Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology 14 (2023).
• Instagram reel on the biological connection between mother and baby.