We’ve all heard the phrase, “my body, my choice,” but celebrities like Michelle Williams are now promoting a new silent mantra: your body, my choice.

In a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, guest host Tiffany Haddish fawned over actress Michelle Williams, gushing: “Can I just say, that your body looks amazing, ‘cause I would have never thought you had any [kids].” As she praised Williams for her body’s ability to “snap back” after having three kids under the age of five, Williams turned to the audience and explained, “Well, then, I’ve gotta give a big shout out to Christine. Because this last baby did not come through my body. The miracle of our little girl is thanks to Christine.”

Haddish ignored the bombshell Williams had just dropped on stage: she and her husband had hired another woman to give birth to their third child. While the tabloids celebrate the announcement of a baby born through surrogacy, and Williams basks in the spotlight of national television, there is a struggling newborn whose plight is being completely ignored. She is caught in the grip of deep grief. Helpless and hurting in the arms of a stranger, she searches for the only mother she has ever known — Christine.

Babies Know Their Mothers

Research has long confirmed that newborn infants recognize their mother’s face within minutes of birth. They are hardwired to seek and connect with her — not the genetic supplier, but the woman who carried, nourished, and birthed them.

When that mother is not found, babies grieve her loss. At first, they will cry uncontrollably. Adoption and social workers have long observed motherless newborns crying inconsolably. Some become so distraught that only sedation quiets their screams. Newborns can and do feel fear and despair. However, they don’t have words to express their suffering, and when their cries go unanswered, they withdraw and detach.

Despite the so-called “advancements” of science that reduce a mother to nothing more than a “gestational carrier,” human needs remain unchanged since the beginning of time. In The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, Nancy Newton Verrier draws on the work of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to understand the deep bond between mother and child. She writes:

…in the beginning of life there is no such thing as a baby. There is instead a mother/baby — an emotional, psychological, spiritual unit, whose knowing comes from intuition. The baby and the mother, although separated psychologically, are still psychologically one.

When a baby loses her mother, she loses a part of herself. It is not just separation. It is a hole torn in her inner self. Chances are, she will spend a lifetime searching for a cure.

I know, because I was once that baby girl.

The Baby Scoop Era

Big Infertility was a major industry long before IVF became fashionable. While adoption serves as society’s correct and compassionate response to children who have tragically lost their parents, or whose birth parents are incapable of raising them, that was largely not the case during the baby boom of the ’50s and ’60s.

I was born into what is now known as the “Baby Scoop Era” — a time when unwed mothers were shamed and sent away, hidden from friends and family inside private institutions. There, they gave birth and were often coerced into surrendering their babies. These newborns were funneled into the twentieth century supply chain for infertile couples.

If severing the maternal bond is inconsequential, I should have thrived. I had an upper-middle-class mother and father, a nice home, and went to a private school. Even still, from my earliest memory, I carried a weight — a physically painful heaviness in my chest I could neither explain nor name. It stayed with me until I was in my teens.

It would be 50 years later before that painful feeling resurfaced. By then, I recognized it. Having buried a teenage son, the pain of grief had become a familiar companion. But this grief had a different edge to it. It was three parts mingled together: grief, fear, and guilt. Its name is abandonment.

Mothers are not interchangeable. Nothing fills the hole left by losing your mother. Like a sapling wounded early, my life bent and grew around the gaping wound of abandonment. Over time, it became part of me.

Even though I had an adoptive mother who loved and cared for me, from an early age, I fantasized about my birth mother — what she looked like and found comfort pretending she was holding me. Eventually, we stop crying and fantasizing, but that doesn’t mean the hole has healed, it’s just expressed differently.

Four months before my seventeenth birthday, I married, and by eighteen, I was holding my first child. I set out to create the family I had longed for. My husband and I have now been married for almost 50 years. He was horrified when I finally confessed that for decades I had carried a secret belief: that one day he would leave me. My fear seeped from a wound he never knew existed nor did he create. It has taken me a lifetime to understand, name, and find the missing pieces.

Infertility Redefined: Children for Sale

During the “Baby Scoop Era” the infertility industry almost exclusively catered to middle-class white families who longed for children but could not conceive. Today, the market has expanded to a global industry valued at approximately $22.4 billion.

With infertility now redefined to encompass single adults and same-sex couples, growth projections are estimated to hit upwards of $201.8 billion by 2034.

There will always be children who need parents, and meeting those needs is what a good and just society does. But that is not why the fertility industry, and the surrogacy industry specifically, exists. Instead, it is about satisfying lifestyle choices and adult desires. And in the process, children have been reduced to products to be bought and sold with little to no regard for the impact on their lives — your body, my choice.