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

Angela Richardson-Mook never intended to make a career out of surrogacy. In fact, her model of what pregnancy should look like was pretty black and white growing up: man and woman, marriage, then baby. "I was raised in an incredibly conservative household," Richardson-Mook tells Popsugar. "A pregnancy outside of marriage, and then ultimately, a surrogacy for queer people was not necessarily in the playbook of the good daughter." To her surprise, she wound up checking off both of those boxes.

Richardson-Mook was in college when she became pregnant by her high-school sweetheart. The two got married and she went on to have three more biological kids and six surrogate babies. "I love being pregnant. I used to joke with my OB, if you could shoot into my veins whatever it is I feel during pregnancy, I would be an addict," Richardson-Mook says.

Her initial appreciation for surrogacy, though, was inspired by her brother's coming out. When her brother told their family he was gay, Richardson-Mook was one of the only people "that really could care less who you love," she says. While that was reassuring for her brother in their small, conservative Kansas town, he still expressed plenty of fears about the future - one of them being that he might not ever be able to have a biological child. "And so there was always this kind of drive for me to think about ways I could help the queer community," Richardson-Mook says.

Fast-forward to 2007, and Richardson-Mook chatted with a surrogacy agency during a nursing school event. This was her chance to do something. "I ultimately met the most amazing couple" - a queer couple from New York, Richardson-Mook says. "I got to meet them and all of their family, and they were part of a big Jewish community - that was something I'd never previously been exposed to. So I actually ended up carrying three times for them. I had all three of their children, just simply because we'd forged such a special relationship."

Afterward, the agency presented Richardson-Mook with two more surrogacy opportunities, and those felt equally fitting. The first family she delivered one baby for, and for the second family, she birthed siblings, for a total of six surrogacy births from 2007 to 2014. "I ended up being a surrogate six times because I fell in love with the families that I carried for, and when they wanted another baby, I felt it was just the right thing to do," Richardson-Mook says.

At the same time, she was also raising her own children and navigating the tough conversations around being a gestational carrier. When her kids were young, Richardson-Mook would explain the situation by using metaphors about the neighbors needing to borrow her oven to bake cookies because theirs was broken. "When those cookies came out of the oven, I was going to take them back to their rightful owner," Richardson-Mook would tell her children. "They were never my cookies."

Then, in her kids' preteen and teen years, the conversations evolved. The talks became more about how families are formed and the scientific background of surrogacy, and she answered their questions around the idea that she would be having sex with someone else. Ultimately though, Richardson-Mook says, "the messaging to my kids was far easier than the messaging to the general public. It's adults who make this weird, not the children." Her next venture would be to help end that stigmatization.

"The stereotypes around surrogacy for surrogates are not positive: that we're uneducated, women that were poor and that were being coerced into this. I'm a college-educated woman that worked in corporate America. I was making a quarter of a million dollars when I was a surrogate. This was not a money motivator for me," she says. For the intended parents, there's also the assumption that they're millionaires. But there are a lot of intended parents who are crowdfunding, liquidating 401Ks, and using grants or partial pro bono services from agencies to have children through surrogacy. "So yes, surrogacy is expensive, but not everyone that pursues surrogacy as an intended parent is necessarily a wealthy person," Richardson-Mook says. For many individuals or couples, surrogacy may be the only option for those who cannot carry a pregnancy but still wish to use their own eggs. Complications or barriers that can make carrying severely dangerous or impossible include certain uterine medical conditions, past failed IVF attempts, recurrent pregnancy loss, and past surgeries.

After carrying her last surrogate child in 2014 and having a biological daughter in 2018, Richardson-Mook founded her own surrogacy agency, Alcea, in 2020. "I just happened to be someone that was really good at being pregnant and decided that I could help other people in doing so. And that became the trajectory for what I ended up doing professionally," she says.

In order to get started, Richardson-Mook quit her corporate career, liquidated her 401K, and started talking to thousands of intended parents and surrogates. "I had them do surveys for me and I ultimately built a model around all of the things in the surrogacy space didn't feel ethical to them," she says. This included everything from unclear timelines and up-front deposits to impersonal relationships and cursory background checks, all of which Richardson-Mook says she's tried to eliminate at her New York-based agency, which was originally started in Texas.

"I wanted to find a way to recognize to both people that they are working in a life-changing space - that you're not hiring a service to take care of your lawn on a monthly basis," she says. "This is the person that will bring your baby Earth side, and this is an enormous responsibility for that person. It's intimate, it's private, and it should be treated as such."

Since launching an agency of her own, Richardson-Mook has worked with 297 intended parents, 71 of whom are have high net worths or are celebrities (though she can't confirm who, because of NDAs). The costs, no matter who you are, are standard, with the intended parent bill coming in at $170,000-200,000 for everything end to end. And for surrogates, the base pay is $60,000-65,000, plus $10-15K in extras like maternity clothes and procedure fees, in addition to lost-wage reimbursement, childcare, and life and medical insurance.

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

"My original motivation was certainly caring for a queer couple, but it grew into so much more in my life," she says. "All of my intended parents came from varied backgrounds, economically, religiously, just culture-wise. And I got so much of an expanded view of the world, and so did my children. And so I think that's why I perpetually kept doing it. It's because it just felt like each journey taught and brought something new to my life that was changing the trajectory of who I was and where I was going."

Alexis Jones is the section lead of the health and fitness verticals at Popsugar, overseeing coverage across the website, social media, and newsletters. In her seven-plus years of editorial experience, Alexis has developed passions for and expertise in mental health, women's health and fitness, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and chronic conditions. Prior to joining PS, she was the senior editor at Health magazine. Her other bylines can be found at Women's Health, Prevention, Marie Claire, and more.