Being a surrogate
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I thought of it as I can separate my mind from my body. I was really wrong. Surrogates need emotional support. It's like they've just walked barefoot across the Sahara Desert to give someone a gift. They need to know that they're appreciated emotionally.

Being able to hand her over and say to them, you know, this is your daughter, meet your child, was, it was amazing. Imagine getting pregnant, dealing with morning sickness, swollen feet, stretching skin, carrying a growing, kicking, hiccuping baby for nine months, going through labour, and then you make the impossible possible for a family who desperately wants a child of their own.

This is the reality for surrogates. In Australia, surrogacy has been legal since 2010. Here we have what is called altruistic surrogacy, which means a surrogate can't be paid to carry a child. That's different to some places overseas where commercial surrogacy is an option. You might have heard of celebrities like Lily Collins, Elton John and Nicole Kidman having babies this way.

So what motivates women to take on something so profound? I'm Yumi Steins. Ladies, we need to talk about being a surrogate. It's hard to get the exact numbers, but there are around 130 to 150 babies born via surrogates each year in Australia. And that number has been slowly climbing.

Most surrogacy arrangements are between family and friends, but around 20% find each other online. In this episode, we're going to bring you two very different experiences of being a surrogate. We'll hear about the devastating fallout when things don't go to plan and the heart-bursting joy that the arrangement can bring. They were just so happy and seeing them standing there holding her, it was just amazing.

This is Beth. She's now 36 and the idea of helping someone else have a child came to her around a decade ago, just after she'd had her first baby. She saw some ads looking for egg donors and thought, hey, I could do that. I guess it just sparked something where I thought there's this one little part that some people are missing that they need help with and, you know, I've got plenty of those. Beth's partner at the time wasn't into the idea of her being an egg donor. But

But after they split, she started looking into it and that's when she realised that she could go even further and be a surrogate. That was kind of one of those eye-opening moments where you realise it's something you can actually do. By this stage, Beth was raising two kids under 10 as a single mum.

I wasn't entirely sure if I had space in my life for another family. And I was really in the investigation stages when I actually matched with my now intended parents or parents. You're going to hear a bit of surrogacy lingo in this episode. So let me stop down for a sec to define some of the language. Intended parents are the people who are going to take custody of the baby once it's born through something called a parentage order.

There's also a couple of ways to become a surrogate. There's traditional surrogacy, where the surrogate uses her own egg, or gestational surrogacy, where the surrogate uses a donor egg and has no biological link to the child. So when she started looking into surrogacy, Beth joined some online groups and started chatting to some intended parents.

I posted an introduction saying that I was interested in going to a catch-up, that I was quite nervous, and there were lots of responses to that. And one of those responses was actually from Dan. Beth liked the look of this guy, Dan, and his partner, Tyson. So she did the surrogacy version of swiping right and they started chatting. It is very much like dating and we actually call it surrogating in the community. Surrogating? Yes.

Look, having a baby with a couple is the most intimate thing you can possibly do outside of being in a relationship with someone. When you're surradating, just like in dating, you don't go straight to putting a ring on it or, in this case, an embryo in it. You've got to suss them out. So Beth and her new friends were taking it slow.

We had a group chat going and we were swapping photos and talking about our lives. And then we decided to have the kind of icebreaker conversation about our non-negotiables. How much detail did you go into with Dan and Tyson as to what the relationship would be like between you and them, the couple, and the child once the child was born? A lot.

I'm a single parent with two boys, and so one of the most important things for me was that at the end of this journey, my children came out enriched by it as opposed to harmed by it. The trio made a commitment to work on their friendship and spent the next six months surradating. Like with most great modern relationships, the getting-to-know-each-other phase happened online. Then the three of them met up IRNs.

Beth agreed to be a gestational surrogate for Dan and Tyson. And just a reminder, that means that the egg used for the embryo was from another woman. For me personally, the idea of carrying a child that is my own genetics would feel like giving up my child, whereas in being a gestational surrogate...

I felt like I was able to maintain some separation there. Beth and Dan and Tyson went through counselling and each got independent legal advice. Then it was time to start trying to get pregnant. Dan and Tyson already had embryos on ice ready to go and after the first round of IVF, Beth got pregnant. She enlisted her own children to help break the news.

I had joked with the boys about how if you have children you never get the glitter out of your house. And so we had little vials of glitter and so we kind of snuck that around the house and then snuck it into their pockets and I told them I was pregnant. It was, you know, months and months of legals and counselling and everything that had kind of built up to this point and it was really magical.

No, a baby on the way. But there were a lot of checks and balances involved for Beth, Tyson and Dan to get to this point. Katrina Hale is a psychologist who has been counselling couples going through the surrogacy process for over a decade now. She knows the ins and outs, not only in a legal sense, but also what it takes emotionally to have a child for someone else.

Anyone doing surrogacy in Australia, they need to go through mandatory counselling. It's called pre-surrogacy counselling. So it's not just for surrogates, it's for the entire group of people who are doing the surrogacy arrangement. When someone comes to Katrina with the intention of being a surrogate or an intended parent, she starts with the basics.

The first thing I'm going to do is like the classic sort of psychological assessment. Who are you? Where are you coming from? What's your history? What's your baggage? What do you know about surrogacy? Current surrogacy laws differ depending on what state you're in, but there are some laws that are consistent across the country.

Firstly, a surrogate cannot be paid to have a baby, but the intended parents have to cover the expenses involved, from doctor's bills to tests and any additional medical costs as agreed by both sides, as well as lawyers' fees. Both parties have to get independent legal advice beforehand, and oftentimes a surrogacy agreement is signed.

And like Katrina says, there's also mandatory counselling, after which the counsellor makes a recommendation to the IVF clinic about whether the surrogacy should go ahead. But this recommendation is not binding. When Katrina runs her session, she talks to the surrogate and their partner, if they have one, separately, and then the intended parents on their own, and then brings both parties together.

a look at the cross relationships between people. What are the dynamics of all those different layers of relationships? What's the dynamics of the intended parent to surrogate relationship and see if they are all functioning harmoniously. So

Here's what I'm imagining. You're going through these sessions with four people or three people and you're running scenarios or you're asking them how they would run a scenario that may well come up and they go, oh, they're seeing things for the first time. They're understanding conundrums that they might face for the first time.

There must be patterns there that you see time and time again, things that haven't occurred to the intended parents, things that haven't occurred to the surrogate. Yeah, that's sort of a lot of my job, trying to get people to recognise that they don't know what they don't know because people come in with a simplistic view of surrogacy because they sort of see the end point.

That end point comes after a whole lot of unforeseen logistics and emotions along the way.

Katrina says that surrogates will often go into the process underestimating their own needs. She's heard the phrase, oh, I'm just the oven, a lot from surrogates during sessions. At a big picture level, that's accurate, but there's a lot of detail below that that people have blind spots in on how to make it that simple. They tend to underestimate their support needs because they want to give this as a gift to

I want you to meet Fiona, which is not her real name. She went into surrogacy for her sister with the best intentions. But unlike Beth, her story is filled with heartache and regret. Around 14 years ago, when it became clear that Fiona's sister couldn't have kids on her own, Fiona made her a promise. I said, don't worry about that. I'll have the babies for both of us.

What did you know about the surrogacy process when you suggested that you could do this for your sister? Absolutely nothing. And it didn't even occur to me. It just was a very spontaneous offer. When Fiona made the offer, her mum was terminally ill and didn't have long to live.

I think I thought of it as something that I could help with, something that I could fix, even though there were things going on in our family that I wasn't able to fix. So you're talking about your mum. What did your husband think about it? We thought about it and framed it as if we had a

niece or a nephew who needed blood or a kidney or something like that, that we would, of course, step up and help. And only later did I sort of start to think, hmm, that's maybe not quite the same thing. Fiona and her husband were living overseas at the time, and her sister was in another country with similar surrogacy laws to Australia's.

Fiona had her first child while overseas and then very soon afterwards got pregnant again.

I would be completing my own family. I only wanted two children and sort of freeing my uterus up for my sister to use. Right. It sounds like you really didn't let go of your promise, that you had it in the back of your mind the entire time, that you've got to free up the availability of your uterus for your sister. Yeah.

Yeah. I came from a Christian background where women's role as mothers and nurturers was really put on a pedestal. And that was also an environment where choice was not really honored. And another big part of it is that when you say, I think I'm going to be a surrogate, I'm going to be a surrogate for my sister who can't have children.

Everyone turns around and says, oh my God, that's incredible. And it's very hard to say, oh, I'm having second doubts when everyone around you is like, this is a fantastic thing. Fiona had difficult births with her own children and postnatal depression after the first child was born.

While her babies were still in nappies, Fiona filled in the paperwork to become a surrogate for her sister, thinking that the whole business would take a while and she'd have some time to get back on her feet. But after only six months, the Overseas Surrogacy Ethics Board gave them the all clear. While Fiona and her sister followed all the proper protocols, red flags around Fiona's traumatic births and postnatal depression were not raised.

If they had been, maybe the story would have ended there. From the time that the approval came through, Fiona had three years to start the embryo transfer process. So the clock was ticking. She told her sister she wanted to wait a year, by which time she would be back living in Australia and the logistics would be much easier. It was around this time that Fiona felt like communication between herself and her sister got tricky.

The reality was that my sister and I were never really close. Were you able to air your misgivings to anyone, like your husband or a close friend? No. I was not able to speak about it. I became more and more anxious. I became more and more depressed. And I isolated myself. My thinking became, just get through it, get to the other side, and then life will get back to normal.

Eight years on from the offer to have her sister's baby, it was time to start the process of the embryo transfer. And after the second round, Fiona was pregnant with her sister's child. And that's when she began to feel detached from her own body. I was getting progressively mentally iller and iller. We got through the entire pregnancy without...

answering any of the questions that must be answered by surrogacy teams. Will the parents be in the room? What kind of physical contact will the surrogate have with the child after birth? How are we going to celebrate the day the adoption goes through? None of those questions had been asked or answered. Like with any relationship, communication in a surrogacy arrangement is key.

Surrogacy counsellor Katrina Hale says it's vital to lay the groundwork during the process to ensure the foundation is unshakable before there's a pregnancy.

Any sort of hairline fractures, when you put a bit more pressure on them, they're going to turn into cracks. If there was some instability in any relationship before we put the burden of surrogacy on top of it, then that's going to turn into a crack as it progresses.

Part of Katrina's job, and that of any good surrogacy counsellor, is to facilitate conversations between surrogates and intended parents for what will happen during the delivery, including who will be in the room and what their role will be. Another major component of best practice surrogacy is after-birth care.

Katrina says that even though the surrogate may understand intellectually that the child is not her own, her hormones will tell a different story.

We have to bring Mother Nature along for the ride and transition those primal instincts, which tell her post-birth, you just gave birth, you're supposed to be looking after a baby. So it's basically a gentle transition. We need to integrate that head-heart hormones, but basically the body to sort of understand what's going on. At the centre of this transition for surrogates is skin-on-skin connection with the baby after it's born.

On a biological and an emotional level, or as Katrina puts it, for Mother Nature to get it, the surrogate needs to have that moment of connection to understand that the child is here, safe and well, and that she was at the centre of that. In gold standard practice, this incredibly important part of the process is agreed on beforehand by both sides.

That's your instincts, your maternal instincts. But you're looking at that baby and it's a cute baby and you're feeling a great sense of relief, but it's not your baby. It's like you belong over there, you know, with the intended parents, like those people. And I've checked them out and that's going to be a great place for you. Trust me, like they really, really want you. So that's the head. Yeah, well, that's integrating.

Katrina says it's also important to plan how the surrogate will be cared for in the days and weeks after the birth. Surrogates also need emotional support because it's like they've just walked barefoot across the Sahara Desert to sort of give someone a gift. So they need to know that they're appreciated and that their sacrifice is valued and they're not going to be just used as an oven and discarded or abandoned.

For Fiona, who was carrying a child for her sister, the closer to the due date she got, the worse her mental health became. And just a warning before we continue, that this next bit touches on self-harm and suicidal ideation. So please take care. And so I started self-harming in attempts to bring on labour.

These attempts marked a turning point. At 37 weeks, she went to the ER and told doctors she needed to deliver the baby. At first, they told Fiona it was better for the baby to go full term and tried to discharge her. And I said, no, look, I do not trust myself to walk out of here and not kill myself. Wow.

I don't trust myself. I need to be here. I need to stay and you need to get this baby out of me.

And then I was induced. The birth was traumatic for Fiona. The baby got stuck and was born in distress. And so Fiona didn't get that crucial immediate skin-on-skin connection that surrogates need to tell their post-birth bodies that the child is alive and well. If you go through birth on a good day, you have all of this information.

pain and trauma and it's like a really tough day in your life. And then at the end of it, you're holding this beautiful child and you forget the pain. And what I didn't realize was just how biological, how incredibly basic those needs are. So in the absence of holding the baby, I would say within 36 hours, 24 to 36 hours, my body was

chemically, biologically, hormonally believed that the child had died. Intellectually, Fiona knew that the baby was down the hall in another room with their parents. But there was this physical grief in me and that could only have been healed by holding the child that I had delivered.

After a few days in the hospital, Fiona's sister and brother-in-law brought the baby in to see her and she was able to hold them. My system was so primed for like fight or flight that I really don't remember anything about that visit. I just disappeared into myself and shut down. And it certainly wasn't the healing experience that I was hoping for.

I can hear your shortness of breath and how stressful this is for you to go back into these memories. It is. Tell me about the weeks after the birth. Well, I was really glad to go home to my kids. I was put on a medication that ideally will stop your milk coming in, but it didn't work for me, so I started lactating and...

Just hearing like the voice of my three-year-old or something, I would have milk let down. Gosh. Did your marriage survive this experience? No, it didn't. It was a very, very, very hard situation for any relationship. And I don't blame him and I don't blame myself. You know, this was just a really hideous situation for

What's your feeling when you see their family in your mind's eye? I hope that they're happy and healthy, but it's thinking of them, even thinking of the baby's name or of my sister's name for two or three years afterwards was a really profound trigger for me. And I found it very, very hard to think of them at all without, yeah, without crying.

Remember Beth, who became a surrogate for gay couple Dan and Tyson? Their relationship grew in strength during the pregnancy, and at 42 weeks and still waiting, Beth opted to be induced. The trio had talked at length about what Beth needed during the birth and immediately afterwards. And after a lengthy labour, baby London was welcomed to the world. We had always planned for me to have first skin-to-skin contact.

And so I had her placed on me and the boys were standing by just absolutely in awe. And it was such a beautiful thing to see that all of the counselling and legals and everything we'd been to had come to this moment where we'd finally done it and she was there and she was safe. And being able to hold her and meet her, this baby that you've carried for nine, ten months, it was wonderful. And...

Being able to hand her over and say to them, you know, this is your daughter, meet your child, it was amazing. Wow. What did she look like in their arms? Honestly, Tyson's quite stoic and seeing him just absolutely come apart at meeting his daughter was phenomenal. They were just so happy. What were those next couple of weeks like? Like your body's really going through some stuff in the first few weeks after delivering a baby. Yeah.

There were times when, particularly in the first week, where I would wake up and I would feel like something was missing, like I'd misplaced something. Mm-hmm.

And then I would call the boys and I'd go and see them. And it was funny because while I was carrying her, I was trying not to become too attached and I was trying to prepare myself mentally. And you can prepare yourself mentally but you can't prepare yourself physically. But I would go over and see her and they'd hand her straight over and I'd hold her and, oh, it's not my baby. Okay, have her back. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So...

You know in your head that you have had this baby for someone else and you know in your heart that you've done something good. But being kind to the body that has carried this baby, that has gone through all the emotional changes of birth, you need to understand that your body is going to grieve like it's a loss. As a surrogate, there's no baby to then go and pick up and hold and snuggle and sniff and make yourself feel better.

Beth and the dads were prepared for this phase. They had talked it through during counselling and throughout the entire journey. My intended parents were amazing. The door was always open but we also had scheduled visits so I didn't feel like I was asking to visit. There was a sense of connection there that even though the baby wasn't in my care, I hadn't lost anything. I was still connected to the family. I was still a part of the team. Oh, that's really lovely.

Tell us where, our listeners don't know this, so tell us where you're at right now in terms of what your body's doing. So I am currently 31 weeks pregnant with a little brother for London. Wow. Yes. So we are what is commonly known as a sibling journey and London is very excited to be a big sister. That's so massive. Yeah. What's been the best part of being a surrogate? Being an auntie.

I love being an auntie. So London is adorable, but she's definitely a handful. And so we go for dinner and when she starts to crack it, I hand her back and it's perfect. As for Fiona, years on from her surrogacy experience, she's done a lot of therapy and healing.

I am doing better and I'm enrolled in a Masters of Primary Teaching. But that's the gap. That's what it cost me. It cost me five years of my life. Thank you for your amazing insights and story and your generosity in sharing it. What an absolute story.

I don't know how to sum it up. It's just, it's a lot. It's a hell of a lot. It's a lot. I'm hoping it's really calm from here on out. I've had enough drama. Oh my God, that's what I say too.

Going into this episode, I didn't know much about surrogacy. My thoughts around it were, whoa, what a massive thing to do. And it is. It can be glorious and life-affirming, but it takes a whole lot of planning, communication and openness. And sometimes, despite the best of intentions, it can lead to heartache.

If they don't already, it's important for the surrogate to get to know the intended parents and to understand their own expectations and needs. You are not just an oven. Get advice from friends, from family, from a lawyer.

Talk through worries and hopes and make plans for what will happen during the birth, including that all-important skin-on-skin connection with the baby. And look ahead to how the relationship will continue after the child is born. There are support groups that you can turn to and we'll put some resources in the show notes.

And listen, surrogacy is extremely complex and we can't capture all of that complexity in one podcast episode. But as the practice continues to build in numbers, as rainbow families grow and infertile folks look for options, this conversation will continue. Thank you to Fiona for sharing your story with us. We hope that you can find the peace you're looking for as you continue to love your own children fiercely.

And since this episode was recorded, Beth gave birth to a baby boy called River and Dan and Tyson still really have their hands full. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Kranzwick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan. Music