Until recently, Russia was one of the few countries that allowed commercial surrogacy for the country’s citizens and foreign nationals. The COVID-19 epidemic caused a surrogacy crisis, in which children born to surrogates for international couples got stuck within the country’s borders, with the parents unable to pick them. The COVID crisis coincided with changes in the political climate on surrogacy. Following the death, in January 2020, of an infant born to a surrogate mother for a Filipino couple, the authorities arrested employees of a surrogacy agency and a reproductive clinic charging them with “human trafficking.” In 2022, following a moral panic about “selling Russian children abroad,” the Russian parliament passed a law that limited access to this technology for Russian citizens only. All participants in the SM market, including birth parents, surrogate mothers, reproductive clinics, agencies, and lawyers, operate under conditions of significant legal and ethical uncertainty. They attempt to rationalize and normalize their activities through different conceptual frames and narratives. In recent years, personal accounts of women identifying themselves as surrogate mothers and sharing their experiences have appeared on social media platforms. The paper examines the narrative strategies for legitimizing and normalizing the practice of commercial surrogacy in Russia in the situation of intense legal and ethical uncertainty that followed the COVID-19 surrogate crisis, the recent legal changes, and shifting political attitudes. The author uses the methods of digital and traditional ethnography to analyze personal accounts of women who become surrogate mothers. Following Raina Rapp’s work, who coined the term “moral pioneers” to discuss the liminal experiences of pregnant women undergoing amniocentesis, the study finds a similar potential for innovative reinterpretation of existing kinship, family, and maternal behavior norms in surrogate narratives.