Homemaker Carries Her Third Child to Help Another Couple

Toby, a young Orange County homemaker, has two children, 5 and 7. Now her abdomen is starting to swell with a third. This one, though, she says belongs not to her and her husband, a maintenance worker, but to others--an Orange County couple who have essentially rented her womb.

This time her pregnancy “is being contracted to do a job,” said Toby (not her real name). “I’m being compensated for my time, stress and the healing process.” But then, as if to point out some of the contradictory elements of surrogate motherhood, she added: “It’s not like a business arrangement.”

The $12,000 she will receive to gestate the husband’s child, conceived through artificial insemination, is the last thing on her mind, she said.

More than anything else, she wants to answer an infertile couple’s prayer, she said. Already she has seen something--love perhaps, or hope--”sparking in their eyes.”

She believes that surrogate motherhood is not “baby selling.”

“You can’t put a price on someone else’s happiness,” she said, adding however, “It’s more comfortable for couples if they can compensate the surrogate for it.”

Toby, carefully groomed and friendly, said she became interested in surrogate motherhood after watching a TV talk show with her husband. “He told me I’d be great. When our kids came along, I was on Cloud Nine.”

Toby, 28, is a high school graduate who grew up in an upper-middle-class urban home.

One reason she wanted to become a surrogate mother is that she was adopted. “I knew my parents had to get me through the black market.” It cost them $10,000 and years of frustration of not having another baby after their biological child had died, she said.

Toby also knew that she had been able to conceive easily and believed that she could help provide a baby as an object of love for someone else.

Through her physician, she was referred to the Center for Reproductive Alternatives, which matches infertile couples with surrogate mothers. The first match, however, was unsuccessful because Toby was unable to conceive after nine artificial inseminations.

Joined a Support Group

Like all surrogate mothers in the center’s program, Toby joined a support group run by a Newport Beach psychologist whose services are paid for by the couple. In addition to preparing for the pain of separating from their children at birth, the women discuss frustrations of their sometimes failing to conceive.

“I was so disappointed I couldn’t do it for them,” she said. She and the wife had become so close that “I lived her infertility,” she said. “I knew this woman was keeping tabs on my cycles.” Each month, when her period would start, Toby called her psychologist in tears and cried for an hour before reporting to the wife that she was not pregnant that month. Eventually, they gave up.

She received no pay for her efforts.

Center coordinator Kathy Wyckoff matched the couple with another surrogate, who is now pregnant.

Toby became pregnant quickly when she was matched with a second couple. At first the couple didn’t want to meet her, she said. “I don’t think I could do it for someone I didn’t meet. If you didn’t see that spark in their eyes. . . .”

They agreed, however, to meet and one evening, the couple, Toby and her husband and children all went out for pizza. “I said, ‘This is your baby,”’ Toby recalled. “If you want to be involved, fine. I’ll be there.”

Gradually, the couple became more interested and went to the doctor’s office with her to hear the baby’s heartbeat.

Over the holidays, she and the wife joined two other infertile women and their pregnant surrogates for a holiday brunch. “We were all glowing,” she said.

She often tells people who comment on her pregnancy that she is a surrogate. Some are taken aback. Some are pleased. “A lady in the mall gave me a hug. She was never able to conceive, and she couldn’t adopt.”

Husbands may not completely understand their wives desire to carry someone else’s child, Wykoff said. But Toby said that her husband “is supportive” of her desire to be a surrogate and that he and their children are anticipating the birth with excitement. Her husband plans to videotape the delivery birth as a present for the couple.

Her carrying another man’s child “doesn’t bother him at all,” she said. “It would be a whole lot different if it were not through a surrogate program or if it were conceived in any other way than artificial insemination. We talked about it for a year at least before I got in touch with Kathy.”

Despite her love for children, Toby said: “I don’t want this baby.

“This baby is 100% theirs. I don’t care if it’s biologically mine.” If something happened to the couple, she said she would probably give the child up for adoption.

It will all be worthwhile the moment she hands the baby over to the wife in the delivery room, Toby believes. “When I see her face, I’m going to be on Cloud Nine.”

But in the next breath, recalling her psychological training, she said, “I know there will be a little bit of sadness in my heart.”

After handing her child over, she plans to go immediately home to her two other children, “pull my babies in bed and cuddle them.”