Why nothing (even coronavirus) will stop me having the baby I long for

At 9pm on a warm May evening, as my husband and I finished a late dinner in the garden, we received the text we had been waiting for, for years.

‘The test came back, congratulations!’ it read, with a string of purple heart emojis.

This is not the way most parents-to-be would receive the message that they are going to have a baby but, then, most people aren’t starting a family with a surrogate, 5,440 miles away in America, in the midst of a global pandemic.

As we held each other tightly, absorbing her message, a mixture of joy, excitement and trepidation enveloped us. It had been two weeks since our surrogate’s embryo transfer had taken place in California — a process we had watched on our mobile phones while locked down in our home in London.

Two nervous weeks, not only worrying about the results of the looming pregnancy test but also watching as the number of Covid-19 cases in America topped 1.5million, with 100,000 deaths. (It now stands at 3.6m cases and 139,000 deaths.)

For all the discussion many parents-to-be have about it, there’s never a ‘good time’ to bring a child into the world, but coronavirus makes this time more challenging than most.

As my husband and I have spent nearly four years and much silent heartache to reach this point — we are now 42 and 41 respectively — we are loathe to let the spectre of Covid-19 cast its shadow over our joyous news.

But to say coronavirus poses challenges to parents-to-be is an understatement. People’s birth plans have gone haywire.

IVF was put on hiatus for months (more than 6,000 cycles a month usually take place nationally); and anyone hoping to have a baby with a surrogate abroad — already a complex process — is facing huge uncertainties due to ongoing travel bans and national shutdowns.

Of all the eventualities we have fretted about during our nearly two year surrogacy process, a deadly virus sweeping the world didn’t feature. How can we protect our surrogate and unborn baby from this threat?

When the baby arrives, will we both be able to fly over to be present at his or her birth? And what about insurance?

eart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), found by chance when I was 26. It means part of your heart muscle is abnormally thick and it is genetic. 

Could we be stuck in the States for weeks on end, during a pandemic with a newborn, waiting to get a passport with no family or support network to help?

This has happened to others. It is happening now to people who began this process nine months ago, long before Covid-19 was in our consciousness. But will it still all be happening in January 2021 when our baby is due? No one knows. To say it all feels out of control is an understatement.

I have a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), found by chance when I was 26. It means part of your heart muscle is abnormally thick and it is genetic.

But although around one in 500 people are thought to have a form of cardiomyopathy (including footballer Fabrice Muamba and Sir David Frost’s son Miles, who tragically died undiagnosed aged 31), I am the only person in my family known to have it.

So far, I am fortunate to have had precious few symptoms, but the condition can lead to deadly arrhythmias — a problem with the rhythm of the heartbeat — even in young fit people, causing sudden cardiac arrest as a worst case scenario. In the aftermath of my out-of-the-blue diagnosis, I spiralled through a grieving process for the privileged carefree life I had envisaged and I never dared to dream of a future with babies in it until I met a photographer named Lewis at a party when I was 32.

As a healthy man of the same age, Lewis had never fathomed not becoming a parent. And, after we married five years later, in 2016, my consultants said they had few concerns about me becoming pregnant or carrying a child, but that I would likely need to be closely monitored.

There would be, however, a 50 per cent chance the baby would have the HCM gene.

Genetic testing could not identify my ‘faulty’ gene, making ‘correction’ of it in any future embryos impossible. That gene may or may not go on to cause the child to develop the condition, and that condition may or may not be serious, life-limiting or even deadly.

After much deliberation, we accepted the risks. Yet, over the next 18 months, I had five devastating miscarriages before 12 weeks, the last requiring surgery.

Afterwards, we sought all the advice under the sun. We had every blood test, scan and analysis, but no cause was found.

Then, for the next eight months of trying, nothing. I was now 38 and reasoned it would probably just take a while; that the stress of the last miscarriage was stopping it happening. Yet, every unsuccessful month, I felt a panic rising: maybe this wasn’t going to happen for us. It was another way in which I felt defective.

Given our struggles to conceive naturally, we considered IVF, but were told the procedure could be more risky for me due to my HCM.

We looked into adoption and were advised that my diagnosis, coupled with the fact we were grieving — my father had died of pancreatic cancer within the past year, and my father-in-law had sadly just been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer — would likely count against us.

So, in October 2018, we decided to explore the idea of gestational surrogacy — a process in which someone else carries a baby for you, using either your egg or that of a donor. This means it is not genetically the surrogate mother’s child.

Ironically, the year before, while working at British Vogue, I’d written an investigation into the process. During my research, I’d discovered that, in terms of legal protection, ethical considerations, availability and success of medical treatment and ease of communication, America was the best place to begin a gestational ‘surrogacy journey’.

It’s also the most expensive, with fees of six-figures when you take into account legal costs, medical insurance, fertility treatment, compensation for the surrogate and her legal fees, and compensation for an egg donor if desired.

We were fortunate to have some savings, and both of our parents matched what we had to enable us to pay for a ‘package’ that covers a limitless number of tries.

While surrogacy is legal in the UK, it is not as yet legally recognised — and, while it does happen, it’s usually informal and, admirably, on an altruistic ‘friendship’ basis, meaning that surrogates cannot be paid, only reimbursed for ‘reasonable expenses’.

This also means there are more ‘intended parents’ than surrogates. After spending nearly three years on this road, and both almost 40, Lewis and I decided we couldn’t face waiting to find a surrogate in this country.

And so, one October night in 2018, over Skype, we interviewed a clinic in California — a state regarded as offering the ‘gold standard’ of the practice.

The surrogates available are given good medical and psychological care and compensated financially (the amount varies hugely depending on the individual, whether it is her first surrogacy or a repeat, and the circumstances of the pregnancy — whether it is a single baby or twins — but is usually in the range of $45,000-$60,000, which is around £35,000-£48,000).

There is also proper legal protection for both the surrogate and her family (we cannot, for example, share details of our surrogate) — and us, as ‘intended parents’.

While Lewis is our child’s genetic father, after much discussion, we decided to enlist the help of an egg donor to avoid the chance of my passing on my heart condition.

Although, in the U.S., egg donors provide more information about themselves than in the UK — photos, a physical profile including their interests, likes and dislikes, a letter to you and a full family medical rundown including parents and grandparents — it was an incredibly fraught emotional process.

How can you choose who should be the genetic mother of your child if not you?

Two months later, on a warm and sunny January day in 2019, we were in California, preparing to meet our first prospective surrogate for a meal. We’d been to the clinic, my husband had given his samples, it was all systems go.

But, long story short, we’re glad we got the guaranteed package. For various reasons, we’re now working with our fifth surrogate, an amazing 33-year-old woman and mother of two, who has helped two other families have children before us, but whom, remarkably, we have yet to meet in real life.

Before we matched with her in November 2019, we had three failed embryo transfers with different surrogates. No reason for the failures was found. These were almost as devastating as our own miscarriages.

The odds of a successful embryo transfer using donor eggs from a younger woman are higher and, despite outwardly maintaining an air of caution, my mind was subconsciously screaming each transfer was practically a done deal. The news of each failure sent me vacillating between devastation and hopelessness.

I told Lewis I wanted to stop, to move on. It was too hard, too emotionally punishing. It felt like we’d pressed pause on our life.

The whole experience has been a rollercoaster of emotions that, even now, with a confirmed pregnancy, look set to continue.

Each morning, our surrogate is the first person I think of when I wake up. I hope she and her children — and our baby — are safe and well.

I anxiously await her WhatsApp messages, which come a few times a week.

Naturally, I’m desperate to text her all the time — to ask what she’s craving, how she’s sleeping, what sex she thinks the baby is, whether she’s wearing a face mask when she goes to the supermarket … But I restrain myself for fear of being too cloying.

There is an eight-hour time difference and she’s a working mother, so I don’t want to bombard her or become suffocating. We’re each taking tentative steps into this new relationship, which we hope will last for life.

We ‘virtually attend’ the scans and pre-natal appointments live on our phones. Technology makes all this possible, but it’s no match for our pre-coronavirus plans, which included a visit to California mid-way through the pregnancy.

Back then, we imagined that, when the time came, we would do as most intended parents did — jump on a flight a week or so before the due date and then go through the well-established routines.

When the child is born, the paperwork done and everyone is able to leave hospital, the parents go to their temporary home and, with the help of U.S. lawyers and their agencies, apply for a U.S. passport for their child.

Ten or so days later, with the passport in hand, the new family can return to their country of residence and begin the necessary immigration work.

Now, though, with travel restrictions in place until autumn at the earliest, and many federal agencies closed, these protocols are fluid, with restrictions and rules changing on a daily basis.

If all goes well, factoring in having to quarantine before the baby’s birth on January 31, we could have to be in California upwards of six weeks.

That’s not really a hardship (although it will be logistically complex and expensive) and we will both take parental leave, but there are also doubts about whether I will be able to travel to America full-stop, due to my pre-existing health condition and government recommendations against travelling rendering all travel insurance invalid.

Additionally, my heart condition makes me at higher risk of complications if I get Covid-19, although I am not classed as vulnerable or someone who needs to shield.

As Lewis has no underlying health conditions, we are fairly confident he, at least, will be able to go — but, after going through all of this, the prospect of my missing the first few weeks of our baby’s life weighs heavily on us.

Natalie Gamble, of NGA Law, is arguably Britain’s most revered fertility lawyer and now ours. Lord knows, we need her advice.

Natalie not only campaigns for law change around the practice in the UK, but helps hundreds of families go through surrogacy every year, both in this country and abroad.

She says she has never had so many urgent cases as during these past few months. ‘Having a baby takes nine months: nobody could have anticipated or planned for this,’ she says.

Natalie tells a story of a British couple whose surrogate baby was born in America, but the night before their U.S. passport appointment, the office closed due to the pandemic.

‘I ended up writing to the Home Secretary, getting MPs on board, trying to get the UK Government to issue British passports to babies stuck overseas. This process used to take six months,’ she says with audible pride. ‘Now it’s a week.’

Natalie says as well as parents struggling to bring babies home, she is also dealing with desperate parents attempting to travel out.

‘With the U.S., we now have a system involving going to the local embassy in London to get special permission to travel. But intended parents must not leave it too late. There is the application process, paperwork, flights and a fortnight of quarantining on arrival.’

Of course, before our last transfer, we debated whether to go ahead in light of the uncertainties thrown up by coronavirus.

We decided to do so because, somehow, life must continue and we’ve come so far. We didn’t know if this transfer would work, plus who knows for how long Covid-19 will cast its shadow? It could be years. Or perhaps in the coming months, there will be an effective treatment, a vaccine, something that will help.

In the meantime, we are left with a feeling of overwhelming gratitude. For the team in America and the people making this possible for us, not least our surrogate — part of our family.

In the midst of everything that is going on, she has given us the one thing we have been so sorely lacking. Hope.