I Was Finally Seeing Some Hope With Surrogacy
By: Carolyn Dooley Apr 29, 2015
A million questions swirled through my head. How could I accept this beautiful gift? How would my husband feel about accepting this type of money from my parents? Was I really at this point, a last resort? After how many miscarriages is a decision like this acceptable? Four, seven, ten?
How many years do you have to suffer with fertility issues before using this option? Should I follow my Manhattan doctor’s recommendation and try one more round of IVF? The answer was to the last one was a resounding “no.” I would not allow my body to kill another one of my precious babies. My friend once winced when I said this: “You can’t think of this like that.” But that was the only way I looked at it.
As guilty as this option made me feel, as much as I cried that day mourning the loss of the pregnancy I would most likely never experience, it was the first time in three years that I truly felt what I hardly realized I’d been lacking carrying hope surrogacy.
To keep my sanity throughout this entire process, I was always a step ahead, so of course I had the phone number of a highly recommended surrogacy agency in New Jersey. The following week I had an appointment, and just like that, the wheels were spinning to match us with our gestational carrier. It all happened so quickly it was almost hard to believe that this was the road I was taking. It was almost as if I was living someone else’s life now. Was this really happening to me?
The surrogacy agency we went to in New Jersey was one-stop shopping—lawyer, surrogate matching agency, escrow management for funds—all under one roof. We were so anxious at this point to have our baby in our arms that we had little criteria for our surrogate. We already knew the carrier would not live in New York, where we lived, because it was illegal to compensate a surrogate in the state.
We went through the application, setting our criterion. Single woman? Sure. Age preference? No. Preference for race or religion? Doesn’t matter. Unbeknownst to us, what put us on the fast track to being matched with a surrogate was our answer to the following question. Would you accept a carrier who refuses to abort for Down syndrome? Yes.
Shortly after our application was filed, we received our first surrogate profile with her bio and pictures. I couldn’t open the email fast enough.
This article was originally published online at: http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a10726/why-i-chose-a-surrogate/
RSMC is a full service fertility center and can arrange surrogacy services through partner surrogacy agency along with all medical reproductive services.
