Piles of paperwork, hours of legal meetings, health checks (for the surrogate and her husband), FDA testing (for our embryos, me and my husband), mandatory consultations, and more piles of paperwork followed. Our embryos were flown from London to the United States, hand-carried from house to house in a small temperature-controlled freezer. Six months after our first meeting with Summer, we called for an embryo transfer via video call. Just two weeks later, she peed (privately) into a cup and held up a pregnancy test to the camera so my husband and I could see the two blue lines developing in real time.
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As strange as it sounds: pregnant and yet not pregnant. Someone recently pointed out that I was experiencing pregnancy like a man: sitting out waiting for the baby to come. I like to think of it that way. The grief, loss and shame of infertility are real, and what could be more luxurious than outsourcing the baking of baby cakes? It felt like “something only famous people do,” as my (very excited and supportive) mother said when we first told her. While Summer struggled with nausea and fatigue for the first 12 weeks, I spent the holidays emulating the Race Across the World, visiting friends and celebrating our good news with ice-cold Pét-nat. The biggest and most overwhelming feeling—after the excitement, of course—was a sense of our immense privilege, and, if I’m being completely honest, a sense of guilt. Of wanting more than my fair share. For most people, a ruptured uterus would abruptly end any hope of starting or expanding a family. Surrogacy is not a journey that everyone can pursue, partly because of the high cost. To be able to do it and have a wonderful woman with a super strong uterus do all the heavy lifting is a blessing.
It wasn’t without its stresses, though. Back to those celebrities, Khloé Kardashian has previously admitted that she initially had trouble bonding with her son, Tatum, who was born via surrogacy in July 2023. Of course, this made me nervous, but I think it was a small price to pay for everything we’ll gain by the end of this wild journey. Carefully marking the milestones helped us come to terms with the reality of not having physical changes. We had a small gender reveal party with close friends and family, and it was another boy. I downloaded the apps. (He’s now the size of a carrot, and about to become a papaya.) Having been uncomfortably open—almost boastful, in retrospect—when I was pregnant the first time, I’ve found it hard to tell people this time around, when normally ordering a mocktail or a decaf would be an easy conversation starter. But I’m not alone. The global surrogacy market is expected to grow from $11 billion to an estimated $76 billion over the next decade. The baby-baking business is really growing.
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