Did you worry you’d bond with the baby? How did you explain it to your kids? Did you breastfeed? These are just some of the common questions surrogates get asked when discussing their decision to carry a baby.
These conversations are familiar to Lisa Charlwood-Green, 41, from Glasgow, who was a surrogate for the first time earlier this year. She decided she wanted to do it a few years ago – a male friend offered to be a donor for her and her wife, and they now have two boys aged six and eight. She wanted to pay forward the kindness. “I wanted to help another gay man have a family,” she tells HuffPost UK.
Lisa signed up with an agency called Brilliant Beginnings in 2015, and it took two years for her to be matched to a couple. Over the course of the next few months, there were phone calls and meet-ups with the couple – and a lot of vetting and checks. She was a host surrogate, meaning her eggs weren’t used but were impregnated through IVF.
“The relationship with the parents felt natural,” she says. “We got on very well as friends. It wasn’t awkward, in that sense, and we had many discussions about our shared values around pregnancy and birth.”
Here are some of the most common questions she gets asked – answered.
Why did you do it?
“This is different for each surrogate I’ve met. Personally I wanted to pay it forward and help a gay couple have a family. Many surrogates love being pregnant and want to do it again, but I don’t have ‘the bug’.”
Did you worry about having a bond with the child?
“It takes a very certain person to be a surrogate. We’re quite a practical lot and I treated the pregnancy in a very practical way. I cared about the baby, but I didn’t bond with him. When I was pregnant with my son, I bonded very quickly after birth, but until that point I felt quite detached.”
Did you regret it at any point during the pregnancy?
“No, I was just nervous about the birth – but I was when I was pregnant with my youngest, too. I guess it’s the one thing you don’t have much control over.”
How did your wife take the decision for you to be a surrogate?
“Neither of us wanted more children, which made it an easier thing to discuss. She was my birth partner, and I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else there. My children were fantastic, too. We discussed it for a long time, I wanted to make sure they were comfortable and they understood what it meant. That was really important for me (I wouldn’t have done it otherwise). After you give birth there is a void – that’s unescapable. To counter this, we got a kitten – he’s the baby in our house!”
How did you explain it to your kids?
“I explained there would be a seed from another person, which would go in my tummy. And my tummy would act like a plant pot for the baby to grow. Once the baby got too big, it would come out and go to the parents. They got that, quite happily. They knew the baby wasn’t physically or biologically anything to do with me.”
How did you feel when you gave birth?
“I was scared because I had an emergency C-section – I didn’t want that! I wasn’t a fan of surgery. But after I just felt really pleased for the couple and happy the baby was safe. I guess I was nosey too, I wanted to see what he looked like – I wasn’t interested in holding him, but I wanted to know what he weighed because he was predicted to be a heavy one. He was only 8 pounds (but looked much bigger!).”
How are you doing now, since giving birth?
“People are often very invested, and assume I’d go back to work feeling down about the whole experience. I only had three months off work, and I remember many people asked: “How ARE you?”, like I would burst into tears and say I’ve made a terrible mistake. I feel fine emotionally, and proud of what I have achieved.”
What are the legal issues around being a surrogate?
“A lot of people don’t realise you are the legal parent until the parental order goes through. There was a law reform published recently, so hopefully this will change. But my wife and I are still the legal parents until October, which will be when the baby is around 10 months old. This has meant a whole lot of legal paperwork for the four of us, including several court visits and time with solicitors.”
Are you going to spend time with the baby?
“When you give birth, that baby goes to his parents – where he’s meant to be. The amount of people I had asking me, ‘But will you have him for a couple of weeks?’ No, of course not. My job was pretty much done when I gave birth. His place is with his fathers. Why would I look after someone else’s baby?
“The parents could say they don’t want me to play a part in the baby’s life, and that’s fair enough. I do, and that’s lovely. My nickname is ‘Potty’, from the flower pot story. And my kids are known as the baby’s honorary cousins. So yes I do see him, and his family. It’s a great relationship which I hope will continue.”
“I expressed milk for about three months, and send milk down to them using a courier."”
Did you breastfeed him?
“I didn’t want to breastfeed him directly as this is one of the ways I bond, and could cause confusion to then switch to a bottle. So I expressed milk for three months, and sent it down to the couple using a courier. It was nice to give him an extra gift, and I even got to bottle feed him some of my breast milk.”
What’s one of the biggest lessons you learned about surrogacy?
“An open dialogue between the surrogate and intended parents is so important. It is a very trust-based system. A lot of parents get scared the surrogate will change their mind, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. But in the same vein, surrogates worry that the parents may change their mind and not want the baby. Obviously, it’s unusual if that happens, but it’s not a legally-binding contract so you really do just have to trust people.”
Would you do it again?
“No, I wouldn’t. I don’t want to give birth again, and it was quite an emotional upheaval for my family, which I wouldn’t want them to go through for a second time. It’s an odd process in some ways, it can feel like it never happened. But I see my scar and realise, yep it definitely happened. It’s a chapter in my life, and I’m happy that I have made two wonderful people’s dream of parenthood come true.”
Lisa runs The Wow Network, created to represent LGBT women in the workplace.