A few years ago, Britain’s first commercial surrogate mother, Kim Cotton, joined one of those ancestry DNA sites.
It’s not a step you’d take if you wanted to keep the past firmly in the past, and yet, she says, she doesn’t actively want the baby girl she gave up 40 years ago to come banging on her door. These things are emotionally – as well as legally and ethically – complicated.
‘Let’s just say, I’ve made it easy for her to find me, if she wants to,’ she explains.
‘I’m not sure how I would feel about it if she did, though. I’m not sure, mentally, how I would be, because it would be opening up a Pandora’s box when I’ve tried to keep the lid closed.
‘It is 40 years lost, isn’t it?’
Kim, a grandmother to seven children (that she knows of) clings to the idea that her biological daughter (‘who will always be a baby to me – I can’t think of her as a 40-year-old’) has had a happy-ever-after life, even though she knows that the opposite could be true.
‘It’s like a fairy tale. I’ve written it and this is the story I am sticking to,’ she smiles, full of self-awareness. ‘I don’t want to hear that it is more like a Hansel and Gretel story.’
Indeed, for many the name Kim Cotton is still recalled with a shudder – and Baby Cotton perhaps even more so.
A few years ago, Britain’s first commercial surrogate mother, Kim Cotton, joined one of those ancestry DNA sites
All hell broke loose in 1985 when it emerged that Kim – a very ordinary (‘and very naive,’ she adds) mother of two from Cambridgeshire – was paid £6,500 to have a baby for a Swedish couple, in a deal brokered by a US agency. Kim used her own egg to conceive the child and the sperm of the man, as his wife was infertile.
For a time, Baby Cotton was the most famous child in the world.
Back then, although it was not illegal, the concept of paying a woman for the use of her eggs and womb was deeply controversial and even scandalous. Emotions ran high, with Kim’s position characterised as unnatural and unfeeling – the mother capable of giving her baby away for money.
And the fall-out was brutal, for all concerned. Even as Kim cradled the newborn in hospital, social services were ‘interrogating’ her, she says. Not long after, the child was taken from her arms in a manner that means even now, 40 years on, she talks about not having ‘closure’.
I tell her that she seems like a woman who is still carrying trauma, and is perhaps even grieving. She agrees.
‘It is a living death. Or maybe a divorce, where you still love someone but you see them with someone else. At the end of the day, she is half mine. She is my daughter. And yet, I set out to do what I did, so I have to live with that.
‘I don’t want this to come across as if I have had an unhappy life. I really haven’t, but for all these years I’ve sort of put it in a box and closed the lid. I can’t torment myself with it.
‘I don’t know where she is in her life. Hopefully she’s a mother by now herself.
‘I tell myself that she’s had a good life because all the indications were that she would have, and there is comfort in the fact that the judge ruled they would be good parents.’
And if they were not? ‘That would be devastating. Unforgivable on my part. You don’t give a puppy to a family without sussing them out, and that’s what I did.’
Baby Cotton, whom she remembers had the same blonde hair and blue eyes as her older children Anouska and Jamie, was made a ward of court after being taken from Kim’s arms.
Only after a High Court hearing was she given to the couple who had paid for her – whom Kim never met and knows little about. They took Baby Cotton on to America, where they lived.
Kim, who sold her story to a newspaper (but only after being outed, she says) was publicly shamed, and privately destroyed.
Her mother-in-law didn’t speak to her for two years, she tells me today. Her existing daughter would grow up to ask her about the half-sister Kim gave away, ‘which cut like a knife because I genuinely never thought of Baby Cotton as a part of my family’.
She still has no idea what that Swedish couple thought about the furore – or, to this day, whether they have even told their daughter that Kim carried her.
Kim in 1985 with Baby Cotton who was, for a time, the most famous child in the world
She doesn’t really know if the child’s original birth certificate – which, by law, had to record her as the mother and her husband Geoff as the father – still exists.
Certainly, in the utter mess, no-one ever said ‘thank you’ for the use of her womb and eggs.
‘The agency involved made me the scapegoat, and accused me of breaking the contract, so I’m sure that couple thought of me as a first-class, money-grabbing b***h,’ she says.
She has pretty unpublishable views of the woman who ran the American surrogacy agency.
‘Later, I discovered that before moving into the surrogacy business, she’d run a demolition business. I thought: ‘That’s exactly what you are in now, the demolition of people’s lives’.’
The Baby Cotton case certainly blew everything up – and changed the law in the UK.
Following the outcry, commercial surrogacy – the overt buying of a baby – was made illegal.
Although in the decades since, the number of babies being born via surrogacy has actually soared, these days the practice is tightly controlled.
In the UK at least, the only legal route is via ‘altruistic surrogacy’, which means surrogates can only be paid expenses.
Of course, elsewhere, particularly in the US, it is nothing short of a circus, a multimillion-pound industry that increasingly seems to be used as a lifestyle choice rather than a last resort.
The list of celebrities who are open about their use of a surrogate now includes stars like Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker and Robbie Williams.
Kim finds much of this horrifying. ‘But the Americans are a different breed,’ she points out. ‘Over there you can do what you want, if you have money.’
Just as it seemed surrogacy was about to become acceptable, however, there was a backlash.
When Emily in Paris actress Lily Collins announced the birth of her first child on Instagram on January 31, she revealed the baby had been carried by a surrogate. This led to a furious online debate over the ethics of surrogacy and the exploitation of surrogates.
When did we all go full-throttle Handmaid’s Tale, some asked – renting out women’s bodies like this? By coincidence in that very same week, on February 4, Baby Cotton celebrated her 40th birthday.
According to some, the woman who birthed her could claim the title of the original Handmaid.
And Kim herself fully admits that the story of Baby Cotton is the stuff of nightmares – although she remains convinced she went into it for the right reasons.
The sequence of events is well documented, but few under the age of 50 will know them, though.
Age 28, Kim watched a TV documentary on surrogacy, and felt desperately sorry for those couples who could not have children. She then decided to contact a US agency and offer her womb.
Money was a factor, of course –she and her husband were renovating their house, and why not get paid for helping someone?
‘At the time I was like a little mouse. I had no idea what I was walking into, or that I should have rights, too.’
Emily In Paris star Lily Collins and producer husband Charlie McDowell, who had a baby surrogate which led to a furious online debate over the ethics of surrogacy and the exploitation of surrogates
She took no fertility drugs for the process (and is horrified that so many surrogates now ‘turn themselves into pin cushions’ during drug-heavy medical procedures). She was simply inseminated with the Swedish husband’s sperm, during her natural cycle.
Part of the deal was that she would have no contact with the child, or the family, afterwards. Spending months getting to know them – de rigueur nowadays, at least in the UK – was not an option.
To this day, she has only scant details. ‘What I was told suggested that they were lovely people who could offer a child a good life.’
She says today that she was struck by the fact they lived in a countryside setting, which sounded idyllic.
Her biggest regret is that she never met the couple and was ‘cheated’ out of a formal handover process, ‘which would have brought some closure’.
It was after she took part in another documentary, anonymously, that Kim’s details were leaked to the press, and everything ‘went pear-shaped’.
Perhaps it was ill-advised to sell her story following the uproar, but she says she felt abandoned.
‘I have never felt as lonely in my life as when I was a surrogate on my own,’ she says.
And yet it also led her to do an extraordinary thing. In 1988, when she must have still been reeling, she set up COTS, a non-profit organisation that offers advice on surrogacy and introduces potential surrogates to infertile couples.
Although she is stepping back soon – retirement is looming – the surrogacy world has been her life for the past 40 years.
‘I’m like a stick of rock. If you cut me open it would read surrogacy. It’s in my bones,’ she says. To date, 1,139 babies have been born via COTS, the latest just on Sunday.
‘I started it because I never wanted any surrogate to feel as alone as I did,’ she says.
In 1991, despite her previously disastrous experience (or perhaps because of it), Kim became a surrogate for a second time.
This time the whole thing ‘was the complete opposite’. She carried twins for a friend, who involved her in every stage of the process. She was not the biological mother in this case
(the eggs and sperm were from the couple), and she insists that the handover was ‘everything you would want it to be’.
‘It proved to me that it was possible, and I cannot describe the joy I felt. It felt warm, as if I was doing something that really mattered, something that was special – because it was.’
She talks with such delight about her surrogate children. ‘They will be 34 this year. They live in New Zealand now, but the last time I saw them in person I joked to one of them ‘come and sit on your Tummy Mummy’s lap’. We have a good laugh about it.
‘But they’ve always known who I am. It’s a hard thing to describe, but we are extended family.’
This is what she advocates for now – a surrogacy system which is ‘based on friendship’, where there is a lasting relationship between the families, and a legal framework that supports it.
That – or the fight for it – is a constant battle.
It is widely accepted that the laws surrounding surrogacy are outdated. Despite tweaks to existing legislation (including the amendment that allowed same-sex couples to use a surrogate), the system is creaky and flawed.
‘It has not been updated, really, in 40 years, and it desperately needs to be. but it’s way down the priority list.’
Kim is walking, talking proof of what happens when the rights of the surrogate are not front and centre.
It’s striking that she uses the twins’ names, and tells you breezily about their first day at school and university, and their career paths – proud as punch of her role in their lives.
And Baby Cotton? Her voice is hesitant when she speaks of her, and what is there to say anyway? She does not even know her name, now.
‘The lawyer who acted for the agency was a fantastic friend to me and we kept in touch until he died.
‘Even though he was acting for them, I always felt he was on my side. He once said ‘would you like to know her name?’. I said no and he sort of backtracked anyway, saying he shouldn’t tell me.
‘But I didn’t want to know. She will always be Baby Cotton, and I still think of her as a baby.
‘If I know her name, she will become something else. I think it would be very difficult. What if she looks just like my son or daughter?’
Kim welcomes the current debate raging around Lily Collins (and points out that ‘we do not know her motivations’), because ‘this is something we must talk about’.
She has strong views of what she’d like to say to the women who ask for her help when they already have children (‘I am polite, but if they say they already have two children I want to say: ‘well be grateful for that’).
She does shudder at what’s happening in the States. ‘I don’t get why you’d want to be a surrogate for a pop star who has four or five children already.
‘Maybe there is something about being able to say ‘I was Michael Jackson’s surrogate’ or ‘I was Robbie Williams’ surrogate’, but I don’t get it. In this country, my experience is surrogates feel they are doing something special.’
And the need is there, she argues, and always will be.
‘People are so motivated to become parents. That maternal instinct in a woman is so bloody strong that they will never give up until they have exhausted everything to become a mum.’
A maternal instinct that is indeed hard to switch off, and for her perhaps more than most – even after 40 years.
