I had the pleasure of talking with a mom who was a surrogate for another mom last week.
She had never met the other woman for whom she offered to carry the baby. She had never thought about being a surrogate before, but after losing her cousin to cancer, who was a young mom, she heard about another young mom who had cancer and was looking for someone to carry her embryo. Through her grief, she saw an opportunity to give back and be grateful for her own health.
When I was talking with this woman I couldn’t stop thinking, why? Why would anyone want to do this for someone else, especially a stranger? Being pregnant is not easy but there is the reward in the end of a baby. You don’t get that reward if you are carrying someone else’s baby.
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You also can’t get paid in Canada for surrogacy. (In the United States, a surrogate typically gets paid upwards of $50,000.) Here, it is an incredibly selfless gift. This woman changed another family’s future. She was able to help a little boy get a little brother and another child for a couple. That is mind-boggling. And she did it all simply out of the goodness of her heart.
My children are my everything and I’m so lucky that I was able to get pregnant, and be able to carry my own children. Not everyone is that lucky. I know that. Talking with this selfless person has shown me that miracles do still exist and there are good people in this world. There is so much bad news all the time, and sadness, but there is also hope for humanity. This surrogacy is proof of it.
The other aspect of the story I can’t stop thinking about, is the incredible advances in medicine.
Traditional surrogacy, where the carrying woman uses her own egg and just a sperm donor is used, has roots that go back to biblical times.
However, the first successful gestational surrogacy, which is when eggs from an egg donor are fertilized in the lab with sperm from a sperm donor to make an embryo which is then implanted into a surrogate mom, didn’t take place until 1985. That doesn’t seem like that long ago.
Since then, the increase in the procedure has risen immensely. Some estimate it has increased 400 per cent in the last decade. Experts say the reason for the increase in interest is mostly infertility, but also gay couples wishing to become parents.
Whatever the reasons, surrogates deserve all our praise. And however one becomes a parent, should also be celebrated and praised.
A mom is a mom, is a mom.
@MariscaDekkema
marisca.bakker@interior-news.com
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