When Surrogacy is Your Only Hope to Become a Mother
MFA board member Alex Kamer was born with a congenital heart defect that prevented her from being able to carry a pregnancy. Last year, her Indiana-based surrogate gave birth to their son. MFA intern Parker Kehrig spoke with Ms. Kamer about her experience as an intended parent in an out-of-state surrogacy.
Kehrig: How did you come to surrogacy?
Kamer: We [Alex and her husband] met with families who had gone both routes [adoption and surrogacy], just to try and learn as much as we could. We spent a year information gathering and having conversations with people. I don't think we ever really were like, ‘We feel 100% about one of these directions’, but we felt more driven, I think to try the surrogacy route to see if we could have a biological child. We wondered if we went the adoption route, if we would have regrets later on in life about not at least exploring the surrogacy option. I don't think that adoption is totally off the table, maybe we'll still do that someday.
What was this journey like emotionally?
IVF was hard, it was a little extra complicated for me with my congenital heart defect, I needed to be followed a little more closely with all of the different hormones and drugs. And the toll that they took on my body, that part was rough. . You know, anytime you're out of the ordinary, you have to train people how to talk to you, and you have to do extra research, and you have to advocate for yourself.That can be really draining, but the emotional stuff didn't get didn't get weird until later on.
Could you tell me a little bit about that?
We had kind of an interesting journey. After IVF, we found an agency in Indiana to work with and had our embryos moved from Michigan to Indiana. We matched with our first surrogate, and we were so naive and excited when our first embryo transfer worked. She was super informed about pregnancy and took really amazing care of herself. And we had this great relationship, but she ended up having a miscarriage at about 13 weeks. We had been so optimistic, and felt like it was a sure thing because we had just gotten into the second trimester. And so that was awful. It was heartbreaking, she wasn't able to carry for us again. So we had to start all over. And then we found a new person, and she had a family emergency happen and wasn't able to continue. Then we had to start all over again and find a new surrogate.The first time we did an embryo transfer with her, she had an ectopic pregnancy. And then finally, our third embryo that we tried was successful and ended up with our son. During her pregnancy, of course, is when COVID started, so that added a whole other layer of anxiety.
That sounds incredibly stressful.
It's already a stressful situation when you're not physically with your baby, and you don't know what's going on. And you have to trust somebody, and it's just a hard relationship to begin with. Our reproductive endocrinologist who did the embryo transfers even said, ‘I've never had intended parents have so much trouble getting pregnant with a surrogate before.’ It took us a lot longer than it should have.
How did you cope with that?
After the miscarriage we grieved. We struggled, and we waited for a while before we started over again. We needed time to recover after that, because we were so all in on that pregnancy and so devastated to lose our baby. I think [my husband and I] became a little bit more guarded and cynical after that. And each embryo transfer, each step after that, we didn't believe it was real, until it actually came true. Our surrogate was about eight months pregnant with our son, and we were finally like, ‘we need to start believing that this is real and get a nursery ready because it's really going to happen’. It just felt like hurdle after hurdle and it wasn't ever really going to happen, and then finally did. We had to get over that cynicism.
What do you wish you had known when you started?
I feel like so much happened during our journey that doesn't happen for other people. I wish that I had known that it can be kind of a bumpy ride and there's a lot of hurdles to overcome, but that it's worth it. The relationship that you have with your surrogate is really important and the trust is important. It's hard to know what to anticipate when you have that initial match meeting, and you're just getting to know a potential surrogate, but really making sure that you ask all the difficult questions. Nobody could have expected a pandemic. The years of struggle, the financial and emotional burden - it was all worth it to build our family and to finally meet our sweet little boy last July.
Do you have any final thoughts?
The reason I'm doing this interview is because it doesn't have to be this hard, we shouldn’t have to go out of state. Maybe the law will have changed by the time we want to have a second child, but at the very least, we can make it easier for other people in the future. It's already a difficult process, the law shouldn't be a contributing factor. We should have support for men and women who are going through this process. And it should be a right, it should be an option for everyone who needs it.