‘Handmaid’ epidemic: How renting wombs creates a class of ‘breeders’ for the elite

Another story of a wealthy celebrity using surrogates to have children is raising questions about a “Handmaid’s Tale” epidemic — not due to abortion, but because women’s bodies are quite literally being used to create offspring for the wealthy elite.

Broadway star Kyle Dean Massey told PEOPLE in an exclusive that he and his husband, actor Taylor Frey, are having their second child. Their daughter, Rafa, was born using a surrogate, and their newest daughter is on the way thanks to a surrogate as well. But they also own Elevate, an egg retrieval and surrogacy business. So they are both using women’s bodies to make their own children, and profiting off of the entire process as well.

“It takes an enormous amount of advanced planning,” Frey said of surrogacy. “Each step is intentional and deliberate and I’ve been so patient to go again because our priority has been to match our clients with surrogates before ourselves. I was constantly asking Kyle — who works more on the surrogacy side of our business — ‘is there anyone for us?'”

Unlike other celebrity couples — such as Lance Bass and his partner — Massey and Frey at least acknowledged their surrogate and showered her with praise. Yet the situation still calls into question the growing prevalence of surrogacy, particularly among the wealthy elite.

WATCH: Jennifer Lahl shares dangers of egg donation and surrogacy for women and children

The women choosing to become surrogate mothers are not typically wealthy themselves; they are often poor women, looking to better their situations through something they see as generous and altruistic. The countries most used for commercial surrogacy are those with high poverty rates, like Ukraine, because it’s a way to earn tens of thousands of dollars — but even surrogates in the United States are often low-income.

And their wealthy clients all too often tend to treat their bodies as property, buying insurance in case the woman’s body doesn’t perform on demand as expected, or forcing a surrogate into abortion if the preborn child she’s carrying has a disability, if she has too many multiples, or even if the baby is the “wrong” gender.

Celebrities are playing a big role in making surrogacy seem like a normal, valid way to start a family, even for women who just don’t feel like carrying their own children. The list is seemingly endless: in addition to the aforementioned Bass and Massey, other celebrities buying women’s bodies for their own use include Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, Paris Hilton, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Sherri Shepherd, and many more.

Taslima Nasreen, a feminist and humanist activist, perfectly summed up the ethical issues with surrogacy in a headline-making statement last year.

“Surrogacy is possible because there are poor women. Rich people always want the existence of poverty in the society for their own interests. If you badly need to raise a child, adopt a homeless one,” she said. “I won’t accept surrogacy until rich women become surrogate mom [sic]… [people] are abusing me for my comments on surrogacy. They claim it’s my stone-age idea to not rent wombs for making babies. I suggest to adopt homeless children [and] to not exploit/invade poor women’s body. Actually its a stone-age idea by any means to reproduce babies for following traits.”