Britain’s first surrogate mother is speaking out about her hope to reconnect with the baby she gave up in 1985.
Kim Cotton, the first woman known to have been a surrogate mother in the United Kingdom (UK), was paid £6,500 to have a baby for a Swedish couple. The arrangement was brokered by an American agency, and as the Swedish woman was infertile, Cotton used her own egg to conceive the child. This process, now called traditional surrogacy, means the baby the Swedish couple raised is actually Cotton’s own biological daughter.
In 2017, Cotton told The Independent it was a BBC documentary that originally caused her to think about becoming a surrogate for another couple. Already the mom to two children, Cotton thought the money would help her provide for her family.
“I wrote to an American agency. A year later it all sort of happened,” she said. Cotton agreed to carry a baby for an anonymous couple in exchange for £6,500. “I’ve always said that it was a two-fold thing,” she added. “The money they were offering helped. I was a stay at home mum in those days, and we took on quite a big project in doing up our house and I thought that might help with the cost. But I also couldn’t imagine not being able to have children. I met my husband when I was 15 years old. We got engaged at 18, married at 19, and I had our first baby at 20. I took it for granted. I never thought that people had trouble conceiving.” She added that it is her belief that “if you’re lucky enough to be able to give birth and have a child, you should share your fertility.”
The case surrounding the child, known publicly as Baby Cotton, set off a legal and media firestorm, which rattled Cotton. Though she said she didn’t regret being a surrogate, she also experienced trauma over losing her baby.
“I wasn’t ready for it. I seriously thought this was something I could do quietly and I didn’t know it would cause a furor. If I’d known I might have thought twice,” she said. “I always think about her on her birthday, January 4th. And then I close the door because it’s quite painful when you open it up.”
Now, she’s trying to find the daughter she lost. She’s joined an online DNA site in hopes that her daughter might be able to find her one day.
“Let’s just say, I’ve made it easy for her to find me, if she wants to,” she told the Daily Mail. “I’m not sure how I would feel about it if she did, though. I’m not sure, mentally, how I would be, because it would be opening up a Pandora’s box when I’ve tried to keep the lid closed. It is 40 years lost, isn’t it?”
READ: Judge sounds alarm in unregulated sperm donation case, calling donor ‘wholly self-centered’
She also said she has made sure to convince herself that her daughter was well taken care of in a loving home, because thinking anything otherwise is too difficult to bear. And she acknowledged that if her daughter was mistreated, it’s partly her fault — and that she lives with the trauma of losing her every day.
“It is a living death. Or maybe a divorce, where you still love someone but you see them with someone else. At the end of the day, she is half mine. She is my daughter. And yet, I set out to do what I did, so I have to live with that. I don’t want this to come across as if I have had an unhappy life. I really haven’t, but for all these years I’ve sort of put it in a box and closed the lid. I can’t torment myself with it. I don’t know where she is in her life. Hopefully she’s a mother by now herself,” she said. “I tell myself that she’s had a good life because all the indications were that she would have, and there is comfort in the fact that the judge ruled they would be good parents.”
Asked how she would react to learning her daughter was mistreated or neglected, she said, “That would be devastating. Unforgivable on my part. You don’t give a puppy to a family without sussing them out, and that’s what I did.”
Cotton also said that the surrogacy arrangement affected her children, as her other daughter often asked about the half-sister Cotton gave away. “[W]hich cut like a knife because I genuinely never thought of Baby Cotton as a part of my family,” she said.
She doesn’t know if her daughter even knows she exists, as she was never told so much as “thank you” for what she did… and then was blamed for the media uprising over the situation. “The agency involved made me the scapegoat, and accused me of breaking the contract, so I’m sure that couple thought of me as a first-class, money-grabbing b***h,” she said. “Later, I discovered that before moving into the surrogacy business, [the woman running the agency had] run a demolition business. I thought: ‘That’s exactly what you are in now, the demolition of people’s lives.'”
Specifically due to the Cotton case, commercial surrogacy was banned in the UK, and Cotton said she’s horrified to hear it has continued in the United States, particularly among celebrities.
“But the Americans are a different breed,” she said. “Over there you can do what you want, if you have money.” She also weighed in on the Lily Collins controversy, saying it’s something that needs to be discussed.
“I don’t get why you’d want to be a surrogate for a pop star who has four or five children already. Maybe there is something about being able to say ‘I was Michael Jackson’s surrogate’ or ‘I was Robbie Williams’ surrogate,’ but I don’t get it. In this country, my experience is surrogates feel they are doing something special,” she said. “People are so motivated to become parents. That maternal instinct in a woman is so bloody strong that they will never give up until they have exhausted everything to become a mum.”
