Today seems the perfect day to inaugurate a new blog about something so dear to my heart as surrogacy.

I have worked with those on the surrogacy path for almost ten years and I am still moved and inspired on a daily basis by the people who come together in this unique way to create family.

This blog had its genesis last spring around the time of the release of Baby Mama, a movie about surrogacy starring Saturday Night Live actors Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Their version of surrogacy was expectedly an exaggerated stereotype, which is the stuff of humor, but I came away feeling that this movie probably set surrogacy back about ten years.

Around that time there was also an upsurge of negative media attention to surrogacy in general, expressing suspicion and judgment of surrogates in particular. This seemed to be stimulated by coverage of the outsourcing of surrogacy to India, where women are reportedly housed in dorms with the express purpose of creating babies for Westerners.

I was puzzled. Neither the movie nor the negative opinion pieces resembled any of the people or processes that I had been closely involved with for ten years. It seemed all the debate was theoretical and ideological. I felt certain that those writing had never known anyone who had been either a surrogate or a parent through surrogacy.

My mind flashed on something I had learned in a sociology class years ago about the military’s strict policy of fraternizing with the enemy. I had always assumed that this rule was to prevent the inadvertent sharing of military secrets. According to my teacher, there was a different motivation underlying this policy: it is harder to kill someone once you have seen pictures of his children.

In other words, once we get to know someone, they may no longer be our enemy.

I suddenly saw that not many people know surrogates or people who have had children through surrogacy, or, rather, they don’t know that they know them. Surrogates are by and large invisible. She may be the pregnant woman behind you in the grocery checkout with her own little children in tow. She may be the woman sitting next to you at the obstetrician’s office. You would never be able to pick her out in a crowd. As for families made by surrogacy, they look like all other families, too. The only reason we recognize more of them now is that when we see two men with an infant, everyone knows they didn’t do that without help from a woman somewhere!

In addition, most people involved don’t wish to seek attention about surrogacy. This is not due to shame, but to an understandable desire for privacy. Also, on both sides of the equation are busy people, dealing with what every other family deals with: balancing work, family and community, and the least of their concerns is how people perceive surrogacy. They are just living their lives!

I am not, and never have been, a surrogate. I am not a parent by surrogacy. Ten years ago I took on a professional psychological support role with surrogates although I knew nothing about them. I have to admit that I came into this with some of the very same stereotypes that are common out there even today.

The goal of this blog is to present positive portraits of real life surrogates and surrogacy-created families, so others can form opinions from their experience rather than just spout from an ideological perspective. This blog is also a precursor to the launching of a membership site for conscious, positive surrogacy. If you would like to be part of this emerging community, please leave your email address in the box at the top.

For now, you can get started by clicking here to meet Norma, Brett and Matt, a surrogate from Colorado and her intended parents from England. This is their day-by-day journal of their process together. As I write, we are waiting to hear if their latest attempt to conceive has been successful.

Also, you can click here to see a slide show that a surrogate from Texas made for the family she helped to create in Israel.

Enjoy and come back for more!