Jessica Allen lives in California, where commercial surrogacy is legal, and is the mother of three children. She entered into a surrogacy agreement with a Chinese couple through an agency and in December 2016 delivered by C-section what she believed were identical twin boys. To Allen’s acute emotional distress, she was not given the opportunity to see the newborns, who were rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, despite the written agreement that Allen could spend an hour with them. The next day, the contracting mother went to the hospital and showed Allen a photo of the children. One looked Asian and the other did not. The baby, half-Caucasian and half-Black, was later proven to be the biological son of Allen and her husband. It took months, at great expense and protracted agony, for Allen and her husband to secure custody of their baby. Learn more about her story.

Toni Bare entered into a surrogacy contract in 2015 in Iowa with a white couple for $13,000. Early on in her high-risk pregnancy, Bare said that the contracting couple engaged in sustained harassment and racist behavior that led her to premature labor. In August 2016, one week after one of the contractors called Bare the n-word, she delivered twin girls at 25 weeks. She decided to keep the girls out of fear of relinquishing them to whom she called a "home of hate." Kaylee died eight days later. Bare resided in the hospital with the surviving baby, Haylee, until November 2016 when law enforcement came to the hospital and removed the nursing baby from her. Bare sued for parental rights, leading to the Iowa Supreme Court decision that Bare entered voluntarily into the surrogacy contract, therefore it was fully enforceable. In October 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the petition to review such decision. Learn more about her story.

Linda G. Kahn, MPH, PhD, is assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she applies a life course approach to reproductive epidemiology. Her research includes the role of preconception and prenatal environmental exposures in pregnancy and postpartum maternal health, reproductive development and fertility, and health outcomes of assisted reproduction in both women and children. Dr. Kahn received her MPH in Population and Family Health and her PhD in Epidemiology from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Kylee Kwiatkowski was 23 years old and struggling to pay her college debt when she saw an ad in a magazine about being an egg donor. Eager to both make money and help others, Kylee signed up with an egg donor agency and was matched with a Canadian couple. The agency told Kylee she would have to fly from the U.S. to Toronto where the egg donation would take place. She was instructed to inject herself with hormones, including Orgalutran to prevent premature ovulation and Gonal-F. Pleased with Kylee’s high production of eggs, the doctor gave her a final “trigger shot” of hCG to prepare for retrieval. Under great abdominal pain, which she was advised was normal, the doctor harvested 45 eggs from Kylee’s ovaries. Kylee became extremely sick on the way back home from Toronto and alerted the doctor, who recommended rest and hydration drinks. Kylee was rushed to the hospital. She had suffered a stroke, caused by ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), and was close to death. A decade later, the right side of Kylee’s body is still impaired and she is believed to be infertile. Learn more about her story.

Taina Bien-Aimé is the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).