In an excerpt from The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family, Leslie Morgan Steiner has the answer:
The typical profile runs like this: married, Christian, middle class, with two to three biological children, working a part-time job, living in a small town or suburb rather than a big city, with a degree of college education but usually without a college degree. Women who shop at Wal-Mart and Costco, not Whole Foods and Neiman-Marcus. In the United States, statistics show that surrogates fall into the average household income category of under $60,000. About 15 to 20 percent are military wives. Some are single women. Those who are married have husbands who support paid surrogacy; surrogacy is obviously not something you can hide, or withstand with a spouse who is not on board emotionally.
She also notes some “quirks” in the system:
There are very few Jewish surrogates and almost zero Jewish egg donors. … Daughters of surrogates frequently decide to be surrogates themselves; surrogacy can become a family tradition. Gay men are the favorite clients of many surrogate moms; one emotional complication is removed from the tricky relationship, because the gay intended parents don’t suffer the understandable jealousy/inferiority issues that can plague infertile intended mothers.
Kat Stoeffel zooms in on the financial aspects of surrogacy:
No one gets into the surrogate parenting business for the money – for one thing, the agencies won’t allow it. … But if one were to get into it for the money, hypothetically speaking, one would probably be interested to know that surrogates do not pay taxes on the payments from intended parents, “which are technically for pain and suffering incurred, not for carrying a baby,” and run $20,000 to $30,000 a pregnancy, not counting good karma.
The Dish 