2 weeks Ago By Kate Hazell
Selena Gomez recently shared that she won’t be able to carry her own children due to medical issues, adding that she “[finds] it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for me”. At a time when young mums making cereal from scratch while wearing couture and with multiple kids hanging from their hips counts as compelling content, for someone young and gorgeous to speak openly about her infertility feels..
. dare I say it, groundbreaking? As someone who is half-way through my own surrogacy journey, it is refreshing to hear someone so high-profile saying the “S” word. As I navigate a steamy 100F Autumn in Dubai, where I live with my husband and our two-year-old son, I am expecting a second child in February.
A second child who is currently cooking 13,000km away in Las Vegas. The birth of my son in 2021 was complicated, and my baby-growing bits took a hit. Our eggs and sperm were great, but the oven had stopped working.
After two years of multiple hysteroscopies, surgeries and rounds of IVF, we were told that our best chance of having another child would be to outsource the job. My husband and I are each one of three siblings (I’m a twin), so giving our own son a playmate was something we, naively, had never questioned. By the time doctors finally told us it was time to look for alternative modes of transport for baby number two, we had a couple of embryos in the freezer.
Surrogacy was the obvious next step for us. The previous two years had been tough, so this decision actually felt easy. Following much deep diving, we learned that the laws surrounding surrogacy vary wildly from country to country.
The US has been navigating surrogacy since 1976 and it’s a comparitively well-oiled machine over there (although the system still varies from state to state). We opted for an agency in California, known for its smooth and relatively quick process, and without the long waiting lists that exist in the UK, where I’m from, and in my husband’s native Canada. We were sent extensive profiles of women with excellent wombs, a human version of the exclusive properties on Selling Sunset , if you will, and spent our evenings sifting through pages of detailed health histories, previous birth experiences (potential surrogates must have had at least one child of their own), and even family photos.
It took us around a month to find someone we felt was right for us. A first-time surrogate, photographer and mum-of-two based in Las Vegas, Summer ticked every box. A video “date” was set up and chaperoned by our surrogacy agency, and after a conversation that ran well over the allotted two hours, we knew we’d found our match.
Sweet, funny, kind, strong, calm: our surrogate was, and continues to be, everything we could have hoped to find in the person who was going to be extreme babysitting our future child. Mounds of paperwork, hours of legal meetings, health checks (for the surrogate and her husband), FDA testing (for our embryos, myself and my husband), mandatory counselling sessions, and still more mounds of paperwork followed. Our embryos were flown from London to the US, carried by hand from door to door in a tiny temperature-controlled freezer.
Six months after that first meeting with Summer, we dialled into the embryo transfer via video call. Just two weeks later, she peed (privately) into a cup and held a pregnancy test up to the camera, so my husband and I could see two blue lines developing in real time. It’s as surreal as it all sounds, being pregnant but also not being pregnant.
Someone pointed out recently that I’m experiencing pregnancy much like a man does: sitting on the sidelines waiting for my baby to arrive. I like thinking of it this way. The feelings of grief, loss and shame that come with infertility are real ( Margot Robbie ’s glorious jersey-draped bump is not helping), and what could be more bougie than out-sourcing baby baking? It feels very much like “something only celebs do”, as my (very excited and supportive) mum put it when we first told her.
While Summer was dealing with nausea and fatigue during the first 12 weeks, I spent the holidays emulating Race Across the World , visiting friends and toasting our happy news with chilled Pét-nat. The biggest and most overwhelming feeling – after excitement, of course – is my sense of our huge privilege, and if I’m truly being honest, guilt. For wanting more than my fair share.
For most, a broken uterus would abruptly end any hope of starting or expanding a family. Surrogacy is not a journey everyone can pursue, not least because of the eye-watering costs involved. Being able to – and having an incredible woman with a super uterus doing all of the heavy lifting – feels like an extremely fortunate position to be in.
Still it’s not without stress. To return briefly to those celebs, Khloé Kardashian previously admitted she initially found it difficult bonding with her son, Tatum, who was born via a surrogate in July 2023. This does, of course, worry me, but I think it’s a small price to pay for everything we’ll be gaining at the end of this wild journey.
Taking care to mark the milestones has helped the reality to sink in in the absence of physical changes. We had a small gender reveal party with close friends and family, and it’s another boy. I’ve downloaded the apps.
(He’s currently the size of a carrot, soon to be a papaya.) Having been so obnoxiously open – in hindsight borderline braggy – when I was pregnant the first time around, this time I’ve found it tricky finding ways to tell people, when usually ordering a mocktail or a decaf would be an easy entry point into the conversation. But I’m not alone.
The global surrogacy market is expected to grow from £11billion to an estimated £76billion over the course of the coming decade. The baby-baking business is quite literally rising. And so, when someone like Selena speaks out, it helps.
It helps those of us who desperately want to get pregnant but can’t. In voicing her reality, and her acceptance, some of the heartbreaking truths of infertility can be eased with hope. What a blessing.
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