Meet the hosts of “I Want to Put a Baby in You”

Jennifer White and Ellen Trachman, the hosts—who are sisters—of the podcast “I Want to Put a Baby in You.”

If never have you ever had the pleasure of listening to the podcast I want to Put a Baby in You, you’re in for a real treat. When researching my book “How I Became Your Mother: My Global Surrogacy Journey”, a number of the experts that I interviewed on surrogacy told me about the podcast. Ellen Trachman, a family formation lawyer, and her sister Jennifer White, who runs the surrogacy agency Bright Futures Families, in their relaxed, funny and thoughtful style interview some of the top experts in the United States and across the globe about infertility, surrogacy, egg and sperm donation and assisted reproductive technologies (ART). But they also talk to everyday people who have gone through the trauma of infertility and come out on the other side. I spoke with them about their podcast and what drives them to try and make surrogacy a more transparent space. Excerpts: 

Ginanne Brownell: So I have to ask, where did you come up with the name for the podcast? 

Ellen:  I write a weekly column for Above the Law on legal issues and the original tagline was "I want to put a baby in you." 

Jennifer: And I bought her the web address as a joke for Christmas. And so that's how we came to have the title for it because we had all the rights to it anyway. I'm pretty sure Ellen said, “We should do this thing, a podcast.” I said, "That seems hard, but let me have think about it.” Yet here we are almost four years later.  

How did you come up with the idea in terms of the focus? 

Jennifer: It wasn't about any specific bent except to talk about all things assisted reproductive technology because people who go through this feel like they're alone. And we just didn't want people to feel like they're alone any longer. We do a number of stories from every direction we can possibly pull, be it parents who've been through surrogacy, egg donors, attorneys, any professional who vaguely touches on what we do. 

I have had the pleasure of having been on your podcast, as has MFA’s founder Stephanie Jones. How do you find guests? 

Jennifer: A lot of people are from our own circles and experiences. So of course, gestational carriers that we've worked with or we go to a lot of conferences and beg people we meet at these conferences to come on the air. 

Ellen: Some are from the stories that I write on for Above the Law, like Derek Mize and his partner, who are U.S. citizens, but had an immigration nightmare in the U.K. where their daughter was denied American citizenship. I was very fortunate that he reached out to me to tell their story. 

Jennifer: And we get rejected too.  I’m not ashamed to admit I reached out to Michelle Obama and her team rejected our pitch. But I will follow people's stories. There are so many surrogacy message boards out there. So I'll see people who will write,  “Oh, you know, like, this person had this horrible experience, and this person had this weird experience” or things like that. I have found a number of people that way.

One of the things that really bothers me about surrogacy is how it’s portrayed in pop culture. It’s always that the surrogate is a stalker or the parents are unstable or that someone is being taken advantage of. 

Ellen: The reality is there's very little drama in a typical surrogacy story. So then you have things like the Jessica Allen story where she gave birth to twins but one turned out to be biologically her child. And you have tears on all sides. And you know, my goodness, that is heart wrenching and that's why that stuff gets picked up. And then suddenly that becomes the next Lifetime story because it has those levels of drama. 

Jennifer: Phoebe on “Friends” for example or Kim Kardashian, those are like the two big culture references I hear over and over again. But definitely there are misconceptions. Somebody came to me trying just having a casual conversation about Kim Kardashian and they said, "Well, but she just did it because it was vanity."  And  it wasn't vanity. She had placenta accreta. So there are the misconceptions that she just did it because she had money, not because she actually had a medical need. 

Heather Jacobson from the University of Texas in Arlington told me that she thinks we need to change the terminology – to avoid that “single story” of who a surrogate is and why she is doing what she is doing. There are surrogacies, not surrogacy, and drawing the same conclusions of how surrogacy is in the United States or the United Kingdom versus Ukraine is rather ludicrous.  

Jennifer:  In New York, for example, Gloria Steinem came out against the then proposed statute making surrogacy legal in the state. [Compensated surrogacy became legal in the state earlier in 2021]. She said that it's just exploitation of women, and it was a complete misunderstanding of the reality. People who are against surrogacy try to claim women are being exploited. And that has happened in other countries. But the women that we work with day in, day out, they are the opposite of exploited. They are very strong women. The reasons why they are doing is that they want to do something amazing. They want to help someone. I feel like it’s very often being inaccurately portrayed as women being used. No, that’s not the experience we have seen at all. 

General Motors, headquartered in Detroit, announced in October that starting in 2022, employees struggling to expand their families could get up to a combined $40,000 benefit to reimburse costs of things like fertility treatments and surrogacy. It seems that there is more and more recognition of how these costs can feel overwhelming.

Jennifer: People are fighting for fertility coverage and insurance. To be a parent can be a very strong driving force and you're willing to go through anything. We know people who have  rented out their house and moved back into their parents basement and gave up everything just to save a pennies so they could go through fertility treatments. And then with surrogacy, of course, it's even worse. There is definitely is a realization that it's expensive and that it is difficult to reach. And I don't know that any of us have hit on a bucket solution; we [as agencies] end up referring intended parents to the same places like the Cade Foundation or Men Having Babies. We spend a lot of time counselling people on how to save money or how to find the money for it. I try to encourage people to do it in manageable chunks, because I think people think that it all has to be done at once, especially if you need an egg donor.  And so what I'll tell people is, "Maybe right now, all you can afford is to make your embryos. So do that and freeze them. And then hold on, and get ready for that next step when you're financially ready.” Break it down into more manageable pieces."

This year you, Jennifer, helped found the Reproductive Alliance, an organization whose mission is to establish an accreditation process for the surrogacy field. Tell me a bit more on this.

 Jennifer: Change only comes from within. I mean nobody outside, unless there is government intervention, is going to actually work on making this change. We've set it up as an organization that includes doctors, lawyers, mental health professionals, insurance professionals, escrow professionals, representatives of intended parents, and representatives from gestational carriers. The goal is to give Intended parents and gestational carriers a way to “look under the hood” and know which surrogacy programs are adhering to best practices. We feel strongly that this will lift up all surrogacy programs as well as make surrogacy a better and safer experience for everyone.