British supermodel Naomi Campbell opened up about motherhood in an interview with the Sunday Times. She admitted her children were born through surrogacy, and claimed that women who say they don’t want children will change their minds.
Campbell, 54, welcomed her children at the ages of 51 and 53, and is a single mother. “My babies are everything to me. It’s made me fear for the future,” she said, confirming she used a surrogate. “I did. I hope for a better world for my children. They are 110 per cent my priority. I have to be there for them on their first day at school.”
But she also gave a statement about the regret people will feel if they put off having children, perhaps unintentionally referencing her own choice to wait until her 50s to have children; by then, use of reproductive technologies was the last option.
“I have heard a lot of young girls saying that it is too expensive to have children and they may not want them, and I have said, ‘You will change your mind. You will want to be a mum,'” she said. “I understand economically it is tough. But my mum had nothing and she made it work. It’s worth it. It is so amazing.”
READ: Khloe Kardashian elaborates about feeling ‘detached’ from son after surrogacy
Celebrities like Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Chrissy Teigen, and more, have turned to surrogacy to have children. Not all have found the experience to be a positive one; Khloe Kardashian notably said she felt the process was “transactional,” and said she struggled to bond with her son afterwards, more so than she did with the daughter she carried herself.
Yet as surrogacy grows in popularity, thanks to its increasingly public use by celebrities, the risks — to both women and babies — are frequently ignored. Surrogacy is inherently exploitative, with wealthy would-be parents paying to rent the bodies of typically lower-income women. As feminist activist Taslima Nareen said in 2022, “Surrogacy is possible because there are poor women. Rich people always want the existence of poverty in the society for their own interests. If you badly need to raise a child, adopt a homeless one. I won’t accept surrogacy until rich women become surrogate mom [sic].”
Furthermore, research has also found that surrogates are at a higher risk of gestational diabetes, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, and bleeding complications after birth than women carrying their own biological children — while babies conceived through IVF are likewise at a higher risk for numerous complications. On top of that, surrogacy creates a child with the intention of separating a newborn from his or her birth mother, which is well known to create trauma. (Adoption seeks to heal a traumatic separation; surrogacy intentionally creates one.) Yet children are turned into business transactions, products to be bought and sold, because a wealthy buyer wants them.
