{"id":300798,"date":"2023-10-30T08:41:52","date_gmt":"2023-10-30T13:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=300798"},"modified":"2023-10-29T19:43:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T00:43:26","slug":"woman-surrogacy-opposes-buying-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/woman-surrogacy-opposes-buying-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman born from surrogacy opposes it: ‘We’re using wombs, we’re buying children’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Olivia Auriol didn’t know she was conceived through traditional surrogacy until she was 30 years old. Now, she’s fighting against the practice.<\/p>\n

Auriol grew up<\/a> splitting her time between France and the United States as an only child. Her mother was French and was often secretive. CNE News reported<\/a> that one of Auriol’s first clues that something was off was her baby pictures \u2014 or lack thereof. \u201cThere were no pictures of my pregnant mother, and I am five days old in the first pictures of me,” she said.<\/p>\n

Eventually, when she was a little older, Auriol learned her mother’s age and realized she couldn’t be her biological mother. “I realised that she couldn\u2019t have had me at that age, now thirty years ago,” she said. “Aside from that, there were also physical differences. I look a bit like my father but not at all like my mother. I am tall and blonde, and my mother is short and brown.\u201d<\/p>\n

A DNA test through MyHeritage confirmed her suspicions. In traditional surrogacy, the surrogate is also the egg donor and is the biological mother of the baby she is carrying. Auriol eventually found her biological mother, though her birth certificate had been altered to remove her biological mother’s name.<\/p>\n

\u201cSwapping birth certificates should be completely illegal when you think of it,” she said. And the knowledge that her parents spent money to have her made it worse. “It was like, Olivia, shut up. Swallow your feelings; they might have spent over 150,000 dollars trying to have you,” she said.<\/p>\n