By Sonja Kersop
Giving the gift of life is a big honour for a Surrogate Mother, to see the joy on the Commissioning Parent’s faces when they hold their baby for the first time is a gift in itself. But why does a woman need to have kids of her own before she becomes a surrogate mother?
When you are pregnant for the first time, it is unlike any other physical experience that you can have. You need to decide if you are willing to go through the effect of being pregnant for someone else, and to give the baby back after the birth, and the only way you can make an educated decision is to go through a pregnancy of your own.
From a medical point of view, it is also important for the surrogate to have a viable birth of a full term baby, so that the medical practitioner knows how her body will react to a pregnancy and if there were any complications during her pregnancy or birth of the baby.
With surrogacy we want to find the most optimal situation for the birth of the surrogate baby and the only way for us to determine this situation is for the surrogate to have gone through a healthy pregnancy of her own.
It is also important that a woman completes her own family before she becomes a surrogate. A woman can become infertile at any stage of her life for a lot of medical reasons, and we do not want a woman to become a surrogate and then later in life need her own surrogate to complete her own family.
Some surrogates describe pregnancy as a passion of theirs and that they had easy pregnancies and births. Some surrogates love to be pregnant but do not want more children of their own. Every pregnancy is different but the best way to know of any issues that can arise and how the woman’s body will react to a pregnancy is if she had a pregnancy of her own.
Someone who considers surrogacy also needs to know about the physiological aspect of being pregnant. Pregnancy can be a very emotional experience and the woman needs to know if she will be capable of giving the baby back to the commissioning parents after the birth of the child. She also needs to know how her body will react to all the pregnancy hormones and to know if she can cope with all the emotions that go along with pregnancy.
We appreciate every woman who contacts us who wants to be a surrogate, but if you have not completed your own family, please consider helping a family in another way such as becoming an egg donor angel. For more information please feel free to contact us via email on leeann@medfem.co.za