The Surrogacy Option
FOR MOTHER-OF-ONE LISA BAKER'89 CARRYING A BABY FOR A GAY COUPLE WAS A GIFT SHE WAS EAGER TO GIVE.
AS TOLD TO ALEC SCOTT
A little more than a decade ago I gave birth to a baby girl for a gay couple to raise. They are her dads, the two parents listed on her birth certificate. One of them donated the sperm that fertilized my egg.
What I am to her is more complicated. She calls me Lisa.
For all the tough moments that were involved—and there were some—I have no regrets. The surrogacy is one of the best things I’ve ever done, one of the few times in my life when I departed from the usual script.
I came to the decision in stages. After Dartmouth I went to graduate school in Montreal. During my Ph.D. program my husband, Jerry, and I decided to have a baby. Eric, now 18, was and is beautiful, healthy, lively, original—a complete joy in my life. By the time Eric was 2 Jerry and I had decided that one child was the right number for our family.
Jerry had a cousin he was very close to who was not able to successfully sustain a pregnancy. In the most natural way I had the idea that I could carry the baby she wanted. I read up on surrogacy in a law library in Montreal. The feminist take was scathing: Surrogacy is an exploitation of lower-class women who have few economic options. I could see the political point of view—I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale—but I felt it had nothing to do with me. (I also happen to think it has little to do with the many generous, altruistic women who choose to be surrogates.)
As it turned out, when we made an offer of surrogacy, Jerry’s cousin and her husband were already on the way to adopting. That made sense to them.
Jerry and I moved back to the States, I found a job as a professor, we bought a house outside New York City and my son entered grade school. Maybe it was a sort of mid-life crisis, but I wondered, “Is this all there is?” I wanted to do something bigger, and the idea of bearing a child for someone who was unable to was a concept that had caught my imagination. I was lucky that my husband not only understood my motivation but also agreed I had a great gift to offer.
I started to think about people I had known who might need my help having a baby, and the gay guys I’d met at Dartmouth and after that came to mind. I placed an ad on a website that matches surrogates with potential parents. It was strikingly similar to a dating site. When a gay male couple in California contacted me, I immediately felt their warmth, maturity and desire to start a family.
I’ll never forget having dinner with one of the two at an Indian restaurant near my home. He was in New York on business. He was the more cautious of the pair, very conscious of all that could go wrong. I don’t think it was until he’d met me—and saw that I was a serious adult—that he started to believe surrogacy could bring him a family. He later told me that as he drove away from dinner he felt he had met his destiny.
We all consulted lawyers and talked over the risks. The dads agreed to pay me what is a moderate fee for a surrogate—$15,000—but the payment complicated things in anti-surrogacy New York. Jerry and I agreed to waive the fee. It was never about the money.
Inseminations in California resulted in a pregnancy—and a miscarriage back home. That was rough, but we all decided to try again. The dads sent frozen sperm to New York, and the next pregnancy succeeded.
I went out to legally friendly California for the birth. Seeing the baby in her dads’ arms was exactly what we all wanted—exactly what I had dreamed of—yet it was so hard, physically hard, for me to part with her. On the flight home I felt as if I’d left a part of my body behind. Later, alone in my home office, I cried as I never had before. I was ravenous for the fathers’ e-mails and phone calls, their progress reports and photos. After a few months, however, that feeling was gone. She was in the right place.
I visited the child a few times when she was little. She is bright, loving, like sunshine. She and her dads phone me on Mother’s Day and holidays. I buy her presents, as I do for my nieces and nephews. I love having her in my life—it’s like having more family.
On reflection, there was something activist about this choice I made. The surrogacy was about using my body—and my courage, my intelligence, my emotional balance—to create my ideal world. I believe people should grow up knowing that whatever their sexuality, they can love. They can form partnerships and families. That was beautiful girl I gave birth to will have to decide what this story means to her—the child always does. Did I do something altruistic, or was it in some way monstrous? My birth daughter will create her own story.
Although Jerry and I have since split up, I’ll always be grateful that we were able, both of us in different ways, to contribute to bringing this child into the world. Her fathers and their extended family, Jerry and I, our son, we all made it work. Despite all the obstacles, the legal problems, the physical and emotional rigors of the miscarriage and birth, our trepidation about doing something outside the ordinary, despite all of that, we made a beautiful thing here. Everything about it is good.
LISA BAKER is a medical writer at a publication planning agency in Southport, Connecticut. She lives in Stamford, Connecticut, with her partner and their young adult children.
