Misconceptions About Surrogacy: What Books, Movies, TV, and Celebrities Get Wrong
Misconceptions about surrogacy are everywhere — and most of them start with a book, a show, a movie, or a celebrity headline. Gestational surrogacy has become a recurring subject in popular fiction and celebrity news — thrillers, dramas, literary novels, streaming series, and headline-making announcements from high-profile families.
That gap matters — because the vast majority of real surrogacy journeys look nothing like what’s on the page or screen. When a story goes viral, it shapes what readers expect. Some walk away more curious. Others walk away worried. Both groups deserve real answers, not more drama.
This article takes on the most common misconceptions about surrogacy — the ones spread by books, TV, film, and celebrity coverage. We’ll discuss the themes honestly, explain where fiction diverges from reality, and show what a well-run gestational surrogacy journey actually looks like.
Key Takeaways
Freida McFadden’s The Surrogate Mother: A Thriller Built on Your Worst Fears
Of all the surrogacy fiction in recent years, Freida McFadden’s The Surrogate Mother (2018) is the one that keeps surfacing. It’s a psychological thriller, not a guide to family-building — but its premise lands with force because it speaks directly to a fear many Intended Parents carry: what if the person carrying your baby isn’t who she says she is?
The setup: Abby, who has spent years pursuing parenthood through failed fertility treatments and collapsed adoptions, accepts her personal assistant Monica’s offer to be her surrogate. What follows is a spiral of manipulation, gaslighting, and ultimately a revelation that Monica had a hidden agenda from the very start.
The novel works as a thriller precisely because it strips away every protective layer a real surrogacy journey would have in place. Monica proposes directly to Abby — there’s no agency. No independent psychological screening. No legal contract reviewed by a reproductive attorney before anything begins.
Monica also uses her own eggs and the intended father’s sperm, making her the genetic mother — a traditional surrogacy arrangement that reputable U.S. agencies have largely stopped supporting for exactly these reasons.
McFadden herself is a practicing physician who writes thrillers about the dark side of trust. The fear she conjures is a real human fear. But the scenario it’s built on — no agency, no screening, a traditional arrangement — is the opposite of how a well-managed gestational surrogacy program works. Real journeys are structured precisely so that fear never gets a foothold.
In gestational surrogacy, the surrogate has no genetic connection to the baby. The embryo is created from the Intended Parents’ genetic material (or donors) and transferred via IVF. The “she might keep the baby” fear doesn’t apply — gestational carriers are not biological parents.
Joanne Ramos’s The Farm: The Questions Worth Taking Seriously
Where McFadden writes thriller, Joanne Ramos writes social critique. The Farm (2019) imagines Golden Oaks — a luxury surrogacy facility in upstate New York where wealthy clients pay top dollar for carefully monitored surrogates who live on-site for the duration of the pregnancy.
The novel follows Jane, a Filipina immigrant who becomes a surrogate at Golden Oaks primarily for the financial payout. She can’t see her daughter for nine months. Her diet, exercise, and movements are controlled. The facility’s commercial logic places the fetus above the woman carrying it.
This is fiction — but it’s fiction built on real ethical concerns. Ramos herself has said she’s not opposed to surrogacy but wanted to ask how far economic desperation can distort what looks like a free choice. The New York Times called The Farm a look at surrogacy “taken to its high-capitalist extreme.”
These questions deserve honest engagement. The process does involve financial exchange. Economic need is a real factor in many surrogates’ decisions. The difference between an ethical program and an exploitative one lies in how the surrogate is treated — as a full person, her motivations understood, her wellbeing protected, her choices genuinely informed.
At a well-run agency, why women become surrogates is taken seriously from the very first conversation — not as a formality, but as a filter. The screening process exists partly to confirm that financial need alone is not the primary driver.
Surrogates are isolated, monitored like assets, and separated from their families
Golden Oaks controls every aspect of its surrogates’ lives — their food, movement, and contact with the outside world. The facility’s business model treats the pregnancy as the product and the surrogate as the container. It’s a pointed satire of unchecked commercial surrogacy.
Surrogates live at home, work with their own OB, and receive ongoing psychological support
Reputable programs in the U.S. do not require surrogates to live in a facility. Surrogates continue their daily lives, see their own managing OB, and have access to mental health support throughout and after the journey — typically for three to six months post-delivery.
Surrogacy does involve money, power dynamics, and complex emotions
Fiction earns its relevance by naming what real programs also have to reckon with: economic incentives, relationship dynamics between IPs and surrogates, and the psychological weight of carrying a child you will not raise. Good agencies build structures around exactly these realities.
The Handmaid’s Tale: The Biggest Misconception About Surrogacy in Popular Culture
Margaret Atwood’s novel — and the Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss — is the dominant cultural image of surrogacy for millions of people who have never considered it personally. That’s worth addressing directly.
The Handmaid’s Tale depicts forced reproductive servitude in a totalitarian state. The “surrogates” in Gilead have no agency, no choice, and no legal standing. The setup uses their bodies to explore coercion, political control, and the limits of bodily autonomy.
It is not about gestational surrogacy. It’s not even structurally related — the Handmaids carry children conceived by the Commander, making them genetic parents forced into traditional surrogacy under threat of violence. Modern gestational vs. traditional surrogacy comparisons aside, the entire framing of Gilead is the opposite of how legal surrogacy in the U.S. functions.
What The Handmaid’s Tale actually explores — and valuably — is why bodily autonomy, informed consent, and legal protection matter so much. The dystopia works as a warning precisely because those safeguards are dismantled. That makes it an argument for rigorous regulation of real surrogacy, not against surrogacy itself.
TV Comedies and the Misconceptions About Surrogacy They Spread
Not every piece of surrogacy fiction reaches for darkness. Some of the most widely seen depictions come from primetime comedies — and they carry their own distortions.
Friends gave surrogacy one of its most memorable storylines when Phoebe carries triplets for her brother Frank and his wife Alice. It’s warm, funny, and emotionally resonant — but Phoebe is a traditional surrogate, using her own eggs. The show presents this as sweet and uncomplicated. Real reproductive attorneys and agencies would flag the genetic connection and its legal implications immediately.
Superstore ran a storyline where Dina offers to be Glenn’s surrogate, despite having never been pregnant or given birth herself. Prior successful pregnancy is a baseline requirement in real screening — not a preference. No reputable agency or fertility clinic would clear her.
The Roseanne revival introduced a surrogate who lied about her age and planned to use her own eggs. A genuine background check and medical screening would catch both in the first pass.
These aren’t critiques of the shows — they’re observing what happens when surrogacy becomes a plot device. Drama and comedy both require complication. Real surrogacy’s safeguards exist specifically to remove the complications these stories depend on.
The Plot Twists in Fiction Happen Because the Screening Didn’t
Every fictional scenario that goes wrong does so because the medical and legal protections weren’t there. At Physician’s Surrogacy — the only U.S. agency managed by board-certified OB/GYNs — screening is physician-designed, legal contracts precede all medical steps, and our preterm rate sits 50% below the national average. The fictional villains don’t survive the first pass.
Our preterm delivery rate is 50% below the national average.
That’s not a marketing claim. It’s the outcome of surrogate screening designed by board-certified OB/GYNs — not administrators.
What Real Surrogacy Looks Like — Debunking the Parts Fiction Skips
The most persistent misconceptions about surrogacy come from stories that begin at maximum tension and escalate from there. What they skip is the part where surrogacy is actually lived — which is less dramatic, more supported, and more carefully structured than any thriller requires.
A real gestational surrogacy journey involves a legal contract reviewed and signed by independent attorneys on both sides before any medical steps begin. It involves psychological evaluation of the surrogate — not just her health, but her motivations, her support system, and her emotional readiness.
It also involves medical clearance by fertility specialists and an ongoing relationship between the surrogate, her managing OB, and the agency’s clinical team throughout the pregnancy. The ASRM’s guidelines for gestational carriers set a detailed clinical standard — one that well-run agencies exceed, not just meet.
The surrogacy contract isn’t a minor formality. It defines compensation, expectations, and contingencies before the first medication is taken. The psychological evaluation isn’t a checkbox. It’s the filter that determines readiness — and it’s one reason reputable surrogates describe their experiences very differently from how fiction depicts them.
For Intended Parents who’ve read the thrillers and watched the dramas: the fears those stories activate are understandable. They’re just not a description of what a well-run program looks like in practice. The most common surrogacy myths all have the same origin — a story told without the safeguards.
For women considering becoming a surrogate: the picture fiction paints is equally distorted. Real surrogates aren’t isolated, coerced, or left without support. They work with their own OBs, have independent legal counsel, and receive psychological support for months after delivery.
The women who do this describe it as one of the most meaningful things they’ve ever done — and the data backs that up. Most return for a second journey.
Celebrity Surrogacy Stories — and What They Actually Tell You About Agencies
One of the most common searches that lands people on articles like this one is some version of “what surrogacy agency do celebrities use” or “how to become a surrogate for celebrities.”
It’s a reasonable instinct. When a high-profile family openly shares their surrogacy journey — Kim Kardashian, Andy Cohen, Gabrielle Union, Elton John — it feels like a signal of quality. If they trusted an agency with something this significant, that must mean something.
The honest answer: most celebrity families work under strict confidentiality arrangements, and agencies don’t confirm client relationships. “Celebrity surrogacy agency” is largely a media framing, not a documented list you can research.
What those families were actually looking for — and what any family should look for — is the same set of qualities: rigorous surrogate screening, physician oversight, legal protection in place before any medical steps begin, and transparent compensation. Those criteria apply for any family — public figures and private ones alike.
If you want to understand how different families — including well-known ones — have built their families through surrogacy, our article on celebrity surrogacy stories covers the journeys that have been shared publicly. It’s the right place for those stories.
This article is the right place for what those stories don’t tell you: how the process actually works, what the misconceptions are, and what a well-run program looks like from the inside.
Why These Stories Still Matter
None of this means fiction about surrogacy is harmful. Thrillers like The Surrogate Mother bring millions of readers into a subject they might never have encountered otherwise. The Farm raises class and ethics questions that the industry should keep examining.
Even The Handmaid’s Tale — as far from real surrogacy as Gilead is from San Diego — makes a compelling case for why bodily autonomy and legal protection are non-negotiable.
The goal isn’t to dismiss these stories. It’s to read them as fiction and use the real questions they raise as a starting point for actual answers. The misconceptions about surrogacy they create are understandable — and fixable, once you know what the real process involves.
Gestational surrogacy is one of the most medically sophisticated ways a family can be built — and one of the most human. Real surrogacy journeys are built on trust that’s earned: through screening, legal protection, medical oversight, and genuine care for everyone involved. That’s a story fiction rarely tells — because it doesn’t make for a thriller. It makes for something better.
If you’re ready to ask real questions and get direct answers, our team is here — schedule a consultation and we’ll walk through exactly what the process looks like for your situation.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Julianna Nikolic
Chief Strategy Officer Julianna Nikolic leads strategic initiatives, focusing on growth, innovation, and patient-centered solutions in the reproductive sciences sector. With 26+ years of management experience and a strong entrepreneurial background, she brings deep expertise to advancing reproductive healthcare.
