I thought I was helping to build a beautiful family as a surrogate. Then at 27 weeks pregnant with twins, the parents said they didn’t want the babies… I’m just one of many women exploited in the ‘Wild West’ world of surrogacy

The message was one that countless women have received – and all of them left bereft, terrified and angry.

Cathleen Legacy was no exception. She was just 20 years old and 27 weeks pregnant – with twins, no less – when their father announced he didn’t want anything to do with them.

She should have them adopted, he suggested coldly. He then blocked her… and disappeared.

Cathleen looked at the text message, her hands shaking so hard she almost dropped her phone. Yet this is not a typical story of a hapless father fleeing his responsibilities.

Because Cathleen was never in a relationship with the father of her unborn babies. They had not even had sex. She was acting as a surrogate for him and his wife – a respectable (or so she thought) and happily married, 30-something British couple.

Only now it seemed they’d changed their minds, leaving Cathleen stranded and without any form of legal redress or support. For while surrogacy itself is legal, surrogacy agreements are not legally enforceable – and the surrogate is considered the legal parent.

‘I was in a blind panic,’ she recalls. ‘I was holding my stomach, feeling the babies moving and wondering what on earth was going to happen to them. I had no idea where to start.’

Cathleen’s experience demonstrates all too clearly the ‘Wild West’ that exists in the legally precarious world of surrogacy.

It’s an arena that, despite increased scrutiny following the use of surrogates by celebrities, is still open to exploitation, with young women like her more often than not the victims.

Looking back on that terrible day 16 years ago, Cathleen, now 35, admits she was woefully naive – and way too young – to be a surrogate.

Yet she’d gone into it with the best intentions. She’d been just 17 when she accidentally became pregnant with her daughter Alexandra. She and her partner Oliver then had a son, Gabriel, 18 months later. Both were easy pregnancies.

It was while on a parenting course that she first heard about surrogacy. It seemed a wonderful idea to help couples who couldn’t have a baby – something that came easily to her.

In Canada, where Cathleen lives, there are strict rules surrounding surrogacy, similar to those in the UK.

Unlike in America, where surrogates are allowed to receive unlimited compensation, the arrangement has to be purely altruistic, with only expenses paid.

Agencies and clinics are also prohibited from charging a fee and can only act as advisors. The clinics have strict rules, forbidding anyone under 21 acting as a surrogate.

Rules, Cathleen now accepts, that are eminently sensible. She now believes no one under 25 should be able to make such a momentous decision. ‘Now I look back and see how young I truly was at 19, how naive and trusting,’ she says.

‘But at the time I’d been through two successful pregnancies and births and knew exactly what it entailed. Waiting an extra two years seemed pointless.’

However, without a clinic’s backing she wouldn’t be able to act as a ‘gestational’ surrogate, where she would carry an embryo created by an intended couple’s egg and sperm.

She could be only a ‘traditional’ surrogate, using her own eggs and getting pregnant through home insemination using the would-be father’s sperm.

‘It didn’t bother me,’ says Cathleen. ‘If traditional surrogacy was the only route open to me, then that’s what I was going to do.

‘To me, any babies conceived and born this way would never be ‘my’ children, in the way that my son and daughter were. Being a surrogate means being able to separate those two things. I always saw it as donating an egg, and not a baby.’

She joined an online surrogacy chat room, where she heard heartbreaking stories of couples desperate to be parents. It was here she met Alice and James, a British couple in their 30s. Alice, who worked in childcare, had severe polycystic ovary syndrome, and the couple had been trying for two years, including a failed attempt at IVF.

James, a civil servant, told Cathleen they’d previously been scammed by a surrogate based in the UK, who’d pretended to be pregnant to receive the monthly allowance.

‘I felt terrible for them and quickly they began to feel like firm friends. We’d message daily and have weekly calls. I even spoke to their parents, who were lovely.’

Eight months later, the couple asked if 19-year-old Cathleen would be their surrogate. ‘It immediately felt right,’ she recalls. ‘They were clearly kind, caring people. They deserved to be parents and I could help them.’

A plan fell into place. James and Cathleen would have medical tests, including a physical and STI screenings, then James and Alice would fly to Canada at the appropriate time in Cathleen’s menstrual cycle.

They’d do the insemination at her home, then fly back to the UK. If the pregnancy worked, they’d return when she was at about 38 weeks for the birth.

As the baby’s legal parents, Cathleen and James’ names would be on the birth certificate, but she’d immediately relinquish parental responsibility and allow Alice to adopt the baby. Then they’d be able to take him or her back to the UK.

‘I was incredibly wide-eyed,’ Cathleen says now. ‘When they told me they’d spoken to a UK lawyer I didn’t even think to speak to him myself.’

He’d drawn up a 16-page surrogacy contract – but what it did not cover was what would happen if either party changed their minds.

Cathleen asked for a meagre $200 (£108) a month simply to cover her extra food bills. Given that a single round of IVF can cost £7,000, this paltry agreement was certainly beneficial to James and Alice..

Had they used an older surrogate via an agency in the UK, they would also have faced stricter regulations – and you cannot help but conclude they took advantage of Cathleen.

Yet back then, with the paperwork signed, Cathleen was a ball of excited nerves waiting for the couple to ring her doorbell a few months later in November 2010.

A few days after their arrival, James went into the bathroom to produce his sperm sample, and after self-consciously handing over the tube, he and Alice went for a walk. Cathleen did the insemination alone in her bedroom, using a syringe. ‘It was all pretty awkward, and when they got back, we didn’t talk about it at all.’

Two weeks later, Cathleen excitedly sent the couple a picture of a positive pregnancy test.

Her first scan at eight weeks, however, revealed a big surprise. ‘There’s a second baby here,’ the sonographer said. Cathleen was frightened. She knew the risks of multiple pregnancies – she was also petrified at what James and Alice would think.

To her relief, they seemed genuinely delighted. ‘Thank you so much for doing this for us,’ they gushed. ‘Please tell us if there is anything you need.’

Yet in the coming weeks, despite numerous gentle reminders, Cathleen started to worry when her monthly expenses did not arrive. James always had an excuse; it had been a tough month. He’d forgotten. Then the phone calls and texts started to tail off too. ‘I tried telling myself everything was OK, that maybe they were just busy, but the panic started to set in,’ says Cathleen.

‘I even sent a video of me using a doppler ultrasound device, so they could hear the heartbeats, yet still there was silence.’

At 24 weeks, Cathleen texted James saying: ‘Please contact me right away. I’m really stressed and just need to know what’s going on.’ Finally, she got a response – and it was devastating.

Alice had moved out, James wrote, and they were divorcing. He reassured her, however, that they still wanted the twins and were going to co-parent.

That promise did nothing to dispel Cathleen’s anxiety. She’d thought she was creating the perfect family of four. Now she had no idea what she had got into.

Yet there seemed to be no alternative than to continue with James’s plan. Despite them being her biological children, she felt there was no way she could raise the twins herself. Not only did they not feel like ‘hers’, but she had two children already and lived in a small apartment.

Plus, her relationship with Oliver was at breaking point. He was furious with James and Alice – and Cathleen.

Despite James’s claim that he and Alice still wanted the twins, he failed to respond to any of Cathleen’s further messages.

Three weeks later, at 27 weeks pregnant, and having still not received all of the money she’d been promised, 20-year-old Cathleen messaged James saying: ‘Do I start looking for adoptive parents?’ She had hoped her words would shock him into getting his act together.

For once, his reply was immediate. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think that’s for the best.’ Racked with anxiety and guilt for dragging two innocent children into this mess, Cathleen thought about keeping the twins. But how could she without support? Unsure where to turn, given she had not set up the surrogacy via an agency, she decided that adoption was the only answer.

She contacted a friend who worked with foster children, who told her about a local couple called Sophie and Rob who had already been approved to adopt, but were still waiting for a child.

They set up a meeting, where Cathleen’s fears were quietened a fraction. The pair seemed a genuine, caring couple.

Sophie was at Cathleen’s side when the twins were born at just 33 weeks after the placenta started to fail. They were so premature, the boy weighing 3lb 11oz and the girl just 3lb 9oz, that both were whisked to the neonatal intensive care unit. ‘It was strange, seeing them. They didn’t look or even feel like ‘mine’, and there wasn’t that immediate rush of love I’d had with my own children,’ says Cathleen.

Yet as their legal mother, she was responsible for all the twins’ medical decisions and spent her days pumping milk for them.

By this time her relationship with Oliver was over.

‘With all the post-birth hormones and the worry about what would happen next, I was barely hanging on,’ she says.

Then there was the problem of the twins’ biological father. James had to terminate his parental rights before the adoption could take place, yet he’d cut off all contact. In the end, Sophie and Rob had to hire a private detective to find him.

‘It was such an awful, stressful time. I was never told what happened or his reaction,’ recalls Cathleen. ‘When the twins were officially adopted at six weeks I felt an overwhelming wave of relief. They were safe with a wonderful couple at last and, although it had cost me my relationship and impacted both my physical and mental health, the nightmare was over.’

With initial updates about the twins over the next few years, she realised she had helped create a happy, loving family – just not in the way she’d planned.

For most people that would be the end of things. But in the years that followed, Cathleen decided to be a surrogate again – this time working with an agency.

‘I think I wanted to have the surrogacy experience that I’d been denied and this time I went in with my eyes wide open.’

Now 35, she went on to help four more couples have children between 2017 and 2023.

However, Cathleen stresses surrogacy is not to be taken lightly. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get past my resentment at what Alice and James did, both to me and to the babies,’ she says. ‘But out of that chaos, a family was created, of which I will always be proud’.