Doing the rounds on the internet is a ghastly video of Ollie Locke (a reality star from Made in Chelsea) and his husband Gareth talking about how they made their twin babies, Apollo and Cosima.
Interviewed by fellow MIC cast member Jamie Laing, Ollie (he and Gareth have the same surname) reveals that the couple probably spent a quarter of a million pounds on finding a surrogate mother. Although they were originally meant to go to “America” to find the lucky lady, Covid damaged the plans, so they soon headed to Mexico.
Ollie explains to Jamie: “I wanted to make sure that we knew who the egg donor was. I wanted them to be super fit… I wanted to find someone I know is going to be absolute smoke show. Basically we chose Emily Ratajkowski.”
His husband describes an L.A.-based company that aided their search, its books consisting of “supermodels who are Ivy League educated.” He adds “Our one went to Columbia.”
When Laing (quite rightly) says “that feels a bit strange, is it not?” Gareth replies: “It’s a bit prostituty, isn’t it?”, Ollie then says: “I think it’s quite fabulous. The eggs are terribly expensive. But we got a Brazillian supermodel.”
If you ever wanted content more emblematic of the current dire period for women’s rights, look no further than this interview. The two men appear to have no conception around how dehumanising and offensive their conceptualisation of the female body is; to them, the womb is something like a microwave, an incubator they can put things into.
The interview lays bare the attitudes many - especially the rich and entitled - have to eggs, which are simply thought of as products on a menu (forgive the food analogies, but they’re the most apt). The richer you are, the fussier you can be about what you’re ordering from the “fabulous” À la carte that is Women’s Bodies.
Although it’s illegal to pay a surrogate (more than her expenses) in the UK, that’s not the case in the parts of the world the Locke-Lockes (yes, really) travelled to, where surrogates can make huge sums of money.
Instead of congratulating themselves about their Ivy League Designer Mummy, they might want to ask why there’s such a willing stock of genius surrogates. Colombia - the alma mater of Apollo and Cosima’s biological mother - costs $32,670 a term. Is it surprising women paying these sorts of fees might like the sound of hundreds of thousands of pounds?
Over the last decade, there have been growing concerns about the ethics of surrogacy, with Westerners looking to India, Ukraine and other poor parts of the world to find women ready to harvest their babies. The disturbing and exploitative nature of these trends were exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine and surrogate mothers and their babies were suddenly left out in the cold. Socioeconomic disequilibrium is the hallmark of many of these set-ups.
What people might realise less is that women in developed countries have too become easy pickings for the fertility industry. With the cost of living rising, many in their 20s and 30s can no longer afford their own children. Rather like someone looking over a friend’s leftovers in a restaurant, the fertility industry’s mentality is “well, if you’re not going to have it, I will.”
The problem goes further than surrogacy. These days social media is awash with adverts offering women the chance to freeze their eggs for “free” - so long as they will donate the other half. Who to, who knows…
Clinics will maintain they inform women every step of the process should they opt for packages, such as “Freeze and Share”. But some of the adverts undermine these pledges, grossly overplaying the efficacy of egg freezing and treating it as if a pension or pragmatic choice for a woman who likes surfing (see the video below).
The adverts are a type of disinformation yet there’s no outrage about them as there was whenever someone questioned vaccines in the Covid pandemic. It seems that scientific accuracy can fall by the wayside when it’s women’s bodies up for grabs.
Moreover, it strikes me that there’s a general lack of understanding among the population about the nature of gametes (egg and sperm) mostly because blank slate theory (the idea that are entirely the products of our environment) is an institutionally- and socially-entrenched doctrine. In fact, gametes are unlike any other type of donation (e.g. kidney). They contain a huge amount of genetic information, meaning that twins raised in different environments can exhibit a large crossover in personality traits.
Another big consideration (in the UK) for would-be egg (and sperm) donors is that the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority changed its regulation this year, so that their biological children can seek them out once they turn 18. A lot can change in 18 years - including whether a donor (biological mother or father) is happy that they donated their eggs/ sperm. They may, of course, have their own children at that time, completely altering their perspective on the nature of DNA and children.
These considerations are just the tip of the iceberg - when it comes to the mess Western societies are getting themselves into on fertility. The video of the Locke-Lockes is at least a massive wake up call as to the dystopian trajectory we are on. While Ollie says that the system is “a bit prostituty”, it’s actually far worse than that. Women’s rights are fast becoming mass casualties of social, medical and technological progress, and that’s before we even get to the babies.
A note: If you are concerned about surrogacy trends, I fully recommend following the account Surrogacy Concern on X here, which is at the forefront of raising awareness and campaigning for political change, or visiting its website: surrogacyconcern.uk.