After Cancer, Becoming a Mother Through Surrogacy

Michigan resident Kim Samson (a pseudonym given to protect her identity) became a mother through surrogacy in 2020. MFA intern Parker Kehrig interviewed Ms. Samso about her experiences navigating this process. Excerpts:

Kehrig: Why is surrogacy important to you?

Samson: It’s currently and likely the only way that I'll be able to reproduce genetically with my spouse. So it's pretty important for us now, and sounds like it will be important in the future as well. We came to surrogacy when it became apparent to us because of a previous cancer diagnosis that I was not going to be able to carry a pregnancy. And we live in Michigan, so there was a lot to learn about how it was going to be possible to genetically reproduce. But we do have a baby now, so that's awesome. But it was definitely a struggle, and a lot of work.

Your friend was your surrogate. Tell me how that came to be. 

At first we looked up agencies that recruit surrogates from out of state, because the state laws are so much better outside Michigan. It's very expensive, it wasn't something that we knew we could do. I got really desperate, I went to Facebook, which is not typically something I’d do with something so private. I wrote a relatively long post explaining the requirements in the state of Michigan and legally what the situation was, and that I couldn’t pay anybody for the service of carrying the child. My good friend from high school reached out to me and said, “Hey, you know, this is crazy. I was just about to be a gestational surrogate for my sister-in-law, who ended up getting pregnant on her own. I've been thinking about this and I was ready to do it. And then I saw your posts.”

So tell me about what the process was like.

We had already harvested my eggs and created embryos, so we had embryos created. In Michigan, both sides need to be independently represented by legal counsel. Our surrogate declined to be represented. My husband and I retained an assisted reproductive technology attorney. She draws up what's called a memorandum of understanding, not a contract, because in Michigan, surrogacy contracts are void and unenforceable. It preserves our original intent, it’s just something to have even though it wouldn't stand up in a court of law. Importantly, [our carrier’s] fertility clinic won't even consider going down the road of a gestational surrogacy without that memorandum and a letter of retainment from our attorney. Once the fertility clinic gets all of that documentation, we're also in Michigan required to go through counseling, then a report is created from those sessions, and that is also sent to the fertility doctor. They have to have all that paperwork in place before they can start with the medical process of getting a surrogate ready for transfer.

How did you navigate Michigan law through your surrogacy experience?

Nothing terrible, because we had a fantastic attorney. It’s expensive, and I know there's a lot of women who don't want to do that, and they want to try to work through the pre-birth order process on their own. And I'm a lawyer, and I know, I can't do that. It's such a strange legal process, because we're actually parties to a dispute, one of us as a plaintiff, one of us as a defendant, and a complaint gets filed. It's very strange.

What are the implications of being automatically labeled a plaintiff and a defendant?

In and of itself, it’s saying that there’s a dispute here over the physical and legal custody of the child, which there is not. My surrogate, from the very beginning, would get a lot of questions about how she was “going to give up the baby”, and she said she just looked at people and said, “It's not my baby. It never was my baby. It's [their] baby and I will be happy to hand her over to them when she’s born.”

Despite the laws here do you think there's anything that is like being done right in Michigan that should be preserved?

Certainly, the idea of someone carrying the child for you compassionately I don't think is a bad thing to do. I don't think that it needs to be looked at as a strictly commercial transaction. I think it's wonderful if someone wants to do this for you out of the goodness of their heart, and I would hope that that is the driving factor. In any case, I think doing it just for the money is probably not the right mindset. Or I would say personally, for me, it makes me feel good to know that someone did this because they are purely good. I know that's not the reality for everybody, if compensation makes the difference, and that's the way they can get to their children, then that's no judgment there either.

What about the ethical and moral debates around compensation? 

The law seeks to align those two things quite closely. And whether you can be moral and still be compensated for carrying someone's child? Absolutely, I think so. I would have been happy to pay our surrogate a sum for this service. Pregnancy is a really big deal. She has two children of her own, she has a husband. And I don't think it's immoral. And I don't think it's wrong that she could have been paid a sum for the service of doing this for me and my husband.