A few years ago, Britain's first commercial surrogate mother, Kim Cotton, joined one of those ancestry DNA sites.
Her existing daughter would grow up to ask her about the half-sister Kim gave away, 'which cut like a knife because I genuinely never thought of Baby Cotton as a part of my family'.
Indeed, for many the name Kim Cotton is still recalled with a shudder – and Baby Cotton perhaps even more so.
Kim, a grandmother to seven children (that she knows of) clings to the idea that her biological daughter ('who will always be a baby to me – I can't think of her as a 40-year-old') has had a happy-ever-after life, even though she knows that the opposite could be true.
All hell broke loose in 1985 when it emerged that Kim – a very ordinary ('and very naive,' she adds) mother of two from Cambridgeshire – was paid £6,500 to have a baby for a Swedish couple, in a deal brokered by a US agency.
