In Search of My Mother

In Search of My Mother is the autobiography of Olivia Maurel, who was born to a surrogate mother in Kentucky, USA as a ‘made to order’ baby for a wealthy French couple. She did not know about the circumstances of her birth until she was 30 years old when a DNA Ancestry test revealed US relatives and no French genetic heritage. Now 35, married and with three children of her own, Olivia looks back on her lonely childhood spent living between France and the USA. In spite of her affluent lifestyle, she felt she did not belong and missed a spiritual connection to her mother. Drawing on her own traumatic experiences, Olivia Maurel has become a fierce abolitionist. She calls surrogacy the objectification of women’s bodies, the deprivation of surrogate mothers’ freedom, and the falsification of their consent. Surrogacy also involves high-risk pregnancies and the contractual purchase of a child. As the spokeswoman for The Declaration of Casablanca – an international group wanting to abolish all forms of surrogacy globally – Olivia travels the world in pursuit of this task, highlighting that surrogacy violates the human rights of women and children. In Search of My Mother is a powerful and moving testimony to the misery surrogacy creates for the children born in this unethical way.