From the outside, our relationship looked the way it had for 24 years: solid.
After our first surrogacy experience ended in stillbirth, our friends were convinced we’d be fine because we were the “most together couple” they knew. I wasn’t so sure. For months, it had felt like my husband Ethan and I were two bodies fumbling to find each other in the dark. At home, our orbits rarely intersected. My eyes barely landed on Ethan. Once, he didn’t realize I was right behind him and he closed the door on me.
It felt like we were suspended in the quiet between the cracks and the crumble. We weathered life-altering challenges together in our 20s and 30s due to my whole-body symptoms from endometriosis, adenomyosis, early menopause, and a medical system that trivialized them all. My condition rattled our intimacy, upended my career, and made Ethan my caretaker. Being undiagnosed for decades also cost us my fertility, depleting my ovarian reserve and leading to miscarriage after miscarriage with IVF and IUIs.
Though we weren’t living the life we dreamed, and I felt guilty for the weight I foisted on Ethan, we managed to maintain the joie de vivre we’d had since we first met—until we turned to surrogacy.
Our decision to opt for an egg donor and a surrogate was an act of compromise. Though I’d always been ambivalent about motherhood, the idea of coparenting with Ethan had gradually filled me with tenderness and curiosity. But by then, after years of illness, I wanted a hysterectomy. Ethan still really wanted to be a dad. Neither of us wanted to jeopardize my wellness with more hormonal treatments and pregnancy losses, so we took what people called the “easy way out.” Though I was criticized by my doctors for giving up on my eggs and my uterus “too soon,” our decision to pursue surrogacy felt liberating—at first.
We thought finding a gestational surrogate would be the hardest part. Turns out, we were wrong. Instead, we were totally unprepared for the ways surrogacy was going to change our marriage.
The three mistakes we made in surrogacy that nearly broke our marriage.
Neither of us verbalized the red flags we saw.
Our first surrogacy experience was the kind we now caution other intended parents against. We entrusted an agency with our fate and our funds, putting them in charge of introducing us to a surrogate and acting as the intermediary who would reimburse her for pregnancy-related expenses on our behalf. At the time, we were unaware of their proven fraudulent history.