PARIS HILTON AND HER husband Carter Reum are ending 2023 as parents to two babies under the age of one, both born via surrogate. The heiress announced she was ‘over the moon’ following the birth of a daughter, London Marilyn Hilton Reum, in November, 10 months after welcoming son Phoenix.
Hilton is the latest A-lister to shine a spotlight on surrogacy, a route to parenthood being taken by a fast-growing list of celebrities, including Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Rebel Wilson, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Naomi Campbell and Cameron Diaz.
For Hilton, the choice to use a gestational carrier, as they’re known in the US, stemmed from her fear of childbirth due to the sexual abuse and medical trauma she experienced at boarding school as a teenager. ‘If I’m in a doctor’s office, if I get a shot, anything , I will literally have a panic attack and I can’t breathe,’ she said. ‘I just knew that would not be healthy for me or the baby, growing inside of someone who has such high anxiety.’
The world of surrogacy in the US bears scant relation to here in Britain, where surrogacy agreements cannot be enforced legally and surrogates can’t be paid. In LA, agreements are watertight and highly sought-after surrogates, such as La’Reina Haynes, who carried Kim Kardashian’s daughter Chicago in 2018, can expect to receive upwards of $45,000 – the ‘going rate’ for an ‘experienced surrogate’ at the time, according to Stephanie Caballero, founder of The Surrogacy Law Center in California. Now, that figure is as high as $65,000 for a first-time surrogate.
Kardashian suffered from pre-eclampsia and placenta accreta, in which the placenta grows into the lining of the womb, during her pregnancies with her eldest children North and Saint, making it impossible for her to carry any more babies. She has spoken about how ‘scary’ it was meeting Haynes for the first time after being matched with her by an agency, saying , ‘I did a FaceTime first and then I invited them over for dinner with their two kids’ in order to ‘feel and see if this energ y was going to work for us’. She added that she was ‘so grateful’ to Haynes for being ‘selfless and kind’.
According to the LA-based Growing Generations agency, believed to have brokered several celebrity surrogacies, VIP clients often not only seek surrogates who ha
