Jeremy and I met the woman who would give birth to our son in January: bleak weather, waning hope. For almost five years, we had been on what insiders call a “surrogacy journey,” which was torturously long and complicated. In Canada, unlike the U.S. and India, surrogacy is largely unregulated, with prohibitions around payment. Even discussing paying a surrogate can net the parents up to ten years in prison and/or a $500,000 fine. But without the ability to legally compensate surrogates for pregnancy, few women in Canada offer to do it. The result is that many intended parents wait years to match, even with the services of paid ?consultants? who work to match waiting would-be parents with women willing to carry pregnancies for the cost of monthly expenses. After having “journeyed” with a paid consultancy for almost a year?during which time we received no matches?we had been connecting with prospective surrogates ourselves, using websites and our own personal connections. Our first, and then our second, surrogates each miscarried our three remaining embryos in turn, before deciding not to continue. Around the same time, I had an ectopic pregnancy that required surgery. My infertility felt less like the absence of something than a malignancy, spreading from one part of my body to the next, from me to these other women who tried to help.
We went back to the Canadian consultancies, who gave us a timeline of a year-long wait to match with a surrogate. With...