Darren Devine, The Western Mail  Apr 6 2004

What do you do if you can't have a child? Adopt, try IVF or ask another woman to have one for you? Surrogacy has hit the headlines again after Moira Greenslade duped three couples, including Wrexham's Peter and Sharon Robinson-Hudson, out of thousands of pounds for her unborn child. Here Surrogacy UK's Carol O'Reilly - mother of three and three-time surrogate mum - talks about her own experience and the problems faced by infertile couples today

I have been a surrogate mother to three children - most recently to Kitty, 18 months ago and before this to Stewart, six, and Amy, eight.

It's only in today's society that people cannot understand or are suspicious of surrogates. References to the practice in the Bible show that surrogacy has a history stretching back through the millennia and was once considered a perfectly normal act of kindness from one woman to another.

I have three children of my own - Lauren, 11, Emily, nine, and Patrick, five. I know exactly what my children bring to me and to give that to another woman is hugely rewarding.

Far from being emotionally traumatic the actual moment of handing over the child is the most exciting part of the whole process. When the baby is born the intended parents cuddle the child first and then I will give it a hug later.

On the last occasion I was a surrogate watching the couple turn from being really excited into the family they had been trying to become for 20 years. It was amazing. At that point you are not tearful - but one or two days later you do have a bad time and spend the whole day crying.

But that's because your emotions are all muddled up - you have milk coming through you, you are aching all over and your body is saying, "I'm meant to be looking after a baby," and your head is saying, "There's no baby because we're not keeping the baby."

So you're totally in turmoil, but it's only for one day and after that you get back on track.

When I get pregnant as a surrogate I have a bond with the couple rather than the child. I'm not excited about having the baby for me, though it's nice knowing I'm doing the right thing and the intended parents are going to be the happiest couple around.

At the end of the day I know that although all three of the children have been mine biologically, in reality they are not mine or my husband Dermott's. My husband and I didn't have the children together and I knew from the beginning they were produced for the intended couple.

Their parents are the people who wipe their noses and help them through life's trials as they are growing up.

I still see the parents and the children quite regularly - I'm just Auntie Carol to them.

Kim Cotton became the first surrogate mother to go public in 1985.

Since then only a handful of surrogacies have ended with the birth mother deciding she didn't want to give up the child to the intended parents.

In this latest case to make the headlines all the families who were duped must be devastated and I think Moira Greenslade has treated them appallingly.

There are a number of reasons why couples could be driven to the extreme of attempting to find a surrogate over the internet.

Although strictly speaking what these three families were doing cannot be described as surrogacy because none of them had any genetic links to the unborn child. In genuine surrogacy cases the intended parents must be genetically linked.

This is achieved in one of two ways. In straight surrogacies the intended father's sperm is used to fertilise the birth mother's eggs. But in host surrogacies the intended mother's eggs are fertilised by the intended father's sperm at an IVF clinic and the birth mother has no biological connection to the child.

In the latest case the Scottish couple Mark and Michelle Johnson had completed inseminations and thought the child was theirs, but discovered later on it wasn't. The Robinson-Hudsons and a third couple had no link to the child and were effectively trying to buy a baby, which is not legal.

There are many reasons why couples might be driven to do something as extreme as those involved in the Moira Greenslade case.

There are simply no babies available for adoption now as there were in the 1960s. At that time single-motherhood was stigmatised and as a consequence babies were often put up for adoption by young women desperate to avoid becoming outcasts in their own communities.

Older children come with baggage because they have spent time in care and it's very hard to take that on.

Then there are social workers who make couples jump through many, many hoops and it's very difficult to pass all their tests. You have to be whiter than white - I've known couples who wanted to adopt disabled children to be turned down because they had no experience with them.

So those children are left in care and the couple's unhappiness just goes on.

Carol O'Reilly, 32, is head of Surrogacy UK, a non-profit making organisation, which helps women willing to act as surrogate mothers contact couples looking for one.