Paris Hilton and her husband Carter Reum are ending 2023 as parents to two babies under the age of one, both born via surrogate. The heiress announced she was ‘over the moon’ following the birth of a daughter, London Marilyn Hilton Reum, in November, 10 months after welcoming son Phoenix.
Hilton is the latest A-lister to shine a spotlight on surrogacy, a route to parenthood being taken by a fast-growing list of celebrities, including Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Rebel Wilson, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Naomi Campbell and Cameron Diaz.
For Hilton, the choice to use a gestational carrier, as they’re known in the US, stemmed from her fear of childbirth due to the sexual abuse and medical trauma she experienced at boarding school as a teenager. ‘If I’m in a doctor’s office, if I get a shot, anything, I will literally have a panic attack and I can’t breathe,’ she said. ‘I just knew that would not be healthy for me or the baby, growing inside of someone who has such high anxiety.’
The world of surrogacy in the US bears scant relation to here in Britain, where surrogacy agreements cannot be enforced legally and surrogates can’t be paid. In LA, agreements are watertight and highly sought-after surrogates, such as La’Reina Haynes, who carried Kim Kardashian’s daughter Chicago in 2018, can expect to receive upwards of $45,000 – the ‘going rate’ for an ‘experienced surrogate’ at the time, according to Stephanie Caballero, founder of The Surrogacy Law Center in California. Now, that figure is as high as $65,000 for a first-time surrogate.
Kardashian suffered from pre-eclampsia and placenta accreta, in which the placenta grows into the lining of the womb, during her pregnancies with her eldest children North and Saint, making it impossible for her to carry any more babies. She has spoken about how ‘scary’ it was meeting Haynes for the first time after being matched with her by an agency, saying, ‘I did a FaceTime first and then I invited them over for dinner with their two kids’ in order to ‘feel and see if this energy was going to work for us’. She added that she was ‘so grateful’ to Haynes for being ‘selfless and kind’.
According to the LA-based Growing Generations agency, believed to have brokered several celebrity surrogacies, VIP clients often not only seek surrogates who have a ‘healthy lifestyle’, but those who also have ‘college degrees, are established in their fields or active in their communities’.
Growing Generations accepts online applications from would-be surrogates, but only 10% meet the initial qualifications, and only 1-2% of those make it as far as final consideration following background checks, medical tests and psychological evaluations.
Many celebrities will hire a personal chef and trainer for their surrogate, along with paying for travel, clothing, gifts and pampering treatments, such as massages. Some will pay extra for surrogates to pump breast milk and courier it to feed the baby for months after its birth.
In fact, the surrogate’s fee is just a fraction of the total sum a celebrity can expect to spend – up to $200,000. As well as hiring a broker and paying all the medical costs of undergoing IVF and implanting embryos, they need a lawyer to help them with matters such as filing a pre-birth order to ensure the baby can leave hospital with the intended parents, or ‘IP’. Kardashian has also spoken about employing the services of a therapist to ‘kind of be our liaison’. Then there’s the cost of confidentiality agreements, with celebrities often insisting on iron-clad NDAs, which prevent surrogates revealing their identity even to family members.
For the stars, all this is a drop in the ocean compared to the joy of having a baby in their arms at the end of the process. As Hilton put it, using a surrogate was a ‘difficult decision to make’ – but her ‘mom era’ is her ‘best yet’.