General Article Surrogacy: ‘Why I carried a baby for complete strangers’

Topic Selected: Fertility and Reproduction Book Volume: 387

Maddie Mawditt is one of five mums featured in documentary series The Surrogates, which airs on BBC3 on Sunday

By Claudia Tanner

Ask any woman who’s been pregnant and she is likely to tell you it isn’t all roses. There’s the morning sickness, fatigue, stretch marks, followed by the actual birth.

But mothers will say it’s all worth it as you get to take home your baby at the end.

Except, for Maddie Mawditt, that wasn’t the plan. As soon as baby Hannah – conceived using her own eggs – was born, she was handed to her two dads, Alex and Richard Margerison, who held her with tears streaming down their cheeks.

Becoming a surrogate was ‘something I’d always considered’, says Maddie, 31, from Bristol, who was a single mother, with two boys, aged 10 and eight, when she started the process.

‘As I was approaching my 30th birthday, I thought it was a good time to look into it; it was a now-or-never type thing. The more I found out about it, and how it’s done in the UK, the more it seemed like s...

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