Coronavirus is taking away the surrogate who was our last hope of a baby

As the impact of Covid-19 is felt around the world, Emily Hodge talks about how it feels to be so close to becoming a parent when your baby is thousands of miles away

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Two weeks ago everything changed. Since November last year a surrogate in Canada has been pregnant with my baby, a child that my husband and I have been trying to have for the last decade. With each passing day we’re getting closer to the due date but have no idea whether we’ll be there to welcome it into the world.

The pregnancy had been going well and we hadn’t found the long distance hard, in fact it felt comfortable to me that someone else was finally doing the part of having the baby that I couldn’t. But now I’m 40 and infertile, and it looks as though Covid-19 is trying to steal my last hope of being a mother away from me.

We turned to international surrogacy two years ago as a last hope to have the child we’ve been trying to have for 10 years. My husband Dom and I got married in May 2010. A few months later, in August, I found out I was pregnant. But it wasn’t to be – in the October of the same year, aged 30, I was diagnosed with bowel cancer. We lost our baby as a result and then followed two years of surgery and chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer.​

After that ended we decided to try getting pregnant with IVF but between 2013-15 we experienced three failed rounds and then at the end of 2015 we lost another pregnancy.

During that time we also lost my father-in-law to bowel cancer (my mother-in-law had died of cancer over a decade ago). Dom lost his mother, father, and nearly his wife, to cancer. All this is to say, we have known our fair share of grief. Of course it wasn’t all doom and gloom but through all this, the inability to have my own child, weighed heavy on me and our relationship.

In 2018, seven years after we married, we started talking about the possibility of a surrogate.

In the UK surrogacy is legal but cannot be advertised or commercialised meaning you cannot pay someone to be your surrogate (although parents-to-be are expected to pay expenses). We quickly ruled out having a surrogate here. In Canada the rules are not too dissimilar to the UK but it has a rigorous legal system to support the relationship.

It quickly became the ideal location, especially as it is less expensive than somewhere like the USA and after three rounds of IVF our personal savings could do with something a little more affordable. Despite our baby being 3,500 miles away from us it felt like the right answer.

We used an agency in Canada that set you up with potential surrogates via a virtual-dating style scheme. We met a few people online but once we met our surrogate, we knew she was the one. She already had her own family of three girls and she wanted to help another couple have their own baby. It was perfect.

In 2019 we embarked on the journey of making it all actually happen. We created the embryos, talked about drugs and hormones, aligned appointments from different time zones and watched this woman – a stranger – take our dream and try to make it a reality for us.

After so much that had happened to us I felt conditioned to believe that things may still not work out and that we would be taking a risk...”

In November last year, on my 40th birthday, our surrogate called from a hockey game with her children to tell us she had a positive pregnancy test. I swore in disbelief then I couldn’t help but cry tears of joy. The first time – it had worked. After so much that had happened to us I felt conditioned to believe that things may still not work out and that we would be taking a risk but it seemed to be paying off.

We last saw our surrogate face-to-face in the middle of March – before the Covid-19 lockdown and travel ban. We had been talking about coronavirus with her but like many people we felt it wasn’t a concern to us. It was only we got home to the UK that things started getting more serious. But even then we still felt we could get there for the birth.

Then on Saturday 28 March our Canadian lawyer phoned and told us we needed to pack our bags and get to Ontario as soon as possible. Just like that, everything changed.

If we are not there for the birth not only will it have huge practical problems – not being able to go on the birth certificate as the baby’s parents and having to find a nanny to look after the child – there are also massive implications for us bonding with our newborn. Our surrogate has offered to look after the baby until we arrive but that is too much to place on her at this stage.

I have gone from feeling optimistic to going through the grief cycle several times a day. I’m feeling the despair of living through a pandemic, feeling guilty for worrying about something so selfish, feeling sad that my expectations of this time aren’t being met, and feeling anger that this was another hurdle we needed to get round at exactly the moment it was finally on track.

I wanted to have the last few months of getting ready for our much longed for baby. But now we have to worry about isolation and flight restrictions and international border closures.

After years of difficulties where we always just “got by” and “coped” and we wanted to finally enjoy this chapter, but now here we are.

I feel we deserve to catch a break on this big emotional part of our lives...”

Dom is continuing to be very stoic and pragmatic, he is helping with lots of the calls and talking to lawyers which is a godsend, and we’re in a WhatsApp group with our surrogate where we can talk and share pictures every day. She tells us about her day, about her children and the baby; I previously hadn’t felt the need to know what was happening throughout. It is her body and I trust her to grow and support our baby as she knows how. But now I feel increasingly anxious.

We had agreed that if we didn’t make it that my cousin who lives near the border in America could drive and collect the baby and be our official nanny until we could be there ourselves, but now the US-Canada border is shut that is out of the question too. We’re running out of options.

Instead Dom and I now have flights booked to Canada for 16 April on the advice of our lawyers. When we get there we will have to legally quarantine in our Airbnb while the surrogate does food runs for us. Of course this is not ideal, and there are still lots of questions about the birth itself to address; the plan had been for her to have a home birth but now she is likely to be required in hospital, and most likely without us. But I’m trying not to think that far ahead.

I know our problem is so tiny in the grand scheme of things at the moment, but I also feel we deserve to catch a break on this big emotional part of our lives. After so many years of trying to become parents we are so close to the finish line.