The 6-Time Surrogate Who Created a Celebrity-Loved Agency

Angela Richardson-Mook never intended to have a career surrogacy. In fact, her model of what pregnancy should look like growing up was pretty black and white: man and woman, marriage, then baby. “I grew up in an incredibly conservative family,” Richardson-Mook tells POPSUGAR. “Getting pregnant out of wedlock and then eventually doing surrogacy for weird people wasn't necessarily on the list of good daughters.” To her surprise, she checked both of these boxes.

Richardson-Mook was in college when she became pregnant by her high school sweetheart. They married, and she had three more biological children and six surrogate children. “I love being pregnant. I used to joke with my obstetrician: If you could inject into my veins everything that I feel during pregnancy, I would become a drug addict,” says Richardson-Mook.

“I felt it was right.”

However, her initial evaluation of surrogacy was prompted by her brother's confession. When her brother told their family he was gay, Richardson-Mook was one of the few people “who really didn't care who you loved,” she says. While this reassured her brother in their small, conservative Kansas town, he still expressed many concerns about the future—one of them being that he might never be able to have a biological child. “And so I always had this drive to think about how I could help the queer community,” Richardson-Mook says.

Fast forward to 2007: Richardson-Mook was speaking with a surrogacy agency during a nursing school event. This was her chance to do something. “I ended up meeting the most amazing couple,” an odd couple from New York, says Richardson-Mook. “I was able to meet them and their whole family, and they were part of a large Jewish community – something I had never experienced before. So I ended up having to wear them three times. I had all three of their children, just because we had such a special relationship.”

After that, the agency presented Richardson-Mook with two more surrogacy opportunities, and they seemed equally suitable. In the first family, she gave birth to one child, and in the second family, she gave birth to siblings, for a total of six surrogate births from 2007 to 2014. “I ended up being a surrogate six times because I fell in love with the families I was carrying for, and when they wanted another child, I felt like it was right,” Richardson-Mook says.

At the same time, she was also raising her own children and having difficult conversations about being a gestational carrier. When her children were young, Richardson-Mook explained the situation using metaphors about how neighbors had to borrow her oven to bake cookies because their oven broke. “When those cookies came out of the oven, I was going to return them to their rightful owner,” Richardson-Mook told her children. “They were never my cookies.”

Then, when her children were teenagers and teenagers, the conversations changed. The conversations focused more on how families are formed and the science behind surrogacy, and she answered their questions surrounding the idea of ​​her having sex with someone else. Ultimately, however, Richardson-Mook says, “getting the message out to my kids was a lot easier than getting the message out to the general public. It's the adults who make it weird, not the kids.” Her next venture will be to help end this stigma.

“The stereotypes around surrogacy for surrogate mothers are not positive: we are uneducated, poor women who are forced into it. I am a college educated woman who has worked in corporate America. I made a quarter of a million dollars when I was a surrogate. For me, it was not a monetary motivator,” she says. The intended parents also assume that they are millionaires. But there are many would-be parents who are crowdfunding, liquidating 401Ks, and using grants or partial free services from agencies to have children through surrogacy. “So yes, surrogacy is expensive, but not everyone who does surrogacy as an intended parent is necessarily a rich person,” says Richardson-Mook. For many people or couples, surrogacy may be the only option for those who cannot carry a pregnancy to term but still wish to use their own eggs. Complications or obstacles that can make pregnancy extremely dangerous or impossible include certain uterine diseases, past IVF failures, and recurrent uterine diseases. pregnancy lossand past transactions.

After carrying her last child through a surrogacy in 2014 and giving birth to her biological daughter in 2018, Richardson-Mook founded her own surrogacy agency. Alceain 2020. “I just happened to be someone who was coping really well with pregnancy, and I decided that I could help other people with this. And that became the trajectory of what I ended up doing professionally,” she says.

To get started, Richardson-Mook left her corporate career, liquidated her 401K fund and began communicating with thousands of intended parents and surrogates. “I asked them to do surveys for me, and I ended up building a model based on all the things in the surrogacy industry that seemed unethical to them,” she says. This included everything from unclear deadlines and upfront deposits to impersonal relationships and superficial background checks – all of which Richardson-Mook said she tried to eliminate at her New York agency, which was originally founded in Texas.

“I wanted to find a way to show both people that they were working in a life-changing space—that you weren’t hiring a service to do your lawn every month,” she says. “This is the person who will lead your child to the side of the Earth, and this is a huge responsibility for this person. It's intimate, it's personal, and it should be treated as such.”

Since opening her agency, Richardson-Mook has worked with 297 intended parents, 71 of whom were high-income earners or celebrities (though she can't confirm who due to non-disclosure agreements). The costs, no matter who you are, are standard: the estimated parent bill is $170,000-$200,000 for everything from start to finish. And for surrogate mothers, the base salary is $60,000–$65,000, plus $10,000–$15,000 for additional expenses such as maternity clothing and procedure fees, in addition to lost wages, child care, and life and health insurance.

While the concept may still seem transactional to many, Richardson-Mook says surrogacy is one of the most personal experiences she's ever had.

“My original motivation was, of course, caring for the odd couple, but in my life it grew into something more,” she says. “All my future parents came from different backgrounds, economic, religious, just cultural. And I gained such an expanded view of the world, as did my children. And so I think that's why I kept doing it all the time. This is because I felt like every trip taught and brought something new into my life that changed the trajectory of who I was and where I was going.”

Alexis Jones is the head of health and fitness at Popsugar, overseeing coverage across the website, social media and newsletters. With more than seven years of editorial experience, Alexis has developed a passion and knowledge in the areas of mental health, women's health and fitness, racial and ethnic health disparities, and chronic disease. Before joining PS, she was a senior editor at Health magazine. Her other original articles can be found in the magazines Women's Health, Prevention, Marie Claire and others.