End of our 1st Surrogacy Journey

As some of you may have noticed, I have been silent since 21 weeks about our surrogate and our pregnancy journey. At 20 weeks, our journey changed drastically. It was as if our surrogate was no longer someone we knew. Someone who, in our minds, threatened the life of our child. It was as though a switch flipped and we were no longer a team. We had now entered into a legal agreement and nothing else. We all of a sudden were stripped down to a “paying for a baby” relationship. There was no more mutual respect.

At 20 weeks, we thought we were losing our child. Not only did we think we would have to bury our son, but we also thought our surrogates name was going to be on the birth certificate and we were going to have to go to court to get that changed. See, our surrogate had decided not to sign the pre-birth order (PBO) after stating she had sent it to our lawyers already. Now, I do not know the full story of what transpired and why the PBO was never signed. What I do know is, this was traumatic. Not only did we think we were losing our son, but we had no legal rights to our son. To us, this completely broke our trust. Then, we found out our surrogate was lying to us about why she was in the hospital. She had made us believe that she was suffering a placenta abruption, which could be life-threatening to the surrogate and the baby. When asked if she could be bleeding because of sex, she did say she had sex but the blood was too severe and the doctors already ruled that out and there was something seriously wrong. Fast forward three days, the bleeding was 100% sex-related but our surrogate was embarrassed and all of a sudden a “very private” person. She was also incredibly angry with me for calling the hospital for an update on MY son. This whole visit ruined our relationship. We even participated in counseling to try and salvage anything we had left. It became unsalvageable.

At 25 weeks, we were asked to have no contact with our surrogate or her agency (she had a separate agency from us.) Her agency was solely focused on her well-being and rights, never fighting for our rights as parents. The next 8 weeks became a battle to have rights in medical decisions for our child, to even be included in doctors' appointments, or to have enough notice to get to doctors' appointments. We were also asked to not come to appointments in person because it would “stress out” our surrogate. The relationship went from friends to co-workers, to victim and abuser.

The situation got to the point where I second-guessed everything I said or thought. How I was parenting my unborn child, what I was doing wrong because I was being gaslighted for asking our surrogate to be safe, follow a gestational diabetes diet, and keep us updated on our son. In her mind, we were asking too much and she no longer had any control of the pregnancy. Surrogacy in its definition gives control of the pregnancy to the intended parents. The pregnancy in question is our pregnancy for our biological child. We never asked too much, even when she was in breach of contract. Like drinking soda when the contract says no caffeine, or not signing the PBO on time, or not following doctors’ orders of pelvic rest resulting in her having to stay in the hospital multiple times (which we then pay for.)

To let you in, our asks were updates on fetal movement, meaning kicks, when he could be felt outside the womb, contractions, any changes in the pregnancy, and asking her to play our voice with belly buds we purchased her. She never introduced Michael to our voices in the womb. She also started to threatened Sam and me, saying she didn’t want us in the delivery room, and then when she consulted her lawyer, she was instructed that she legally had to because of our contract. She continued to hold that over our head until the day he was born. She refused to let us have a say in specialists, even though it was in our contract, and blamed me for everything that went wrong in the pregnancy. She even lied to doctors about my medical conditions, stating I was born two months early, had to have surgery, had an extensive NICU stay, and had a hole in my heart as a baby. None of this is true.

Now, I get pregnancy hormones. I get feeling out of control, I felt that the whole journey. When you sign up to be a surrogate, you are being welcomed into a family where surrogacy is their only or last option. We are already traumatized by asking someone else to carry our world. We feel as though we got taken advantage of. I will never forget her being incredibly rude about me to our agencies while I was on the call saying, “she just would never understand pregnancy” or “she is too pushy.” This journey was harder than my cancer fight. This journey has broken me.

Michael was born at 33 weeks and 5 days gestational age. Our contract paid her out if the pregnancy ended after 32 weeks. It felt as though she did everything in her power to get him here early because she didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. Even making statements of “I don’t want to be in the hospital for my birthday.”

I am terrified to endure another surrogacy journey, but I have to believe that there are people out there who do it for the right reasons, and not just a paycheck. In the end, we realized that our surrogate wanted the paycheck, made obvious by all the monetary requests, and the attention, made evident by the numerous photoshoots she did of the pregnancy and sharing them on social media while keeping all of our printed sonogram pictures.

We have learned a lot and will do another journey in hopes of giving Michael a sibling, but things will be different. Our contract will be different, and how we vet will be different. I write this with tears in my eyes because this is not at all that we wanted when we started this journey. We pray for peace as we embark on the next chapter of our lives and we pray for our surrogate as she lives hers. There is so much more I want to share on this journey, maybe in time I will feel comfortable opening up more about the abuse, but for now, this is our side of the surrogacy journey. I truly don’t know how our surrogate views what happened, but I can tell you even our agency was hurt by what she did.