The Vanishing Mother - thoughts before Mother’s Day
Renowned feminist and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently disclosed that her twin boys were carried and birthed by a surrogate mother. Speculation has run rife. Some suggest fertility challenges, given she was 47 at the time of their birth. Others point to her career. In a March 2025 BBC interview, she described how pregnancy with her first child in 2016 caused a 'terrifying' writer’s block. Perhaps she wanted to avoid the physical and emotional toll she had previously endured. We don’t know. But her decision raises an uncomfortable question: what has happened to motherhood?
Mothers are vanishing. Not literally, of course — there will always be women bearing and raising children. (Unless the grotesque techno fantasies about artificial wombs come to pass.) But there are ways in which role of the mother is being eroded in law, in language, in medicine, and in culture, with the rise of surrogacy and artificial reproductive technologies alongside gender ideology and the systematic downgrading of what it means to be a mother.
In the UK, legal reforms are being proposed to make it easier for ‘intended parents’ to take immediate custody of a baby after birth, stripping the woman who carried and delivered the child of any maternal rights. Meanwhile, in the US, the industry is thriving, fuelled by billionaires and celebrities who bypass pregnancy in favour of paid gestation. Khloe Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and Chrissy Teigen have all used surrogates, gushing about their babies on Instagram with little acknowledgement of the women who carried them.
Even the word ‘surrogate’ is problematic. A woman, a mother, is reduced to a thing — a function, a vessel, a service to be paid for. It is objectifying language, stripping her of her identity and her relationship to the child she has carried. She is not a surrogate — she is a mother. Yet the language of the surrogacy industry deliberately dehumanises her, making it easier to disregard her experience and her loss.
Commercial surrogacy is not an act of benevolence, it is a market, driven by profit. Women — often poorer women, because this is driven by the pay check — rent their wombs for the benefit of the wealthy. The biological, emotional, and physical labour of pregnancy is monetised, and the mother is reduced to a ‘gestational carrier.’ This is not progress, this is commodification. And even worse, the children are for sale. In this model commercial surrogacy is indistinguishable from the sale of children. Anyone wealthy enough can essentially buy a baby.
At the same time, the word ‘mother’ itself is being erased. If you inhabit social media I’m sure you have seen many examples. In the UK, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust replaced ‘mother’ with ‘birthing parent’ in maternity services, and the General Medical Council quietly scrubbed references to ‘mothers’ from its maternity guidance. This shift, driven by transgender ideology, reduces motherhood to a functional, mechanical process, as though there is nothing distinct about being a mother beyond the act of giving birth.