I was a surrogate mother for a wealthy gay couple: They left me penniless, abandoned me with C-section wounds in the street and literally ran away with my baby

Belén, a single mother of three living in poverty, was scrolling through Facebook one day in 2022 when she came across an opportunity she believed could change her life.

The then-31-year-old was working as a waitress and struggling to afford food for her children while living in the home of her physically abusive ex-boyfriend.

So when she saw a post from a wealthy gay couple who were looking for a surrogate to carry their child, Belén says she ‘saw the way out’ of her situation and immediately contacted them to arrange a meeting.

The couple promised to pay her and help her escape her abusive home. But in the years that followed, Belén says she barely saw a penny and was forced to beg for money to feed and clothe her children.

She was stripped of the right to make decisions about her own body and left feeling ‘exploited, used and abandoned’. 

Following a traumatic C-section, she says the couple and their family members screamed at her as she lay in bed, crying in pain, and threatened to send her to jail and take away her children.

And worst of all, Belén says she was barely allowed 10 minutes with her baby after leaving the hospital, before the couple snatched him away and ran off, leaving her heartbroken and alone on the street.

‘I realised that I had simply been their incubator - the cheapest one they could find,’ she told the Daily Mail.

Belén was stripped of the right to make decisions about her own body and left feeling ‘exploited, used and abandoned’

An ultrasound image shows Piero, the baby boy she birthed on September 30, 2024

Now, several years after giving birth to a baby boy named Piero, Belén speaks to me from her home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, about her heartbreaking experience as a surrogate and why she is now campaigning to make the practice illegal.

'When I saw the post, I was at a point where I was emotionally exhausted from constantly trying to survive and support my three children. I was desperate to get out of the violent situation I was in at home,' she says. 

After contacting the two men, Belén arranged to meet them at a cafe, where they asked about her lifestyle, whether she had ever taken drugs and how many children she had.

After a brief conversation, the three agreed to sign an informed consent form, the document used in Argentina for assisted reproduction arrangements.

Belén tells me that couples seeking a surrogate will usually advertise how much they are willing to pay. In this case, however, the couple had not specified a figure, so the terms were agreed during their meeting.

They offered Belén 120,000 Argentine pesos (£60) per month for the first three months of pregnancy, 150,000 (£75) from the third to the sixth month and 180,000 (£90) from the sixth month until delivery.

‘That amount would barely be enough to buy food,’ Belén says. But crucially, the couple also agreed to help her move out of the apartment she shared with her abusive ex-partner. Desperate to escape, she accepted their offer.

'I met them in March 2022. I didn’t get pregnant until January 2024.' she recounts.

'During those years, I was spending my own money to travel and undergo fertility procedures, and taking time off work to recover. They gave me no money during this period.'

She reached a breaking point in December 2023, a month before she finally fell pregnant. 

'I called them sobbing because I couldn’t buy my children Christmas dinner. I didn’t have a penny. Only then did they give me just enough to buy some food.'

When she became pregnant with Piero in early 2024, Belén expected the couple to send her the monthly payments they had agreed upon. But they never arrived.

'At first, I thought, “Okay, I’ve only just become pregnant. At some point they’re going to give me something. Maybe it's because I'm not far along enough yet."

But then, Belén lost her job, after she was forced to take more time off to recover from bleeding during the pregnancy. Even then, the couple would not pay her what she was promised.

'By the sixth month, I had still not received any money from them. They didn’t even give me the 120,000 pesos that I had originally been promised. I was crying and saying, “This can’t be happening.”'

'I reached the point where I had nothing to eat. I was thinking, “I’m pregnant, I’m doing this for them, and they are giving me nothing.”'

The worst part was the cold. Her radiator had broken and she didn't have the funds to fix it. When she told the couple of her situation, they simply said: 'Oh, you poor thing, it must be your hormones.'

The only time Belén received anything from the couple was after medical appointments and ultrasounds, when they would take her out for meals at expensive restaurants. 

'They would take me out for a nice meal that day and then leave me to go back home and feed my children rice, which is all I could afford.'

At this point, Belén realised she had made a mistake in trusting this couple. But she was already in her third trimester, and had grown attached to the life growing inside her.

She began seeing a therapist at her clinic to whom she confided feeling like 'a little dog that gets taken for a walk once a month.'

The psychologist told her, 'They’re essentially buying you with that food.' 

The only time Belén received anything from the couple was after medical appointments and ultrasounds

Belén says she felt constant anguish during her entire pregnancy

'During that period, I can’t describe any other feeling or emotion apart from constant anguish,' Belén recalls, with tears in her eyes.

'First of all, I loved my baby very much. I had already bonded with him - it was impossible for me not to.

'I kept thinking, “How can it be that I have to give this baby away? I’m the one taking care of him. I’m doing everything so that he is okay, and then I have to give him to people he doesn’t even know, who were barely there for me.”''

After pleading with the couple, Belén says they eventually gave her 1 million pesos (£500), which helped to stabilise her situation but was still nowhere near enough to cover her mounting debt. 

'I couldn’t believe that I was going through my fourth pregnancy in this process and that I was experiencing hunger and hardship,' she says. 

Upon seeing the fragile state Belén was in, the couple scrambled to find her a new therapist, who she says they then used to further exploit her vulnerabilities and control the situation.

'I would cry to [the therapist], saying ‘ these people are using me. They’re using me. I don’t want them to use me.”'

'He would scold me for not trusting them. He said they had good intentions.

'I was abandoned as a child. I had been homeless. He saw all those weaknesses and used them to manipulate me.'

To make matters worse, the couple was making decisions about Belén's body - about her own pregnancy. Every test result was given to them. She wasn't shown a single report.

They even wanted control over what would be in her hospital bag, including the underwear she would wear postpartum. 

'I realised that I had simply been their incubator - the cheapest one they could find that worked for them,' she says. 

When Belén was halfway through her seventh month of pregnancy, the couple went away on a month-long European vacation.

Around the time they left, she began bleeding, and an ultrasound showed that the foetus wasn't growing properly. 

Instead of cutting their trip short to come back and check on Belén and their baby, she says the couple extended the trip. 

'They ended up coming back only three weeks before I was due to give birth.'

On September 30, 2024, the day of her scheduled C-section, Belén had only one thing to look forward to - finally seeing her baby. But she struggled to come to terms with the fact that he would soon be taken from her.

'With ordinary pregnancies, everyone understands that the baby is going to seek out its mother, her smell, the connection, what is familiar. But with these pregnancies, it seems as though all of that is erased,' she says.

She asked for the newborn to be placed on her chest after his birth, and asked to see the placenta - things she had never done with her previous babies.

'I had loved Piero very much. I had a beautiful connection with him. So I felt that this was the only moment I was going to have with him outside my body. I wanted it to be special.' 

Belén pictured at the hospital before her C-section. She was finally about to meet her baby

 Despite how the couple had treated her, she allowed them to be in the delivery room. 

'I felt a certain amount of empathy for them. In spite of everything I had been through, I still felt like a bad person if I excluded them from the birth,' she says.

Soon after his arrival into the world, Piero was whisked away to the NICU after doctors noticed he looked slightly pale.

Belén was taken to a hospital suite rented by the couple, consisting of an entrance room and a small bedroom where she was expected to recover from her wounds. 

'On the third day, they finally brought Piero upstairs. They kept me shut away in the room at the back. They literally left me locked in the room. They would close the door while they stayed at the front with their visitors.

'From the moment he was born, I only saw them when they came to make me sign paperwork relating to neonatology. Nobody came to check on me.'

Belén recounts the heartbreaking moment she heard Piero crying, realising she would not be allowed to comfort him. 

'Emotionally, that was incredibly difficult for me. It was like seeing everything I had imagined about how they were going to treat me becoming reality.'

The following day, a nurse came in to ask Belén to sign Piero's release forms.

Under Argentine law, the woman who gives birth to a child is legally recognized as the mother, so they needed her approval for the discharge. 

At this point, Belén, in pain and exhausted, became angry. 'I thought, “Are you kidding me? They haven't come once and now they’re sending the nurse to me so that I can sign the discharge?”'

She refused to sign, and moments later, all hell broke loose. 'Piero's fathers came into my room and verbally attacked me. The grandmothers came in and insulted me.

'All four of them were screaming at me while I was lying helplessly in bed. They called me a baby thief, and threatened to take my children and send me to jail.

Staff from the fertility clinic then began arriving, followed by the couple’s lawyer.

‘The lawyer kept telling me that I was going to face criminal charges. They told me that if I didn’t sign the discharge papers and leave, they were going to report me for child abandonment.’

After six hours of chaos, Belén finally signed the release form after Piero’s biological father promised her money.

She says she knew she would never see that money, and she never did, but by that point she was so exhausted that she finally gave in.

Belén was allowed to see Piero once more, as he was legally required to leave the hospital with the woman who had given birth to him.

'I held Piero in my arms at that moment. He was making little noises and crying, and I knew that he recognised me,' she says.

But before Belén could spend a single moment with her newborn outside the clinic, his father snatched him away and put him in a baby carrier.

'We walked out together and crossed the clinic's exit. Then he ran. Literally ran away from me with the baby.

'I was left there on the street with my C-section wound, without any battery on my phone, with nothing. I had to go to a nearby cafe to charge my phone and call an Uber to get home.'

Belén's experience has turned her into a fierce advocate for abolishing surrogacy (here she is pictured wearing a t-shirt that reads 'Why do feminist movements not talk about surrogacy?')

Piero's birth was over two years ago. Since then, Belén has had zero contact with her son, despite the couple promising she would have a relationship with him. 

'I had begged them, “Please don’t separate me from Piero.” And they said, “No, Belén. We would never do that to you.” But then they did.'

'The whole situation broke me. Being pregnant for nothing broke me. Although, for me, the value of the whole thing is Piero’s existence. But there’s no amount of money that can repair all the damage they caused me.'

She has filed complaints alleging human trafficking, falsification of documents, obstetric and gynaecological violence and abandonment, while the couple are also challenging her legal parentage. 

But she says both the civil and criminal proceedings have moved slowly, in part because Argentina has no specific legal category for trafficking or reproductive exploitation in the context of surrogacy. 

She is still waiting for the legal proceedings to move forward, while using an anonymous Instagram account to follow Piero’s life through photographs posted by his fathers. 

Belén was ultimately able to leave her abusive ex-partner’s home a year ago after his own parents lent her the money to move out.

She now lives with her current boyfriend, who she says has been her rock and her only source of support throughout the ordeal. She drives for Uber to make ends meet, but hopes to eventually study law at university.

Her experience has turned her into a fierce advocate for abolishing surrogacy, and she now campaigns across Argentina in the hope of ensuring no other woman is exploited or has her child taken from her. 

'If you pursue parenthood consciously through the exploitation of another woman, everyone knows there is a need involved,' she explains.

'And however much you try to romanticise it, the reality is that we need to be conscious enough to understand that sometimes our needs can't be fulfilled. 

'We don’t go around violating other people’s bodies because we want something.'

She says she often wonders how Piero's fathers will explain his arrival into the world to him one day.

'How are you going to tell him that you left the woman who carried him abandoned with her three other children? That you used her and discarded her? How are you going to explain that to him?,' she says. 

'I know I’m criticised a lot for having loved him. And I think, “How could you not want me to love your child? How could you not want me to show him that he is loved?"'