At 31 weeks, my baby was kicking and stretching. On the sonogram screen, I could see that he was doing his customary sit-ups. The monitor broadcast the slushy sound of his heartbeat.
The technician varied from visit to visit. The previous time, we were lucky: it was the gregarious young woman named Gisele who wrote things like “Hi Mom and Dad!” over the cloudy portraits of the baby or, on one image of the baby’s genitals, “I’m still a boy!” On this day, we got the terse woman who grudgingly wrote “foot” and “face,” if she wrote anything at all.
Then she tore off the sonogram images and handed them to me with one hand; with the other, she reached down to wipe the gel off the stomach of the woman who was bearing my child.
I did not give birth to my son. He is the product of my egg and my husband’s sperm. After half a decade of trying to become pregnant, sometimes succeeding but always failing to carry a baby successfully to term, I came to the conclusion that if we wanted to have a child who was genetically related to us, we would have to find a woman with a more reliable uterus to gestate and deliver our baby. That was in April 2007. I was 39 years old. Exhausted by years of infertility, wrung emotionally dry by miscarriage, my husband and I decided we would give gestational surrogacy — hiring a woman to bear our child — one try. It was a desperate measure, to be sure, and one complicated by questions from all the big sectors: financial, religious, social, moral, legal, political.
On May 11, 2007, my husband and I sent an e-mail message to a New Jersey lawyer who specializes in gestational-surrogacy cases. In July, a doctor coaxed eight egg cells — oocytes — from my ovaries and fertilized them with my husband’s sperm.
By the beginning of August, a substitute schoolteacher from Harleysville, Pa., named Cathy Hilling was pregnant with our child. On May 11, 2008, I was holding my 3-week-old son in my arms. It was Mother’s Day.
THE DESIRE TO BE a mother — to give birth to a child, to care for that child — has always been rooted in me. I never doubted my ability to be a good mother. I had a charmed, happy childhood; I have a warm, loving, funny mother. Even so, I did not think of raising a child as a goal in itself. I saw motherhood as the natural outgrowth of a loving relationship. If I never met the man, I would skip the child.
I did meet the man, Charles Stevenson, when I was 32. Happily married at 34, I hoped that becoming pregnant wouldn’t be too difficult. My husband — 54 — was older, but his sperm had a track record: he already had children from previous marriages. By the time I turned 35, nothing had happened, and after consulting a handful of doctors, Charles and I decided to start in vitro fertilization. Judging from several friends’ experiences, we figured that I.V.F. would guarantee swift results. In the battle for my fertility, I wanted the big guns.
In a typical I.V.F. cycle, the ovaries are stimulated to produce several, perhaps even dozens of, eggs; after a surgical procedure in which the doctor vacuums the eggs out of your ovaries, the embryologist pairs each mature egg with a healthy sperm. The embryos grow for several days, and one or two — or three or four, depending on the patient’s age and reproductive history — are then implanted through a catheter directly into the uterus. (Doctors will put more embryos in older patients, who generally have less success with implantation.)
We started I.V.F. at Cornell University’s Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility in New York City, the towering Emerald City of infertility. Every morning, patients waited for an hour or more in what came to me to feel like a hangar-size waiting room. A nurse would rattle off your name when it was time for one of the available doctors to peer at your ovaries. Occasionally, a name would ring out that you might recognize: someone’s ex-girlfriend, an acquaintance. I was a reporter for The New York Times, so in my case the summons might lead others to remember a byline. Once, a fellow patient stopped me in the hall. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This is like A.A. We’re not supposed to talk about who’s here. Your secret is safe with me.” Her silver sobriety bracelet twitched on her wrist.
I was taken aback. Her gesture underscored the helpless, self-enforced secrecy of the infertile. Couples often erect a barricade of privacy around the process to avoid the questions from friends and family members, and their ceaseless, useless volley of suggestions: You just need to relax. Did you try acupuncture? Soy milk makes you infertile. You’re in front of your computer too much. What’s the problem with all you career girls? Did this cycle work? Are you pregnant this time? How many shots? Where? A low whistle: Boy, you must really want a child.
You must really want a child. As if that were a bad thing.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30Surrogate-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
