The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family

Introduction

I’m a mom of three children. So I understand the immense joys—and challenges—of bearing and raising kids.

Which also allows me a glimpse of the agony of being unable to have children.

As a writer on women’s issues, I believe nothing is more intimate an issue for every woman—actually, every human being—than the desire to have a child.

Now, my children were all conceived and born naturally. They enjoy full, robust health. Sometimes, a little too robust, actually.

But I discovered that infertility—the myriad variations of disease and biological abnormality that cause specific men and women to be unable to create children together—strikes randomly. Anyone can be infertile. A teenager who had her appendix removed. A fifty-year-old career woman who never tried to have children. A nun, a virgin, a celibate gay man. Infertility is surprisingly common, afflicting 10 to 12 percent of the human population.

There is no surefire way to prove you are fertile in advance, no blood test to screen newborns or teenagers for the inability to have children as one might for hemophilia or celiac disease. Part of infertility’s cruelty is the surprise of its assault. You rarely learn you are infertile until you try, and fail, to have a baby.

When I found this all out, I wondered: what would I have done if I were infertile?

That was when I stumbled upon the seemingly strange new solution of surrogacy—paying another woman to carry a baby for you. Surrogacy has actually always been a solution to the age-old problem of infertility. In fact, surrogacy (via concubine) is mentioned over twenty times in the Old Testament.

Today, the global medical community, funded by generations of desperate infertile women, has figured out exciting—and disturbing—new ways to create babies no matter the obstacles. The medical term is Gestational Surrogacy (GS), a new-and-improved version of an ancient solution to childlessness.

Today, thanks to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other advances in assisted reproductive technology, babies can be created with sperm from one source, an egg from another, and a uterus separate from both. Surrogates today are not biologically or genetically connected to the babies they gestate. This simplifies many ethical, legal, and parenting issues.

And creates new ones.

Modern surrogacy is thus transforming humans’ centuries-old definition of motherhood.

Today a newborn can have two mothers or two fathers, or no mother, or no father. A baby can actually have zero legal parents, as in a few isolated cases where a gestational surrogate carried a baby created with donor egg and sperm, and a clinic mix-up means no legal parent can be traced or proven.

Today anyone—a twenty-five-year-old with uterine fibroids, a forty-year-old woman with a cancerous uterus, two married gay men—can have a baby, their biological baby, via surrogate.

As long as they can afford it.

Because surrogacy in the United States can cost $100,000 or more.

Gestational surrogacy has become better known in recent years due to international celebrities such as musician Elton John, comedian Jimmy Fallon, and actresses Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Banks, and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have all had babies via U.S. gestational surrogates.

But the rise of GS is important for more normal people too.

Like Gerry and Rhonda Wile, a nurse and firefighter from Arizona whose story is told in this book.

Gerry and Rhonda met and married in their late twenties. Gerry was already a father, but he’d had a vasectomy, which he didn’t tell Rhonda about for SIX YEARS (but that’s another story).

As for Rhonda, for her entire life she had an extremely rare, undiagnosed medical condition that allowed her to get pregnant easily—and she did—but the same condition caused her to miscarry 100 percent of these pregnancies.

Prior to twentieth-century medical X-rays and ultrasounds, Rhonda would have gotten pregnant and miscarried dozens of times throughout her reproductive years—as often as 3-4 times A YEAR—for decades without ever understanding what was wrong with her biologically. For too many centuries, infertility was a lifelong, mystifying curse. A perennial loss that often left sufferers, women in particular, feeling rejected by their husbands, families, communities, and even by God.

So what did the Wiles do?

What would you do?

Today there are several options for the world’s infertile. Treatment, adoption, accepting that you will live your life without children. But for the Wiles, there was only one solution. Surrogacy meant the Wiles could create the family they dreamed of using Gerry’s sperm, Rhonda’s eggs (or what turned out to be eggs from a donor), and an unrelated gestational carrier.

Gestational surrogacy is an exciting, awe-inspiring new medical innovation that makes it possible for infertile couples like Gerry and Rhonda, and millions of other people, to have babies and become parents … as nature and our biological drives have always intended.

Surrogacy today heralds the end of infertility, the death of an affliction that has plagued humans since the beginning of time.

This is exciting, thrilling, life-changing, society-changing, disturbing …

Everything a huge medical advance SHOULD be.

Unfortunately there are several problems with surrogacy.

Doctors consider infertility a disease—but insurance companies won’t pay for surrogacy as a treatment.

The procedure is out of reach financially to most people—a $100,000 treatment not covered by health insurance anywhere in the world.

And oh yeah—it’s not legal anywhere in the European Union, most of Asia, and in ten out of fifty American states.

Including Arizona, where the Wiles live.

All major Western religions except for Judaism oppose GS.

Anti-abortion groups do too.

Surrogacy makes for a hardcore feminist debate topic: the practice is taboo even among feminists who encourage women to control their reproductive destiny, because some see surrogacy as exploitation of women.

Some states allow or even encourage surrogacy—but others like New York, which allows gay marriage—currently prohibit paid surrogacy.

Surrogacy and assisted reproductive medical advances mean we’ve got sperm donors with 150 children. Ivy League egg donors auctioning off their ovum to the richest bidders. Trends toward genetic engineering, opportunists seeking to create better babies with unnaturally high IQs, customized eyes, hair color, and height, a complete absence of genetic flaws.

Which are all interesting debate topics. Except if you are infertile. Then all you want is a baby, without all that controversy over pros and cons.

The final surprise about surrogacy is that it’s personal. It’s human. It’s about you and me.

What if, like our Arizona nurse and firefighter, you had to travel eight thousand miles to have your baby—and risk not being able to bring her back with you?

Or, because of societal stigma, you felt pressured to have your biological offspring with a heterosexual partner, instead of parenting with a gay partner, or becoming a single parent?

Or your health insurance said you were too old, or too religious, or not religious enough to qualify for infertility reimbursement?

Or your God said no, you can’t treat your disease … you must live your life without the children you’ve dreamt of having since you were a child yourself.

Imagine the betrayal you would feel if your country, your political leaders, your neighbors, your God, refused you a baby, merely because the treatment for your disease made people uncomfortable.

Would this make you want—or deserve—a baby any less?

Read on and find out.

Part 1

What’s the Big Deal About Not Having Babies, Anyway?

Mother’s Day, 2011. In the golden twilight of her cactus-studded front yard in Mesa, Arizona, forty-year-old Rhonda Wile looked nothing like a woman who had endured six harsh years of failed fertility treatments. One surprise vasectomy. One heartbreaking miscarriage. A painful divorce. One suicide attempt.

Most of all, Rhonda looked absolutely nothing like a woman who, after years of despair, was finally expecting twins in August.

Instead, sipping iced tea in the auburn shimmer of the sun setting on the desert, Rhonda Wile looked like a stunningly attractive-yet-approachable young wife posing for a Cialis or Viagra commercial. She wore a red cotton V-neck shirt and crisp white shorts that accentuated her trim, hourglass waist. Her long blond hair was glossy and thick. She appeared surprisingly well rested for a nurse who had just come off a twelve-hour shift. Over five feet seven inches tall, with a striking, curvaceous figure and a friendly grin, she smiled with the warmth of a woman not overly aware of her charm.

Despite the fact that she’d spent Mother’s Day working her usual 8 A.M. to 8 P.M. schedule, Rhonda radiated optimism like a halo. Rhonda had spent most of a decade mired in fear that she’d never join her sister, mother, and childhood friends in that most exclusive club: motherhood. These days, she mainlined hope like a drug—even when she shopped at Target, changed an IV drip at work, or slept at night next to her husband of eleven years.

This Mother’s Day, for the first time since being a child, hope felt like an emotion Rhonda could count on.

As a nurse, Rhonda knew, objectively at least, that her mad, burning desire to have children sprang from the universe’s most powerful biological craving: to create life. Perpetuation of our species is the instinct behind our sex drive, the logic behind sexual attraction. Nature wants us to give in to both urges, the sexual impulse and the deep craving to have children.

That intellectual understanding did not make Rhonda long for children one iota less.

Gerry Wile, Rhonda’s husband of more than a decade, had stayed home on Sunday while Rhonda worked. A Maricopa County firefighter, Gerry was a six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, former military man with a buzz cut. He, too, looked straight out of central casting, the type of handsome, rugged man who revs a Dodge Ram pickup truck through a muddy ravine, smiling reassuringly as dirt spews out from the mammoth back tires.

Gerry was barefoot and shirtless in the dry Arizona heat, watering the cacti and walking with the light feet of a quarterback. His body was accustomed to jumping out of airplanes and carrying 110-pound, five-inch-diameter hoses from his fire truck directly into the wildfires that raced through the desert brush. Laugh lines were etched into his sunburned cheeks. He was a guy who, while hauling you safely out of a burning building, would crack a joke to make it seem like you’d come through a memorable adventure, not a near-death experience.

The fading Arizona sun showed off the butterfly tattoo on Gerry’s ripped right calf. On his left rib cage, there was another design, large and intricate enough to rival Lisbeth Salander’s famous dragon tattoo. The ink depicted a huge elephant head. It was an elaborate representation of Ganesh, the Indian god devoted to removing obstacles. The elephant head was overlaid with two tiny baby footprints, the type you see stamped onto a hospital birth certificate.

Strange ink for a forty-four-year-old fireman and military veteran.

As a firefighter, Gerry knew that the desire to nurture and protect children was nearly as powerful as the urge to create them. Nothing generates more adrenaline in firemen than children’s toys scattered on the porch of a burning home with a family trapped inside. This is also a biological imperative of our species, because as any firefighter knows, human infants are among the most helpless offspring in the animal kingdom.

For most parents, as for most firefighters, the instinct to protect children outweighs even our instinct for self-preservation. Even though we sometimes cannot stand our own kids. Even though no one, not even Rhonda or Gerry, wants to sit next to a crying baby on an airplane, few parents would hesitate to run into traffic—or a burning building—to save a child.

All just as nature intended.

Rhonda and Gerry knew the U.S. Department of Justice statistic that every year in the United States over 100,000 children are abducted. A distinctly unnatural desire: to steal someone else’s child. Imagine what you would do if your child were kidnapped, if a force outside your family, someone with no interest in how deeply you love your child, had the ability to destroy your family, your biological link to eternity.

How much would you pay to rescue that child?

How far would you travel?

Would you ever abandon the search?

Rhonda, sitting on her brown living room sofa with Frankie, her white shepherd-Catahoula pooch, often watched America’s Most Wanted on television alone during the long evenings when Gerry worked overnight shifts at the firehouse. From the show, she had learned the comforting data that, fortunately, the vast majority of abducted children are found within hours. Only roughly one hundred kidnappings a year result in the death of a child. It consoled Rhonda to know that few parents understand this misery firsthand.

However, Rhonda and Gerry understood all too well an anguish nearly identical to the trauma of losing a child. Failure to conceive or give birth to a baby is a kidnapping of a different variety. Over the course of their eleven years together, Rhonda and Gerry’s dreams had been stolen. It didn’t matter that their lost children were never born.

Every year in the United States, an astonishing number of children—more than one million babies—are lost to infertility and miscarriage. These losses don’t make national headlines. At times, even best friends and close family members never learn of them.

Yearning for a child—and not being able to have one—represents an ache that is complicated to capture or measure, even for sufferers and fertility doctors. For some, to die without creating life adds up to two deaths: one’s own, and the opportunity a child represents to defy mortality.

It feels like constant starvation, says Rhonda Wile, speaking slowly, searching the cobalt desert horizon outside her home like a crime victim trying to recall an assailant’s features for the precinct sketch artist. You’re hungry all the time, even when you’re sleeping. You gradually understand that you are going to be starving, starving for a child, for the rest of your life.

How far would you go to have a child?

Would you harvest your eggs or sperm at age twenty-two, your fertile peak?

How many rounds of long subcutaneous needles, hormones flooding your body, and invasive, expensive surgeries would you endure?

Where could you find the money? Would you sell your car, your house? Ask your parents to hock their retirement condo?

What would you do to help someone else have a child? Write a character recommendation for an adoption agency? Lend a friend money? Donate an embryo? Carry a stranger’s baby in your uterus?

Picture that you’d spent your life savings on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility treatments, and you still didn’t have a baby. Could you make one final reckless gamble? Would you be able to find the nearly $100,000 needed to finance the most desperate solution: paying another woman to create and carry a baby in her uterus for you?

At forty, nearing the end of her fertility road, Rhonda knew the answer. She and Gerry, after trying to get pregnant dozens of times, dozens of different ways, had found a radical new solution.

Rhonda and Gerry had spent nearly $50,000 trying to have children together, more than they spent on their house down payment and the purchase of their two cars. Rhonda and Gerry’s baby chase had led them thousands of miles from home, to a perplexing, entrancing country with over 11 million unwanted infants and one of the highest female illiteracy rates in the world. They’d ventured to a faraway land they had never once dreamed of visiting, all in search of a baby they could afford on a nurse and firefighter’s income.

The reason Rhonda looked so svelte was simple.

Although she and Gerry were expecting twins, Rhonda was not pregnant.

The unborn twins were Rhonda and Gerry’s babies, but they were not growing inside Rhonda’s body. Another woman was pregnant with Rhonda and Gerry’s twins. Her name was Gauri.

A dozen times a day, while Gauri went about her chores, when she heated water for breakfast tea for her husband, or scrubbed her children’s dark blue school uniforms, the thought jerked Gauri like a truck horn suddenly blaring in the night: she was pregnant from a twenty-minute medical procedure, without having had sex with the baby’s father. The babies she had carried for five months had been created from another woman’s egg and a stranger’s sperm; she had no genetic connection to them. And she was going to become rich beyond her wildest dreams in exchange for growing these babies for two people she had never met.

Her body. Their babies.

The Wiles knew Gauri’s height and weight, the ages of her son and daughter, her husband’s income, what she ate for breakfast, and the results of her latest blood draw. But they had not met the woman carrying their babies. In fact, they had never even talked to her. Gauri didn’t speak English. Plus she had no telephone. Finally, the woman bearing the Wile twins lived twelve time zones and 8,847 miles away in a small temporary apartment in the Bhandup West neighborhood of Mumbai, India.

Which made it kind of hard for the three of us to catch up, says Rhonda today, with a rueful smile.

*   *   *

Having a baby is natural, right?

Also as natural—and as ancient—as the human species itself is difficulty conceiving and carrying babies. Long before words were written on papyrus, or horses painted on Paleolithic cave walls, long before doctors understood what causes infertility, and centuries before birth control and women’s rights advocacy enabled women to delay childbearing, infertility afflicted humans at a steady rate of 10 to 12 percent.

Surprising, then, that studies have shown that almost all women wildly overestimate our ability to get pregnant, at every age, and to have as many children as we want in our lifetime. Infertility is one affliction no one talks about, or assumes will happen to them, until it actually happens to them.

Throughout time and in every culture, women like Rhonda Wile have erroneously borne the burden of blame. The inaccurate historical assumption has long been that infertility was strictly a women’s issue. In the Old Testament, written sometime in the fifth or sixth centuries BC, Abraham’s wife Sarah was barren until a miracle son, Isaac, was born long past her childbearing years. In Genesis, the Lord closed Rachel’s womb until she cried out to Jacob, Give me children or else I die. Michal, the daughter of King Saul; Hannah; Elisha; Samson’s mother; even the Virgin Mary’s mother, Anna, and her cousin Elisabeth, all were labeled barren women who could not bear children.

The Bible never refers to any men as barren. U.S. history books rarely note that the father of our country, George Washington, was not an actual father. He created no offspring, despite marrying a demonstrably fertile young widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, who had given birth to four children with her first husband by the time she turned twenty-five. Today’s infertility specialists suspect that Washington suffered from Klinefelter’s syndrome, an affliction with symptoms including bad teeth (Washington lost his by his early twenties), unusual height (he was six foot three), and sterility.

Human understanding of male infertility came only with twentieth-century medical technology. The reality is that for 30 percent of cases, experts don’t know what causes the inability to conceive. In couples where doctors can pinpoint the origin, 50 percent of problems lie with the man.

Bias lingers nevertheless. Many cultures continue to shun women when a couple experiences sterility. Many women, in the United States and other countries, blame themselves if they have difficulty getting, or staying, pregnant. An accepted solution in many cultures, cited over twenty times in the Old Testament, was for men to turn to other, potentially more fertile, women to try again, sometimes with legal and societal sanction. An ancient, respected form of surrogacy.

Hiring a surrogate is now, in certain circles, a badge of hipness. Trendsetters today make magazine covers with their surrogate babies. Nicole Kidman. Elton John. Sofia Vergara. Angela Bassett. Neil Patrick Harris. Sarah Jessica Parker. They all have beloved babies born from other women’s wombs. Among the less famous, an amazing 2,000 to 4,000 babies are born each year to surrogate mothers to whom they have no biological connection.

In short, infertility has been a reality for the human race, disproportionately affecting women, for centuries. And surrogacy has always been one of the solutions.

What’s wrong with not being able to have babies, anyway?

You could save a lot of money on birth control and diapers.

With seven billion people, who needs more children in the world?

Maybe infertility is God’s way of controlling the population.

Why don’t you just adopt?

Try telling that to anyone who wants a