Canadian surrogate mothers refusing to carry Israeli babies

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long since spilled over into Canadian society, with regular street protests, encampments on university campuses and a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents.

But one of the most unusual fallouts from the Gaza war is unfolding quietly in the rarefied world of so-called third-party parenting.

At least two Canadian agencies that help individuals and couples find surrogate mothers to carry their prospective children say none of their surrogates will work with any of their many Israeli clients.

Some of the women object to Israel’s invasion of the Gaza strip, which has left tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children dead — after Hamas fighters murdered 1,200 Israelis, and kidnapped hundreds more, in the October 7 attacks last year.

Others say they don’t oppose matching with Israeli individuals, but worry about sending the baby they birthed back to a region wracked by violence. And a few surrogates fear personal blowback if it became known they were gestating a baby for an Israeli.

“We very much have seen an impact from the conflict between Israel and Palestine, with how these clients are being affected here in Canada,” said Jacki Lebert, CEO of Ontario’s Platinum Surrogacy.

“There are surrogates who feel that carrying for an Israeli would be supporting genocide … More frequently than that is the fear (of harm to the parents or baby or reprisals for them).”

Lebert said the agency deals with as many as 100 separate clients from Israel in a given year. While she personally believes Israelis should be able to access the service in Canada, she says she legally cannot pressure a surrogate to “match” with a particular person.

The situation is similar at Surrogacy in Canada, another agency with a significant Israeli clientele.

“Lately, I don’t have any (surrogates) that will consider it at all,” said agency head Sally Rhoads-Heinrich about serving Israeli clients.

“They feel it’s a genocide, or they say it’s too much religion. They don’t like seeing innocent women and children being killed over there. They say things like – ‘I don’t want a child to grow up in a war zone – missiles, bombs, suicide attacks.’ ”

Both agencies say none of their surrogates’ objections are based on clients being Jewish, but are related to the conflict and have cropped up only over the last year.

Still, fertility lawyer Sara Cohen said she is deeply saddened by the situation, and feels surrogates are treating Israelis like a homogenous group, not the way they would other intended parents – as individuals with their own unique values and views on issues like the Gaza war.

The Israelis she represents are almost exclusively gay men so have felt discrimination of a different sort, barred until recently by law from accessing surrogates in their own country.

Cohen said she understands concerns about safety in the region, but said she initially was given a different explanation for the surrogates’ stance.

“When it was first presented to me … it was more about comments calling Israelis murderers and not wanting to bring the next generation of murderers into the world, and that’s what I found devastating,” she said. “It was making a decision about an entire group of people,” labelling them all as killers instead of getting to know them as individuals.

Cohen posted a message on Instagram lamenting the situation, and while most of the responses were supportive, some users reacted angrily.

“Typical Zionists – entitled to other people’s land so why wouldn’t they be entitled to other people’s wombs?” scoffed one person.

In a bitter exchange on the Surrogacy in Canada Facebook page, one surrogate opposed to working with Israelis was asked if she supported the controversial boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and if she’d change her position after the war. Yes, she said about BDS and “it’s not a war, it’s a genocide.”

“I fully understand that it’s not the general population of Israel’s fault for this abhorrent war,” said another surrogate in the same forum. “But the idea of a child that I birthed growing up in an active war zone is just too anxiety-inducing.”

South Africa has accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel, which says it takes strong measures to avoid killing civilians as it fights terror groups seeking the destruction of the Jewish state, has strongly rejected the charge of genocide.

Ontario surrogate Lisa, who works with Surrogacy in Canada and asked that her full name not be published, said in an interview she would not currently carry a baby for Israeli parents because she doesn’t know enough about the conflict – and what she does pick up concerns her.

“I would just prefer to spend my time with a couple where I’m not seeing expressly negative things in the media,” she said. “You see videos of children parentless, or parents crying over injured children … That really creates a bias I wish I didn’t have, but it’s there.”

Even so, Lisa said that if she was told an Israeli client matched closely with her own values and that the baby would be perfectly safe, she would consider carrying for them.

Part of the concern stems from the unusually close relationship Canadian surrogates forge with parents and babies, say agency heads and surrogates. Unlike in the U.S. and some other countries, the law here stipulates that surrogacy be carried out on an altruistic basis, not as a commercial transaction. Surrogates are reimbursed for expenses but can’t be paid fees like their American counterparts.

Many, like Halifax resident Jessica Langdon, see the baby they carried and the intended parents as a sort of extended family.

And that made for a nerve-wracking time earlier this year when Langdon gave birth to a child for an Israeli man for the second time. She says she developed high-blood pressure during a pregnancy for the first time and blames the stress.

The father ended up having to stay in Montreal – where papers were signed at the Israeli consulate – for an extra two weeks before returning with his baby, after his connecting flight to Tel Aviv was canceled four times because of the war.

“He downplays it, and says it’s not that bad,” said Langdon, who works with Platinum Surrogacy. But “‘Literally the building next to you got bombed and you’re telling me not to stress and worry.’”

Though she considers the babies’ father a good friend, she says she would likely not carry for an Israeli parent again, at least until the war ends.

For the agency heads and lawyers like Cohen, it all makes for difficult phone calls or emails to clients in Israel.

“They’re very upset about it,” said Rhoads-Heinrich about the response. “They feel judged, they feel discriminated against.”

Cohen said she was almost ashamed as a Canadian to pass on the bad news to Israelis.

Clients “said this is a feeling they have about how Israelis are perceived around the world right now, how everyone hates them.”

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