Wombs to rent: ‘We were scared to tell our surrogate she couldn’t eat pork’

Nine years ago, Justin and Jamie matched on JSwipe and a love story began. Both had been living in Washington DC for about a year but were originally from New York. Jamie, then 24 and working as a maths teacher, told her new match, who worked for the US government, that she enjoys rooftop bars. Justin, 23, picked the best he could find.

They had two drinks before going on a long walk through the city. That week, they met up three more times. A year later, the pair moved in together.

When Jamie’s parents realised the couple – both raised in Reform Judaism – were getting serious, they sat their daughter down for a serious conversation. They broke the news that when she was 14, she had been diagnosed with a chromosomal condition called Mosaic Turner Syndrome, which would affect her ability to conceive and carry to term. In 2018, a doctor told Jamie that without significant help, having a successful pregnancy was going to be a challenge.

After the couple tied the knot at their wedding in 2020, they got serious about starting a family. A medical specialist on Jamie’s condition recommended surrogacy, and, full of optimism, the couple set off on this path.

Justin and Jamie are part of a growing phenomenon. The global surrogacy ‘industry’ was valued at $22.4 billion (£16.7 billion) in 2024 and is projected to reach $201.8 billion in 2034. In the UK, commercial surrogacy is forbidden, but altruistic surrogacy, where a surrogate mother can receive no more than “reasonable expenses” and intended parents must apply to the family court for a parental order, is permitted. As national adoption rates decline, the number of surrogate births recognised by UK courts increased from 117 in 2011 to 449 in 2022.

There is nothing more rewarding and more special than being able to hand intended parents a baby that they would not have been able to have on their own

The controversial practice, altruistic or otherwise, is banned on moral grounds in France, Italy, Germany and Spain. In October, the Italian senate branded surrogacy a “universal crime”, while French President Emmanuel Macron has said it is “not compatible with the dignity of women” and equated it to “turning their bodies into commodities”. But the business is booming in the US, Mexico, Colombia and Georgia, countries where increasing numbers of UK citizens seeking surrogates are turning.

“We did some very basic research and realised this is something people do,” says Justin, recalling the beginning of his and Jamie’s surrogacy journey. “It’s not anything anyone we know has done, but it works. Why wouldn’t it work for us?”

One might assume that the relationship between intended parents and the surrogate mother is kept transactional and at a distance, to avoid any blurring of boundaries. On the contrary, the surrogacy agency Jamie and Justin chose – Circle – mandates a close, personal relationship between the parties, with weekly communication, as is the case with many in the States.

“It was almost like dating,” Justin says. “The agency picks a candidate, you swap information, and if you both agree to meet each other, they set up a blind date. If you both agree to move forward after that, it’s considered a match.”

Their surrogate was perfect. A two-time mother and a nurse married to another nurse, she clicked with Jamie. “That was one of the things we liked about Circle. They emphasised that personal relationship, so that the intended mother and the surrogate really develop a bond.”

After the first gestational transfer in July 2024, using Jamie and Justin’s highest-grade embryo (they had three after gruelling IVF), the two couples met up for a meal, full of hope. At the time of our interview, nine months later, Justin and Jamie had just made the heartbreaking decision with their surrogate to part ways in a “medical match break”, after their third gestational transfer failed.

“It’s disappointing, because Jamie and I are 33,” says Justin. “All around us, our friends are having their first kids, their second kids. You can’t help feeling like you’re just running behind.”

It’s clear that the past year has been a particular battle for Justin, who has dedicated himself to being strong for Jamie. The couple are now about to embark on a third round of IVF after the second yielded no embryos in “another devastating blow”. But life moves on, and the couple are back on the waiting list looking for another surrogate.

Jamie and Justin Cohen are looking for another surrogate mother[Missing Credit]

Gestational surrogacy has a success rate of 75 per cent, with the most important factor being the age of the woman who provides the egg. For Atlanta-based Jewish couple Alexandra and Zach French, their surrogate – a Christian woman in her mid-twenties from a small town near Alabama – changed their lives.

The couple met in 2010 and married three years later. They had their first child, a boy, when Alexandra was 29 and Zach was 31, and had plans for more children.

Before meeting his wife, Zach had lost touch with his Judaism, but Alexandra reignited his passion for community. Every Shabbat dinner, the couple has ten to 20 people over – a tradition he says derives from his wife’s South African family. But in 2019, when Zach was studying 12 hours a day for the bar exam, their plans to add to their tribe were plunged into chaos when Alexandra was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Before chemotherapy began, the couple made sure to freeze her embryos. But when Alexandra had her double mastectomy, the doctor discovered further cancer that would make carrying to term impossible.

Coming from traditional Jewish backgrounds, having children was always a priority for the couple. “Every single person in our family of childbearing years has at least two kids,” says Zach. “It’s very much the expectation – to grow. If someone decided they didn’t want to have kids, they wouldn’t be shunned by the family, but it just didn’t even cross anybody’s mind.”

Because they started their journey during Covid – when foreign citizens were not able to pursue surrogacy in the US, creating an unusual surplus of available surrogates – the whole process was fast-tracked. The couple signed up to their agency in February 2020, found a match in April, and the gestational transfer happened in December. Now, they have a daughter.

Zach and Alexandra French with their son and surrogate daughter[Missing Credit]

Finding a Jewish surrogate wasn’t the couple’s top priority, but they still wanted her to keep kosher. “We were scared to tell her that she couldn’t eat pork and shellfish,” says Zach. “We had to get comfortable with things like the fact that [our surrogate] may have never met a Jew before.” When they found out she was Christian, and the daughter-in-law of a pastor, they couldn’t help but worry their surrogate might prefer the intended parents not to be Jewish.

It turns out she didn’t care. “Now we have this amazing relationship with the couple, we see them multiple times a year, we text on kids’ birthdays, they’ve stayed at our house,” says Zach. Their surrogate attended their daughter’s baby shower, and their son, conceived naturally, refers to the surrogate’s children as his cousins.

Shortly after she learnt how to walk, their daughter was reunited with her surrogate mother. Sat in a restaurant with Zach and Alexandra, as soon as the surrogate walked in she ran up to hug her, despite only having met her a few times since she gave birth to her.

Because Alexandra had already felt what it was like to carry her own baby, she says she wasn’t as devastated as she could have been. She Facetimed her surrogate during scans to feel as close as possible to the process. “I’m the type of person that once I had the gut punch of, ‘I cannot carry, we need to go through surrogacy,’ I was like, ‘OK, we’ve got to do whatever we have to do to expand our family.’”

While the urgency to have another child was Zach and Alexandra’s preoccupation, other Jewish couples encounter stumbling blocks in their surrogacy journey, owing to its halachic implications.

According to the London Beth Din, conversion is required in all cases of “assisted conception”, when either the egg is of non-Jewish origin, or the surrogate mother is not Jewish.

Israel was the first country in the world to regulate surrogacy, but the practice is still subject to strict restrictions and bureaucracy

The Reform movement, in contrast, determines the status of the child via the ovum of the mother, so a baby is Jewish if it comes from a Jewish mother’s egg (whose Judaism can derive from a matrilineal or patrilineal line). “Technically, Jewish birth was defined as ‘from the womb of the mother’, but that goes back to a period 2,000 years ago, when surrogacy was inconceivable,” says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, the former leader of Maidenhead Synagogue who now oversees the Reform Beit Din. “To say we have to apply a 2,000-year-old definition of birth to a modern, scientific new age, is absolutely astonishing, and if it causes harm to the parent, then it’s abhorrent as well.”

It was the US Conservative movement’s view of surrogacy babies that triggered attorney Jessica Chod’s struggle to change the law. When her surrogacy journey began, her main frame of reference was celebrity couples such as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, but she quickly familiarised herself with the process and learnt that her movement wouldn’t recognise her future child as halachically Jewish if her surrogate was not.

After welcoming her son into the world in 2018, her campaign began to address the longstanding belief of the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards (CJLS) that a child created with the egg of a Jewish woman but born using a non-Jewish surrogate must be converted in a mikveh. When I suggest to Jessica that this campaign must have been a fight, she resists. “It was a struggle for sure,” she says, “but I really value Jewish institutions, so it was never a knock-down-drag-out fight to break or dismantle a system: it was really done out of love and respect for the movement.”

Campaigner Jessica Chod with husband Andrew[Missing Credit]

Jessica joined forces with Rabbi Judith Hauptman and Rabbi Suzanne Brody to present the talmudic case in a paper that was then presented to the committee. In 2022, several years after her son’s birth, a vote was held, and Jessica’s recommendations won by 12 to nine, with two abstentions. The aim was not to disrupt the halachic belief that only a child born from a Jewish woman would indeed be Jewish, but to adapt this precept to the modern medical landscape.

“Such a rule worked well in the past because the identity of the birth mother was always known, and in ancient times, it was inconceivable that an egg could be taken from one woman and then implanted in another to bring it to term,” the paper said. But not any more. The paper also opened with the fact that there’s a precedent for assisted conception in the Tanakh, where three of the Jewish foremothers – Rachel, Sarah and Leah – all use an early form of surrogacy.

Even if the halachic implications can be solved, money continues to be a problem for expected parents. Justin and Jamie have spent north of $200,000 on their journey – 75 per cent of which went to their agency – while multiple rounds of IVF have ramped up the price. Meanwhile, Zach and Alexandra paid around $120,000 in total: $32,000 went to the surrogate, plus “bonuses” for the embryo transfer, the heartbeat confirmation, monthly maternity allowances, and her insurance. On top of that, around $30,000 went to the agency, and thousands on legal fees. Zach tells me prices have only increased, because there is more demand than supply. In California and New York, a first-time surrogate will receive between $60,000 and $80,000, while a more experienced woman could receive up to $120,000. It is cheaper in the south-eastern USA, where surrogates will be paid between $45,000 and $60,000, he says.

The financial burden of the process led the couple to found The Surrogacy Foundation in 2022, to give something back once their journey was complete. “Tzedakah is a big part of how we grew up,” says Zach, recalling how he spent Chanukah as a child volunteering in a soup kitchen. So far, the foundation has raised more than $500,000 to give to expected parents who would otherwise be unable to fund the process.

Even though Rabbi Romain says the Reform movement in the UK permits surrogacy as a valid option, he encourages Jews to approach the practice with “caution”.

He acknowledges that infertility is a significantly challenging situation, particularly for Jews, because the emphasis on family-building is “ingrained into Jewish culture” (the very first law of the 613 commandments is to “be fruitful and multiply”, after all).

“So, the sense of loss and failure is even more exacerbated perhaps in Judaism than in other faiths,” he says.

Surrogacy, when successful, can be a “wonderful” and a “real mitzvah”, but he encourages couples to consider other options first, such as adoption, because of the emotional impact on the carrying mother, the trauma if she changes her mind, and the potential future identity crisis of the child.

It’s undeniable that the country is divided on the issue. In March 2023, the Law Commission of England and Wales – the independent body that advises the government – published a joint report with the Scottish Law Commission, recommending reforms to surrogacy laws in the UK, including removing the need for a parental order. This would allow intended parents using surrogacy to become the legal parents at birth, rather than waiting up to a year for the title.

Anti-surrogacy feminist campaign group Surrogacy Concern criticised the proposals as biased, misogynistic, and “fraught with risk”. But reformers argue that greater clarity in UK law would encourage more people to seek regulated surrogacy within the country, rather than looking to Mexico or Africa, where the risk of exploitation of women and babies by dubious agencies is higher.

But for surrogates like Charlotte Ramberg, 33, based in Atlanta, Georgia the experience is far from traumatic. “There is nothing more rewarding and more special than being able to hand intended parents a baby that they would not be able to have on their own,” she says.

“I’ve given birth now four times unmedicated, and the providers laugh because I just sit back and do my thing.”

Charlotte Ramberg with husband Kevin and their children[Missing Credit]Charlotte Ramberg with her own son, holding a newborn baby she delivered for intended parents[Missing Credit]

Though not a member of the tribe herself, Charlotte facilitates support groups for intended parents at the Jewish Fertility Foundation – a US nonprofit founded by Elana Frank in 2015 to give grants to Jews on their fertility journey – helping them through the struggles and triumphs of surrogacy. Justin and Jamie have successfully applied twice for the grant, receiving more than $10,000 in help.

But what draws Charlotte to surrogacy? As a counsellor with a certificate in prenatal mental health, she spent years guiding women through the challenges of fertility and family building. But when she realised she might aid them in the ultimate possible way – as a surrogate mother – it was a no-brainer. “I just love everything babies,” she says.

“I love the whole process of trying to expand your family and the excitement it brings for these couples. There are a lot of difficulties that come with [infertility] that people don’t talk about, but I get to enter this realm, one that is usually so isolating and personal.”

Surrogacy is not always an easy ride. During her second journey, there were two failed transfers and one blighted ovum, meaning Charlotte had to endure a miscarriage. At that time, her husband was a big support. “I was experiencing pregnancy symptoms, there just wasn’t a baby. He was there constantly to remind me: ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s not your fault, and even though this wasn’t your baby that you lost, it was still a loss,’” It was difficult to come to terms with the fact that this time, she couldn’t help. She also had to remember that she had licence to grieve, as much as the intended parents.

And what about managing the maternal attachment she inevitably develops with the children she carries for nine months? It’s all about the mental preparation, and thorough psychological screening, she says.

“You never know how you’re going to react or bond, or not bond, until you go through it,” says Charlotte. But surrogates must enter the journey with full awareness that the baby they will give birth to is not their own. Instead, the surrogate is more of a “glorified babysitter”, which has its own perks.

“I still get to love them, like I would love any of my relatives’ or friends’ babies. I still get to see pictures of them, I still get to be a part of their story. It’s just I don’t have to be responsible for raising them, which I love because my husband and I have our own two kids – we finished our family.”

For more than two decades, Israel lawyer Irit Rosenblum has campaigned to innovate the law surrounding surrogacy in the Jewish State. Israel was the first country in the world to regulate surrogacy through the Embryo Carrying Agreements Law of 1996, but the practice was, and still is, subject to strict restrictions and bureaucracy.

When the law passed, a state-appointed committee – now made up of seven members including medics, a religious official, a social worker, a psychologist and a lawyer – was introduced to oversee and approve every surrogacy agreement in the country. But for decades, the pathway was available only to heterosexual couples, with same-sex partnerships and singles being excluded from the system.

The exclusion meant gay couples ventured abroad – to the USA, Canada, India, Nepal and Mexico. Irit, who believes surrogacy is a fundamental human right and part of every truly free society, personally assisted around 50 Israeli couples in their pursuit of surrogates.

If I want to be paid to give my uterus to other people, it’s my own decision

She was also involved in several legal battles representing those excluded from the state-managed system, which resulted in major breakthroughs in the law. As the founder of the New Family Organisation, she lobbies for equal family rights for everyone in the country – especially those who do not fit the normative model of a man and a woman married according to religious law. Eventually, in 2018, the Knesset expanded surrogacy rights to single women. It wasn’t until 2022 that the health minister Nitzan Horowitz announced surrogacy would be allowed for same-sex couples, single men and transgender individuals, with the same religious restrictions as normative couples.

When I ask Irit if she had any concerns about the exploitation of low-income women in developing countries, she says such a stance was paternalistic and colonialist.

Israeli lawyer Irit Rosenblum[Missing Credit]

“If I want to be paid to give my uterus to other people, it’s my own decision,” she says. “I don’t see it as a feminist issue. To restrict it and not to give women the opportunity to be paid – this is the feminist issue, because feminism means that you can do with your body what you want to do.” She compares surrogacy – bringing life into the uterus, to having an abortion – taking life away. Both are fraught with risks, and both are a woman’s right.

For Irit, there is still scope for progress to be made when it comes to reforming surrogacy in Israel. For one, she views the approval committee system as sexist. A man, seeking a life-changing operation would never be asked to convince a committee he is well enough to make that choice, she argues. Moreover, surrogate mothers must meet certain conditions, including being the same religion as the intended parent and unmarried, but having previously given birth, limiting the pool of viable surrogates in Israel.

In her view, denying people the ability to continue their genetic line is fundamentally discriminatory, and at worst, a violation. Her razor-sharp focus on expanding access to fertility is clearly driven by the fact that her family was devastated by the Holocaust. All of her grandparents were murdered by the Nazis while her Polish parents survived the horror of Auschwitz and the Death March. At the end of the war, her father, then aged 16, who had been subjected to Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz, weighed just 28 kilograms. Her mother, then 14, left the camp weighing 26 kilograms.

“As the daughter of two orphans, I understand the importance of family, of not being alone. I never had the feeling of having an aunt, an uncle, or a grandparent – never. I know how to live without.”

Throughout these discussions, Judaism comes up again and again as both women and men tell of the urgent need to continue their genetic line. Surrogacy is a rapidly growing phenomenon – normalised in the States, but still cloaked in taboo in much of Europe – which might have the potential to be as divisive as the assisted dying debate here in the UK. But many of its practitioners are legitimising their pursuit within the Jewish need to survive, against all odds – and sometimes at any cost.