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Looking for a
Surrogate Mother or an egg donor?
This book
is a moving real-life account of one woman's struggle
with infertility and her journey through surrogacy to
have the family she desperately wanted.
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Jayne
Frankland holding Betty, and flanked by Abigail,
at left, Sam and Charlotte.
Picture:Stephen
Shepherd
Englishwoman Jayne
Frankland became a mother through surrogacy. Now, she's
decided to become a surrogate herself. She shared her
remarkable story with Mary Braid.
Jayne Frankland
combines an interview and the care of her children with
admirable ease. First, there's her youngest child,
Betty, a cute 14-month-old, toddling on unsteady feet,
arms outstretched, towards her. Then there are Betty's
siblings, Sam, four, and Charlie (Charlotte), three,
fresh from playing next door, now ready to compete for
Mum's attention. In about an hour, Abigail, seven, her
eldest, returns from school.
Not that Jayne, 38,
would complain about the demands of motherhood. In fact,
she's five months' pregnant. The next baby, however,
will not be joining Betty, Charlie, Sam and Abigail —
and their IT manager father, Mark, 43 — in rural
Hereford, England. He/she will be handed over,
immediately after birth, to an infertile couple from
Oxfordshire and Frankland will become the first woman in
Britain to have become a mother through surrogacy and
then gone on to become a surrogate herself.
Nineteen years after
the first surrogate baby was born, surrogacy remains on
the fringes of infertility treatment. Usually a
procedure of last resort and plagued by the tricky
legalities of lawful parentage, surrogacy is still most
often portrayed as a tortuous emotional process sullied
by exploitative, rent-a-womb commercialism and tragic
breakdowns in agreements between surrogates and
prospective parents. Frankland offers an entirely
different and infinitely happier picture of surrogacy,
one that she says is far more true to the reality of a
practice that has produced more than 500 children in
Britain.
For the Franklands, the
surrogate mother they found through the organisation
Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy (COTS) ended 10
years of trying to start a family. Then, three years
after Abigail, created from Mark's sperm and the
surrogate's egg, was successfully delivered by the
surrogate, Jayne Frankland's fertility, to her
amazement, recovered and she went on to have her three
younger children naturally. Last year, with her family
complete, she offered to end the agony of infertility
for Richard, an Oxfordshire accountant, and Lynne, his
teacher wife. The baby she is carrying was created using
Richard's sperm and her own eggs.
Frankland has no
genetic connection with Abigail, the first-born child
she adores, but she will be biologically related to the
baby she is now carrying and intends to hand over to
Richard and Lynne. She insists that this does not
trouble her. She does not adhere to the current
preoccupation with all things genetic and, particularly,
genetic bonds. "What matters is the relationship between
the child and the parents who love and raise it," she
argues.
"You have to be strong
emotionally to do this," she concedes. "You can't go
back on the arrangement, because it would wreck so many
lives. But no one knows better than me the pain of not
being able to have children or the joy of finally having
a baby. No one knows better the new dimension having a
family brings to life. I have seen tears in Lynne's eyes
when she has been with me at scans and I remember how I
felt in her position. That is what will allow me to give
this baby to its parents."
Married at 20,
Frankland assumed that she would, one day, have
children. Following two years of trying to conceive, she
was worried enough to seek medical advice. Eight
frustrating years of National Health Service waiting
lists, repeated bouts of hormone treatment and failed
IVF attempts followed. She even gave up her public
service job when a doctor suggested stress might be
preventing her conceiving.
It was several years
before doctors discovered that a combination of
polycystic ovaries and an abnormally thin womb lining
was preventing Frankland from becoming pregnant. More
drugs and IVF followed, but the lining continued to be
too thin for her embryos to implant successfully. "Three
times I took drugs to stimulate egg production and
thicken the lining, and three times implantation did not
take place," Frankland recalls. Before they opted for
surrogacy, the couple went through a three-year
assessment to become adoptive parents, only to see the
process stalled by the death of Jayne's mother.
Frankland says that the
yearning for a child left her feeling suicidal, though
she also recalls some of her fertility initiatives with
humour, such as her and Mark's search for the ancient
fertility stool in a pub they had read about in a
magazine. When they found the right pub, there was no
sign of the chair and they were too embarrassed to ask
about it. "We didn't really believe in the stool," she
says, before adding wistfully, "but always at the back
of your mind is the hope of a miracle."
In the end, Jayne
Frankland was blessed with not one but two miracles. The
first was her surrogate's conception of Abigail. Her
relationship with her surrogate was very close. "It was
the next best thing to being pregnant," she says. "I was
at the birth and Mark waited outside. I cut the
umbilical cord. The surrogate wanted me to be the first
to hold the baby. When you have waited as long as we had
to have a child, it seems such a remote possibility. I
was so grateful I could not stop saying, 'Thank you'.
After Abigail was born, I felt that, finally, I was
really living, not just existing."
"The second miracle was
conceiving Sam naturally. "My period was late but I only
did the test to rule it out," she remembers. "We were
amazed when we saw the pink dot. I was nine weeks'
pregnant. Now people see me struggling with my four
children and they remark that I'm always smiling. But I
don't think I would have appreciated them the way I do
if I'd had them easily."
She began to think of
helping another desperate couple shortly after Betty was
born. Frankland is a member of Surrogacy UK, a support
group founded two years ago. She met Lynne and Richard,
who already have one surrogate child, at one of its
social events. Surrogates and infertile couples can
mingle at Surrogacy UK gatherings, but, for legal
reasons, Surrogacy UK has to refer couples who want to
make formal contact with a surrogate to its sister
organisation, Trinity. The initial socialising allows
surrogates and potential parents to get to know each
other, but Frankland says it is the surrogate who does
the choosing. "A couple may never get chosen," she
explains.
Surrogacy UK's aim is
charitable status — and the wider respectability and
social acceptance that would bring. The group's
"intended parents" must prove they have exhausted all
other medical possibilities before asking for a
surrogate. "That's because for some women, like those
without wombs, surrogacy is the only option and there is
a shortage of surrogates," says Jayne Frankland.
Surrogates and intended
parents undergo medical and criminal record checks. The
hopeful parents also have to be married and one has to
be capable of biologically parenting the surrogate
child. Only then will the couple be able to apply to the
courts, six weeks after the surrogate baby's birth, for
the parental order that will give them legal
guardianship. Until that point the surrogate, whether or
not her eggs have been used to create the baby, is the
legal mother of the child, and the surrogate's husband
the legal father.
In the US, couples pay
thousands of dollars to women to carry a baby for them.
Surrogacy UK advises couples to stick to British law,
which states that no fees be paid and that a surrogate's
expenses must not exceed £10,000 ($A25,000). If they do,
questions will be asked by the courts when a parental
order is sought. "The best way is friendship first and
surrogacy second," says Frankland, now Surrogacy UK's
treasurer. "When arrangements break down — and it
happens far more rarely than people think — it is
usually because of a lack of communication."
Geography is also
important. She and the intended parents have to live
near each other, as regular supplies of fresh sperm are
required, or if there is a risk of complications in a
pregnancy.
Frankland knew Lynne
and Richard for five months before she made her offer.
She says they were delighted because they had not
suspected that she was even thinking of becoming a
surrogate. Mark Frankland was not surprised that his
wife decided to give what she had received. It is her
body and her decision, he says, and he understands her
motivation. He says he has felt more removed from this
pregnancy than the others but seems to feel no jealousy
that she is carrying another man's child.
"It was Abigail who
asked why I didn't help another woman now that I was
better," she says. The couple had always been honest
with their children about Abigail's conception. The
children say that the baby in their mummy's tummy
belongs to Auntie Lynne, who comes round once a week.
And Abigail has already proudly told her class that her
mummy is having someone else's baby.
Abigail was raised to
know her origins.
"Mark and I told her as
she was growing up," says Frankland. "She meets other
surrogate children and she understands her biological
connection with her surrogate mother but she sees her as
an aunt figure. It is all normal to her."
Frankland will not
reveal the level of her expenses but says she is making
no financial gain from her surrogacy. She clearly does
not need the money; she and her husband are comfortably
off. Given this is a generous and emotional act from a
woman who dotes on her four children, it is easy to
understand why friends wonder if Frankland will be able
to hand over a newborn in four months when her hormones
are playing havoc with her.
Frankland says she has
considered all this. "I do not think of this baby as
mine. And I don't have to brainwash myself to see things
this way. I am not very religious but I believe in God
and I believe my fertility came back for a reason. I am
paying back the gift that was given to me.
"At Betty's
christening, the vicar could see I was pregnant and
asked when the baby was due. I said that I was a
surrogate and that another woman had once done the same
for me. The vicar said it was a generous thing to do."
She says the vicar
described what she was doing as part of the "the circle
of life" and asked if she kept in touch with Abigail's
surrogate and biological mother. In fact, the vicar had
already met the woman who helped create and then carried
Abigail. The surrogate had just stood before him in
church as baby Betty's godmother.
- Observer
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