Olivia Maurel talks to Julie Bindel

Olivia Maurel tells the story of her discovery that she was born of a surrogate mother and sold to her parents and explains why she is supporting the universal abolition of surrogacy.

Maurel was born in the United States, where surrogacy is legal, in 1991 to a surrogate mother. Her childhood and adolescence were spent between the United States and France. She was an anxious girl and had a distant relationship with her parents.  She says she paid a high price to satisfy a couple’s desire to have children and, facing a huge identity crisis, she descended into drugs and alcohol. She later realised she was a surrogate child and went in search of her origins. She says she discovered a world of fragile women made to sign cynical contracts and of children turned into commodities, which she believes is a form of human trafficking.

Maurel is now a mother of three children. She denounces surrogacy as a form of human slavery and is a spokesperson for the Casablanca Declaration for the universal abolition of surrogacy. Here she talks to journalist and feminist campaigner Julie Bindel, author of Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation and Lesbians, Where are we Now?