When Olivia Maurel was six years old, she began to doubt. Her mother was different, she didn’t look like her at all and was much older than the mothers of her friends. There was something strange. “I don’t remember a single moment in my life when I didn’t ask myself questions about my birth,” she says today, almost 30 years later, sitting in a room at the University of Los Andes on a cold morning in Santiago, where she has just presented Where are you, Mom? (Ediciones Mensajero, 2025), a book that tells the story of the search that motivated those questions and the work she decided to undertake after finding the answers.
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“My mother is beautiful,” Maurel continues, trying to make it clear that there is no prejudice in her childhood doubts, but “she has brown skin, brown eyes, is very short and very thin and I am very tall, very robust and at that time I was blonde.” That is why, she recalls today, “I remember telling myself back then ‘she is not my mother’.” “There was an emotional disconnection,” she adds. And her suspicions were not wrong. That French woman who had raised her along with her Swiss-origin father in West Palm Beach, Florida, was indeed not her biological mother.
Olivia Maurel was born in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, on December 1, 1991, and although her adoptive mother appears as her mother on her birth certificate, she was actually carried by another woman. “I was born from a surrogate mother,” she writes in her book, “what is commonly known as surrogacy.” “A practice in which a woman agrees to carry the child of another person or couple and hand it over at birth, with or without payment,” she adds. Her case occurred five years after the first case of surrogacy was registered in Michigan in April 1986.
How did you find out you were the child of a surrogate mother, because I imagine you first suspected you were adopted?
Actually, at first I didn’t think anything, I just felt that something was wrong. I grew up, reached adolescence and it was very hard because I knew something was missing in my story, something that didn’t fit. I got into drugs, alcohol, tried to commit suicide several times and when I was 17 I decided to do something. The information I had was that I was born in Louisville. So I searched ‘Louisville, Kentucky’ on Google and spent a whole night researching. At first I looked for adoption agencies, because I didn’t know what surrogacy was. But very soon fertility clinics started appearing on Google. So I clicked on the clinics and by the end of that night I was convinced I was born through surrogacy.
What did you do next?
The doubts grew stronger as I discovered what surrogacy was. Then I met my husband, got married and had three children and being a mother made everything worse, because I felt I didn’t know 50% of my story and, therefore, 25% of my children’s story. I didn’t know my medical history. I didn’t know what I was going to tell my children. “Who is their grandmother? What are their origins?” I felt guilty as a mother. Then my mother-in-law, who saw me go through depression, gave me a DNA test when I was 30 years old. The results confirmed that I was not French.
But that test also revealed something else that allowed her to advance in her efforts to clarify her origins. A cousin, whom she didn’t know, had also taken the test and the site offered to put her in contact with her. She decided to do so, send photos and tell her something about her family history. The response came quickly. “Good morning Olivia!, welcome to the family, there are many of us N.” “Jenn put me in contact with my half-brother and they with my half-sisters and that’s how I found my biological mother,” she recalls. Olivia was 31 years old. It had been 25 years since her first childhood doubts.
What was the meeting with your biological mother like?
I received a message from her on Messenger. The conversation was very emotional. She answered all the questions I needed her to answer. Who am I? Who are my ancestors? Why did she resort to surrogacy? How was our first separation? What is her favorite color? Now I know why I love animals so much, she has a great passion for them. She loves reading books. I also love books. She also had photos of my grandparents. That’s how I was able to reconstruct myself.
Had she never known anything about you?
She only knew my name and surname. But in surrogacy contracts there is a confidentiality clause that does not allow biological mothers to talk about surrogacy and they are not allowed to contact the child, so she didn’t even try.
Do you maintain a relationship with her?
No, no. She struggles with many mental health problems. She doesn’t talk to the children she had. I think, in a way, she had to tell me what she told me, she vented and I got the answers I needed. The truth is I wasn’t looking for a substitute mother, so the contact simply faded away. We no longer talk.
And what is your relationship with your adoptive parents like?
I have no relationship with them, because when I started talking openly about surrogacy, at the end of May 2023, and started recording TikTok videos about how I felt about surrogacy and what my perspective was as a child born through surrogacy, they saw one of those videos and told me “Either you stop talking about surrogacy and we stay in touch, or you keep doing that and then we disappear from your life.” And I chose to keep talking.
Why did you decide to speak out and take an active stance against surrogacy?
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Because I think surrogacy is horrible. I mean, as a mother, I don’t want any other woman to become a mere reproductive instrument for the rich. Here we are talking about poor women who become surrogate mothers. I have yet to see a rich woman gestate for a poor couple. That has never happened. There is always an economic difference between the parents who want a child and the surrogate mother. So, as a mother and as a woman, as a feminist, I cannot accept it. Also, as a child born through surrogacy, I know what consequences it can have. I’m not saying it will have the same consequences for all children, I’m just saying it can have consequences for children and that is unacceptable.
How does surrogacy work, because there are different cases?
Yes, there can be different cases. There are two general ideas. There is traditional surrogacy, which is my case, when the surrogate mother provides her eggs and the womb and the sperm of the adoptive father or donors are used. That happens in 30% of cases. In the remaining 70%, there is what we call gestational surrogacy, in which children can have up to five parents. There can be an egg donor, a surrogate mother, the mother who will raise the child, the father who raises the child, and the sperm donor. Cases vary.
You talk about the economic issue, but there are also cases of mothers or sisters lending their womb so that another sister or daughter can have a child, are you also against that happening?
Yes, of course. I am against it, because it is always the same. Those cases, when a sister gives birth to the child of her brother or sister, account for 0.001% of cases. It’s like it happens once every thousand years, so it never happens. But aside from that, I am still against it, because it involves separating a child from their mother at birth. So, even if it is their aunt — which is strange, if you think about it — it seems absolutely terrifying for the child. You have to think about it from the child’s perspective. My mother, the one who gave birth to me, is my aunt, but I also have my mother, who may have provided her eggs. Or maybe I have an egg donor. So, how does a child build themselves in this situation? It’s complicated.
You are a spokesperson for the Casablanca Declaration, which advocates abolishing surrogacy. How did that idea come about?
It all started on March 3, 2023, when 150 experts from around the world gathered: doctors, jurists, feminists, lawyers, etc. to address the issue…
And how did you meet?
They met because they knew there was a global market that was expanding: the global surrogacy market. At the current rate, we know that market will reach 200 billion dollars by 2032. So the growth is exponential. The goal is to achieve an international treaty to abolish surrogacy. Now we are about 300 experts from nearly 80 countries. It’s a fantastic group. I always joke with them because there are feminists, Catholics, people from the left or right, progressives… there’s everything. And we can sit around the same table, we can discuss and hate each other on any other topic, but on this issue we agree.
You talk about a surrogacy industry, and in your book you say that buying a child in California costs between 110,000 and 250,000 dollars. Who are the players in that industry?
There are many players involved: fertility clinics, doctors, big pharmaceutical companies, companies that sell the products surrogate mothers have to inject themselves with, as well as medication. There are also lawyers, even hotels, Airbnb, Uber. Sometimes, for example, if you go to Africa… and I saw this in a brochure, if you go to Ghana and choose the premium package, you have 21 days in an Airbnb they provide. You have a driver, you have tickets to do tourism and participate in safaris for free. There are many different players. It’s not just one. It’s a whole group of people profiting from this.
Which country has the best surrogacy legislation today?
Italy.
Why?
You can be for or against Giorgia Meloni, but she made the decision to review surrogacy and realized it was a global problem. They then decided to ban surrogacy and today Italians cannot resort to it on Italian territory. But not only that, if Italians go abroad and come back with a child, buy a child, they can face two years in prison and a fine of one million euros. It’s not about penalizing the child, but about preventing people from going abroad and returning with children. And it has worked.
Which countries have the most widespread surrogacy?
Ukraine remains a huge, huge center for surrogacy, even with bombs. It’s quite sad. You see babies born amid bombings and their orphanages are full of children. They are children no one has come to pick up because of the bombings. But there is also the United States and Mexico. Mexico is becoming a huge market because it is cheap. Women are paid little, many of them cannot even read or write. So they don’t know what they are signing in the contracts, they are vulnerable and need the money. Mexico is a very important place. Africa is also becoming a problem at this time.
