They Answered an Ad for Surrogates, and Found Themselves in a Nightmare

The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them. They didn’t actually know where House 5 was, only that it was huge and perched somewhere outside Tbilisi, on one of the many hills that surround the Georgian capital. They heard that there were hundreds of pregnant women in House 5, crammed many to a room. They heard that there was limited food in House 5’s communal kitchen — the pork, rice and vegetables their bosses were supposed to provide daily were in short supply — and so the women of House 5 had to fight one another for vegetables or go hungry.

When the women from House 3 saw the women from House 5 at the fertility clinic, they looked fierce. They sat in the waiting area with their legs crossed and their arms folded. Intimidating. Maybe, they told themselves, those House 5 women had to be that way to survive. They heard that in House 5, they kept their cooking...