Someone Else's Child: A Surrogate's Story

ROOSEVELT

Preface

The birth of hope

I would like to tell you a story about a little girl who, like another child we have all heard of, had nowhere to ‘lay her head’. She had a mother who would do anything in her power to love, nurture and protect her and a father who was willing to fight dragons to place her, safe and well, in her mother’s arms – but he didn’t have the power to make that happen.

You see, years ago her mother became quite ill and as a result she couldn’t have children. She wasn’t infertile because of a lifesaving chemical treatment, leaving some chance that fertility may return. She had lost her uterus – the very cradle in which life begins and grows.

There was no breakthrough treatment or surgery she could undergo. No medical advancement that would help her situation before she would be physically too old to conceive. In short, there seemed no hope that she would be able to hold her genetic child in her arms.

Like all couples facing infertility, they experienced a time of bereavement and then a time of acceptance. At least, it looked like acceptance.

Imagine for a second what it must be like: watching your family, friends and colleagues as they conceive, carry and give birth to their children. Imagine the pain that she felt, the lack of hope, the despair. This woman would have given anything to have our complaints of sleepless nights or tantrums. Imagine too, the hopelessness of her husband as he struggled with his total inability to help his wife.

At times like these, when all that is left is despair and hopelessness, something has to change. This is the story of that change, of the birth of hope.

The baby carrier

I was 40 weeks and five days pregnant when I finally went into labour at home in Canberra in the early hours of Sunday 3 February.

It only took two hours and 13 minutes for Sophie to make her entrance.

Like any woman who has given birth I can tell you exact statistics: she was 52 centimetres long, with a 37 centimetres head circumference, and weighed 3670 grams. As a woman involved in an assisted pregnancy I can tell you that she took up residence in my womb at 7.45am on 11 May – my husband’s birthday.

And I know with certainty that it was 4.35am when my waters broke, 6.48am when she was born and 6.53am when I kissed Sophie goodbye and handed her to Lily.

There is a very simple explanation for why a woman would hand her baby to another woman moments after giving birth: the baby is not hers. I didn’t choose her name and was never going to bring her home to a beautifully prepared nursery. That honour belonged to my friends Lily and Ben Fletcher. It was their baby that I carried and gave birth to. I was a gestational carrier, more commonly known as a surrogate.

Actually, technically I am not a surrogate at all. A surrogate carries a child that has been created using her own ovum fertilised by the genetic father’s sperm.

I quite literally carried Lily and Ben’s child. Lily ‘lost’ her uterus in her late twenties due to illness, but retained her ovaries. I ‘conceived’ following the transfer of embryos that were created by in-vitro fertilisation using her eggs and her husband’s sperm.

It sounds awfully easy, doesn’t it? Mix eggs and sperm, allow to fertilise and then implant into waiting uterus. The reality is nowhere near that simple. When Sophie arrived, it was the culmination of a process that took just over two years.

But why on earth would anyone want to carry someone else’s baby? Why would anyone decide to give up two years of their life for the heady cocktail of morning sickness, bloating, haemorrhoids, varicose veins, heartburn and perineal stitches? Seriously, why would you even consider going through labour if you weren’t going to get the prize of the baby at the end of the process?

When I was a little girl and people asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the only thing I can ever really remember saying was to be a mummy. I don’t remember having any conditions attached to the desire, no perfect number of kids, no names in mind, no preference of sex. I just wanted to be a mummy.

So I went through my school life being ‘that clucky girl’. Indeed, it is quite possible that several of my relationships that went south may have fallen victim to my verbalised desires – those poor men must have thought they were in danger of being trapped into parenthood.

Oddly enough, although I knew I wanted to be a mummy I was never the girl who was going to ‘just go for it’. Despite being involved in several quite long-term relationships, somewhere deep inside I knew that I wanted the whole package. I wanted love, marriage and to be a mummy – and I wanted it in that order.

Well, I have to say that I got lucky. I fell in love with Benn, a friend of several years, and he with me. We were married in December 1997, two weeks after my 30th birthday and a mere 11 months after we started going out.

When my husband and I announced that we were expecting a baby there was little or no surprise expressed by anyone in my family. When I asked my father why the occasion merited so little fuss, he told me that when I was a little girl and the family went to gatherings, one of the first things he would do was find a baby or a toddler for me to dote on. So it was no surprise that, once married, I would want a baby of my own.

My oldest daughter, Jane, was born in April 1999 and we launched into a seemingly endless run of sleepless nights and feeding problems. She was nearly 18 months old before she finally slept uninterrupted for more than one hour and 45 minutes. Six weeks later I asked my husband for another baby.

He looked absolutely horrified. ‘Are you nuts? We’ve only just got her sleeping. You cannot be serious! What if we get another just like her?’ I explained that, to my way of thinking, we should do it sooner rather than later while we remembered how to handle these problems.

This argument must have made some sort of sense to him because our second daughter, Bree, was born in August 2001. She slept through the night from six or seven weeks old and fed like a dream.

I remember when she was about three or four months old, sitting in the rocking chair, just holding her and being amazed all over again at how perfect she was. I called out to Benn, ‘Honey, I want to have another baby.’

‘No,’ was the firm reply from the kitchen.

A couple of weeks later I tried a more subtle approach. ‘Isn’t she just gorgeous?’ I asked him, as Bree presented him with one of her enchanting smiles.

‘She certainly is,’ he cooed as he cuddled her.

‘We should have another just like her, don’t you think?’ He gave me a look that clearly said, ‘I know what you’re up to.’

‘Why do you want another? We have two perfect little girls.’ That stopped me in my tracks. I knew he wasn’t going to take me seriously if I said, ‘I just do,’ so I had to work out why I had this desire.

After several hours pondering the question I said, ‘Because I haven’t finished watching firsts. It’s not that I’ve finished watching Jane’s firsts, and I know I have loads of firsts to come with Bree, but I’m not ready to stop. I want more first smiles, first words, first steps, first teeth.’

Benn seemed to accept this but it didn’t change his stance on a third child. He said that we couldn’t afford another child and until I could show him differently he wouldn’t talk about it.

Parenthood is never easy and Benn and I have ‘suffered’ through sleepless nights, sore breasts, teething, middle ear infections, high fevers, vomiting, croup, a dislocated elbow, a scratched cornea, infant pneumonia, a thankfully minor bout of meningococcal and – believe it or not – scarlet fever. All of it stressful, but every bit of it worth it to have our kids.

I think that this is part of the reason that the plight of my brother-in-law Tod and his wife Kathleen made me think of offering to carry someone else’s baby for the first time. They had no trouble getting pregnant but they never seemed to make it past the first trimester. In addition, an ectopic pregnancy – between the second and third miscarriage – had robbed Kathleen of a Fallopian tube and reduced their chances of a successful pregnancy even further.

I spoke with Benn about the possibility of carrying their child for them and he thought the idea had merit. We did raise the concept of surrogacy with them once. They were talking about the process of IVF, and I asked, ‘Have you thought about having someone else carry the baby for you?’ And Kathleen replied, ‘Nope. If I can’t carry the baby, I’m not meant to have one.’ I was a little surprised by this because I would have done anything to have a child. For me, that finality was very surprising – but completely understandable. I could tell from the way she said it that this really was the way she felt, she wasn’t just fobbing me off. As it turned out, they were finally able to bring a beautiful son and daughter into the world with the invaluable assistance of IVF and a dedicated team of medical professionals.

Still, once you have positively considered an idea like surrogacy it is impossible to look at the challenges of fertility in the same way again.

Following the births of our niece and nephew I was finally able to show Benn that we could afford to have a third child. I don’t know how many variations of our household budget and how many different leave combinations I tried before I was able to show him that it was possible, but I will say that it paid off.

Although once again we became pregnant relatively easily, we experienced a miscarriage in November 2003. Afterwards I kept telling myself that I was OK, that I was lucky because unlike so many other women, I had children. Even if I didn’t ever have another baby I would have them, just down the hall, to hug. But with all of that logic it was a long time before I didn’t feel sad and a little bit lost.

Liam was born exactly a year after I miscarried and I felt that the universe had regained its balance. And for us, our family was now complete. In our marriage, every big decision is a joint decision. We have three children; really, my husband probably would have stopped at two, but he went with my feeling once I proved we could make it work financially. The moment my husband said, ‘You know what? The circle’s closed, it’s complete,’ it wouldn’t have mattered what I said. It was a nice thing, what he said, but it was very final.

Benn is an extremely rational man. He is a public servant, and he is responsible for reviewing documents for policy and legislative implications. He doesn’t rush into his opinions: he weighs everything first. When Benn says something, it’s been thought through and considered.

So how did I go from feeling empathy for my extended family’s struggle to have children to carrying Lily’s daughter? It certainly didn’t happen overnight. In fact, the subject of surrogacy didn’t come up again until Liam was nearly two years old. This was when my close friend Emily revealed to me a similar pain because she was not able to offer to carry a baby for her younger brother and his wife, as she and her husband, Adam, had not finished having their own family – something strongly encouraged by the Ethics Committee.

Surrogacy is very firmly controlled by law and the medical system in Australia. The Canberra Fertility Centre (CFC) submits each request for access into its surrogacy program to the Ethics Committee. Anyone seeking to be part of a surrogacy program or egg donation or similar has to be assessed by it. The Ethics Committee is effectively a risk-reduction mechanism, a safety net. It is there to make sure the people who go on the program are the best people for the job, so to speak, and are least likely to compromise the integrity of the surrogacy program by wanting to keep the baby or otherwise going against the agreed procedures.

Emily told me about Lily and Ben when we were in the car together, driving to Sydney. When she broached the subject and explained that they had asked her if she would carry a baby for them, I thought, Oh my God, she’s going to ask me if I would do it! I mean, who else’s mind would go there? As it turned out, Emily told me their story, not because she was hoping I would do something, but because she needed to tell someone who knew Ben and Lily and cared about both her feelings and theirs. She just needed a sounding board, someone to say, ‘It’s OK to put your family first.’

Benn and I share godparent responsibilities for Emily’s son, Deacon. I enjoyed Ben and Lily’s company and had watched and listened as they had assured people that they were at peace with their circumstances and were going to enjoy the freedom that having two incomes and no children would afford them. They spoke of trips they would take and places they would see. They agreed that initially they had wanted to find a way to become parents, even briefly exploring the option of surrogacy, but after consideration they had decided that this was a ‘better way’ for them.

Then Emily told me that Lily had gone to a reunion and had become very upset when she saw that everyone around her had kids or was pregnant. Lily is a very strong, calm woman; she’s not the sort to burst into tears in a situation like that. But the whole carefree attitude, it seemed, was a facade.

I spoke to my husband about how unfair it all was. How this wonderful couple had decided it was simpler to pretend to be at ease with the hand they had been dealt, just so they didn’t have to bare their souls continually and explain their disappointment to anyone who asked about their childlessness.

We discussed the quandary that Emily and her husband were in, wanting to help but having to put their family wants and needs first, then feeling guilty because they were doing just that. We decided that it was a great pity that they weren’t in our situation: finished having a family, and able to help. We even briefly discussed the possibility of offering ourselves but Benn and I had reservations, and we decided to leave the subject alone.

Yet I was simply unable to watch a friend ‘cheerfully’ suffer as she saw her friends, colleagues and school mates become pregnant when fate had ruled that she should lose her uterus at the tender age of 27. How could I watch her in pain when I had three kids and there was no physical reason I couldn’t have a fourth? How could I sleep soundly knowing that no treatment would help her, while I had hardly needed to think about conceiving and I could hug my kids anytime I wanted?

I know that this sounds a little sappy and dramatic, but that’s who I am and it was how I felt about the situation. I had simply not been able to put the subject from my mind and it was this painful empathy – and some unwittingly well-chosen words spoken one day – that led me to raise the topic of surrogacy with my husband a second time.

On a particular Sunday in January 2007 I was at church. We were having our service outside, in the playground that is attached to the church. We were sitting under the awnings in the dappled shade and the minister, Robert, was talking on Jonah and the whale. He was explaining very clearly that Jonah and the whale was not a ‘real’ story. No one actually got swallowed by a whale. It’s a story about our duty to God and to each other to do things even when they’re not exactly what we want to do, or when they’re difficult, or even if they are distasteful. He finished up his sermon and he said, ‘So no one was swallowed by a whale, it’s simply that even if you are swallowed by a whale you can’t escape God’s will. You need to appreciate that if there’s something out there that you’re supposed to be doing, it doesn’t matter if you put your head in the sand, it’s not going to go away.’ And he looked out at us, and I swear he looked straight at me as he said, ‘So what is it that God’s asking you to do that you’re not doing?’ And I knew I had to go home and talk to Benn and say, ‘This thing won’t leave me alone and there’s a reason it won’t leave me alone.’

I was scared of surrogacy initially but it was something that I knew was important. I sincerely believe that God gave me a brain and he gave me a conscience and I’m supposed to use them. I would never claim that God told me to do this thing: it sounds too bizarre to say, ‘My minister said this so I went and had someone’s baby!’ But I had continued to think about it since my initial discussion with Benn, and Robert’s comment had really struck a chord with me. I felt very much as though I wasn’t supposed to walk away from this. They probably were just the right words at the right time, but I don’t believe totally in coincidence. I think things happen for a reason.

So I don’t think I ever said to Benn, ‘Do you know what? Robert said...’ Instead I came home and said, ‘Something happened today and I think we have to have this conversation again. I don’t think we’re done.’

The second discussion was more detailed than the previous one. Benn’s main concern was my health and we agreed that we would investigate how stringently they assessed a carrier’s health before making any final decision or offer. As it turned out, the carrier’s health was deemed extremely important – only someone with a good background in both general health and previous pregnancies is favourably considered. One hurdle passed.

The other hurdle we had to cross was the fact that these were not our closest friends, so the concept felt a little strange. We also knew that we had to consider how this decision would be taken by those around us. Most people have the ‘American’ view of surrogacy: in the US it is often a commercial arrangement where a couple (not even necessarily infertile) can select a suitable carrier from a database and pay her to carry their child for them. This leads to an attitude that anyone willing to carry a child for someone else must be doing it for financial reward and they are seen as a sort of prostitute willing to sell their body to anyone for the best asking price.

It is important to know that at the time we were considering doing this thing, it was not only illegal for anyone to enter into a commercial surrogacy arrangement, but surrogacy