Hundreds of babies are born every year in the United States to surrogate mothers, whose wombs are rented for nine months for some sum of money. Surrogacy is rapidly becoming more popular — whether as a way for infertile couples to have children who are genetically related to them or as a way for gay couples to have kids. But this crisis didn’t exactly sneak up on us overnight.

Surrogacy is generally divided into two categories. In traditional surrogacy, a surrogate mother conceives through artificial insemination — meaning that the child to whom she gives birth is genetically related to her. In gestational surrogacy, the child is conceived in a lab through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) before being implanted in the surrogate mother’s womb, and the child she gives birth to nine months later isn’t genetically related to her at all. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: Pope Francis Is Right. The World Should Ban Surrogacy.)

But while modern science and its innovations have managed to sterilize the process for our modern sensibilities (although they have certainly not made it any more moral), surrogacy is nothing new. In today’s video, we talk about the history of surrogacy — from the earliest recorded instance of it in Genesis, to the tumultuous court cases of the 1980s and ’90s, as well as the work of legal experts like Noel Keane who tried to establish the legitimacy of the practice in the United States. (READ MORE: Shane Dawson and Ryland Adams’ Use of Surrogacy Showcases the Practice’s Grotesqueness)

Watch the video to learn more!

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