Surrogate Motherhood: A Practice That’s Still Undergoing Birth Pangs : L.A. Centers Match Infertile Couples With Birth Mothers

The broiling controversy surrounding the landmark “Baby M” case, soon to be decided by a judge in Hackensack, N.J., has drilled the term “surrogate mother” into our consciousness. She is a woman, who for a fee, agrees to have a child for an infertile couple and give the child to them after it is born. However, who these women are and what motivates them is often twisted in the web of controversy that surrounds them. Here are some of the surrogate mothers’ intimate stories.

Laurie Antale got to the delivery room minutes before the baby was born. The doctor on duty wasn’t hers and they had never met. When he asked the name of the newborn girl, Antale looked quizzically at her boyfriend. He returned the look. Finally she said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her mother.”

The doctor “almost fell backward,” she told a room full of laughing women, all of them surrogate mothers, and the men with them.

They were seated in an office at the Surrogate Parent Program in West Los Angeles, run by Nina Kellogg. Every two weeks Kellogg, a licensed marriage and family counselor with a doctorate in psychology, conducts a surrogate mother support group.

One of Two Locally

Kellogg’s center is one of two in Los Angeles; the other is the Center for Surrogate Parenting, Inc. in Beverly Hills. There are about 20 surrogate parent programs in the United States. Since 1981, Kellogg’s center has had 17 births and the Beverly Hills center has had 52.

Antale, a petite woman of 26 with long, light brown hair, was the last among the support group to have had a baby for another couple.

“I told him ‘I’m a surrogate and I know the mother’s on the way,’ ” Antale continued. “ ‘Will somebody look out in the waiting room for her?’ ”

Kellogg asked Antale how she felt now.

“Glad it’s over with. I spent a whole year pregnant,” said Antale, a registered nurse and the divorced mother of three. Her first pregnancy as a surrogate lasted three months, then ended in a traumatic miscarriage. The biological father “lashed out at me” emotionally, she said, making her feel as if the unborn infant’s death was her “fault.” They managed to resolve the tension between them, however, and she was artificially inseminated again. The second pregnancy went smoothly and resulted in the birth of a baby girl named Melissa.

‘Whose Baby Is This?’

“Let me ask you the question that everybody wants to know,” Kellogg said. “Whose baby is this?”

“It’s theirs,” Antale responded. “There’s no doubt about that.”

“Are you just saying that because it’s the polite thing to say, and what we’ve all been coached to say?” Kellogg asked.

“No, especially for me, after the miscarriage, after seeing the couple’s pain and shock. I see how come people jump off bridges. I felt like a real failure. I have three children . . . but it was their last chance.”

Their last chance . The words invoke the pain an infertile couple feels, and with it, the hurt and hope that has lead to surrogate parenting.

Kellogg asked another question. “How many of you are worried about your children? You’ve heard this before: Are your children going to miss their flesh and blood?”

A ‘Family Project’

“Definitely not,” Becky McKnight said. Her oldest daughter gets “really angry” when people say that, she told the group. Her teen-age daughter tells people “ ‘This isn’t my sister, this is for our couple. It was a family project.’ ”

McKnight speaks with calm command. She is 35, the mother of three and became a surrogate four years ago while working for three obstetricians who specialize in infertility. She now assists Kellogg with the screening of prospective surrogate mothers.

If the child McKnight carried for another couple wants to get to know her biological mother in the future “that will be fine,” she said. “We’re all set up for that.” But “she isn’t a member of our family. She’s theirs.”

In the Baby M case, Mary Beth Whitehead, 29, reneged on her contract as a surrogate mother and refused to give up the baby. At one point, she threatened to kill herself and the baby if she had to relinquish the child to the father, William Stern, 40. The New Jersey judge will decide the validity of the surrogate contract and whether custody of the 11-month-old girl should go to Whitehead--the mother of two and a high school dropout--or Stern, a biochemist, and his wife, Elizabeth, 41, a pediatrician.

Religious leaders, most notably those representing the Catholic church, have condemned the practice of artificially inseminating a surrogate mother with the sperm of the intended father. This month, in a major statement of church doctrine, the Vatican also termed artificial insemination in general, embryo and sperm banks, and the technology that produces “test-tube” babies immoral. Reaching beyond Catholics, the Vatican statement asked government leaders to oppose these new reproductive techniques and impose “moral norms on certain medical and scientific activities.”

Others have called surrogate parenting a social nightmare, riddled with economic bias, a rent-a-womb operation for the rich that exploits poor women.

“One of my greatest fears about surrogate parenting is that it can exploit the lower classes and the women of the Third World,” said Vicki Van Valer, 41, who tried for eight years to become pregnant without success. She started working when she was 17, rose in the business ranks but never got a college degree. She recently quit her job as vice president of her husband’s construction company to go back to school. She and her husband, Happer Campbell, are expecting a child from a surrogate this weekend.

A couple looking for a surrogate, she continued, has “to be absolutely sure who is running the program and what the motivations of the surrogates are. If the women are poverty stricken and the biggest factor (for them) is money, it would be unconscionable.”

Karen Hill, the surrogate mother they choose, is “intelligent and articulate . . . a self-made woman who I admire,” Van Valer said. The money is not the crucial factor. “If you are poor, the $10,000 sounds like a lot of money. If you’re a working woman, out there in the world like Karen and me,” it’s not a great deal.

Hilary Hanafin is well acquainted with the surrogate parenting process and its effects. She is a staff psychotherapist at the Center for Surrogate Parenting Inc. in Beverly Hills and was an expert witness for the Sterns in the Baby M case. Her doctoral dissertation on surrogate mothers is among the most comprehensive research available in a little-explored field.

The average surrogate mother is white, attended two years of college, married young and has all the children she and her husband want, Hanafin said.

At the surrogate center in Beverly Hills, Hanafin said about 15-20% of the surrogates are “Hispanic and the rest are Anglo. We have had one Jewish surrogate, but she wasn’t a practicing Jew.” During the six years the program has been in existence, “we have had one Asian accepted and probably six applications from the black community to be surrogates. But we haven’t had a black surrogate because no couples wanted to work with a black surrogate.”

Typically, the couples are Anglo, though “10 to 20% at any given time are not,” she said. They may be Asian or Latino and in two cases mixed-race couples: one black and Anglo and the other Latino and black. “Apparently,” Hanafin said, “infertility seems to hit at the Anglo dual-career couple hardest.”

Most Feel Deep Sympathy

Kellogg described the West Los Angeles center’s surrogates and couples similarly. The majority of surrogate mothers say they enjoy being pregnant, are attracted by the money they would receive and feel deep sympathy for women who are unable to have children, Hanafin said.

Reflecting Hanafin’s findings, Kellogg said many of the women in her program had a family member or friend unable to have a child. “So they watched somebody they cared about not being able to have children when they had kids easily,” and this helped motivate them to become surrogates.

Neither the surrogate center in Beverly Hills nor the one in West Los Angeles has been involved in a dispute like the Baby M case.

The reason is not just the “initial screening of the prospective surrogates and adoptive parents” that most programs have, Hanafin said. “It’s the ongoing counseling. What’s unique in both Nina’s program and here is that there is a mental health professional on staff who also runs support group counseling, who assists with the administration (of the program), the inseminations and the post-partum counseling. There is ongoing availability.”

The psychological “processing” of all the emotions a surrogate mother feels takes years, said Hanafin, who is conducting a survey of 35 surrogate mothers who have been part of the center’s program and gave birth over six months ago. Her preliminary results show “there is no surrogate who has written back saying she has regretted (being a surrogate), none of them have described any grieving, post-partum depression,” and they are satisfied with the amount of contact they’ve had with the adoptive parents.

Enhanced Self-Esteem

Most of them also said that “being a surrogate mother has influenced their lives in a very positive way,” Hanafin said. “For example, in the screening process, one of the things I evaluate is what (the surrogate) is going to get out of the program, not just that she can do it. Is she going to walk away with more than the $10,000, which is minimal? What the surrogates are explaining two years or a year later is, yes, they have felt an incredible increase in their self-esteem. It’s not uncommon for me to hear about surrogates who have gotten one or two job promotions” or are “returning to school to complete their degree for the first time in 19 years.”

The women discover a new strength as a result of being a surrogate, Hanafin continued. They look in the mirror and say to themselves, “ ‘If I could do this, I could do a lot of other things.’ ” The experience “serves as the transition for them from a content self-satisfied life” to one in which they envision higher personal or professional goals. “It varies for everybody,” she said.

Kellogg, Hanafin and the surrogates interviewed all agreed that money was the primary motivation for becoming a surrogate.

“The majority of homes need two incomes,” Kellogg said. The women who become surrogates “have average earning capacity. If they give $75 or $80 a week to child care, what they bring home is not that huge. The kind of money we give will enable them to do what they want, which is to stay home and parent their child.”

Hanafin agrees. “Being a surrogate mother is certainly unique, but also within the traditional role of women. She can stay home with her kids and not redefine women’s role in society. It’s an interesting contrast for these women who tend to be bright, have fairly traditional values but who are looking to do something unique.”

If she were doing it for the money, “it would be a poor part-time job,” said Karen Hill, who contracted to give birth for Vicki Van Valer and Happer Campbell of San Jose.

It costs about $25,000 for a couple to arrange for a child through a surrogate parent program. About $15,000 pays for legal, psychological counseling and medical bills. The surrogate generally receives $10,000, but not in a lump sum. The first $5,000 is paid in monthly allotments before the baby is born. The remaining $5,000 is paid after the adoption proceedings are final.

“When it’s all said and done, it’ll be approximately two years” before all the money is received. It helps with the expenses and a few extras, but it’s here and gone just like a paycheck,” said Hill, who is a high school graduate and former veterinary assistant. She is married to a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff and between them they have four children, all from previous marriages. Her two boys live with them, several dogs and a cat in a house they own in a modest neighborhood in Bloomington, a small town south of Fontana.

‘Save That Ad’

Hill first thought about becoming a surrogate because a close friend was unable to have children, she said. “This was several years ago when surrogacy was just coming into the news.” But the friend’s marriage fell apart and Hill forgot about the idea until her husband pointed out an ad for surrogates. “ ‘Oh, honey, here’s something you can do.’ ” she recalled him saying. “He was joking, but I said ‘Save that ad.’ He thought I was kidding.” She’d never mentioned her interest in surrogate parenting before and she didn’t pursue a discussion of it with him then, she said.

When she did tell him of her interest, her husband, Jon, wondered: “Who the hell did I marry? Who is this nut?” But he says he listened very intently to what she had to say and attended all the meetings at the West L.A. surrogate program. “I really didn’t decide one way or the other until we met our couple and we sat in Nina’s office for quite a few hours. We yakked and got to know them, and that’s when I decided to give the green light.”

At no time did they feel coerced, the couple said.

“I felt like we were on trial,” Jon Hill said. “She (Kellogg) wanted to make sure we were what she wanted, which was quite surprising to me. The last thing Kellogg said after the interview with “their couple” was “ ‘go home, think about it and let me know.’ Not, ‘we’ll be calling you.’ ”

Careful Prescreening

The surrogates and couples in both programs go through careful prescreening, they meet each other, get to know one another well. They go to doctors appointments together, and all decisions regarding the baby’s health are made by the adoptive parents. Throughout the process, the surrogates participate in group counseling which continues months, sometimes years after the birth.

Karen Hill, who is a licensed real estate agent, recently found a job with a real estate company in Riverside. She’ll begin work a month after the baby is born. She plans to have minimal contact with the adoptive parents. “More out of respect for them. I don’t want to ever give them any fear that I might want to interfere or come back into the child’s life. I decided when I became a surrogate that I can’t be part of that child’s life.”

Reflecting emotional patterns that Hanafin and Kellogg say are typical of surrogate mothers, Hill explained: “I’ve come to break down the bonding process into two different phases: One is the maternal instinct you have when the child is inside you and you can feel it kicking and moving and knowing that you have to do certain things to care for the child.”

The second phase is “the other bonding that you do after the baby is born, when you actually become the mother and the baby is born--not right after, but weeks and months after--when you get to know your baby as a person. When you know that you’re it. Without you being there to take care of its needs, it couldn’t survive. So I think you bond in a different way before and after you actually become the mother. I’ve never really thought of this child past that nine-month time.”

Different Feelings

Said Hanafin: “There are women who do have the capacity to feel differently about different pregnancies. I think women, throughout time, have known that. There are women who are thrilled with one pregnancy, not thrilled with another. Abortions are plentiful in our society, there are abused children.”

Surrogate parenting is a threat to the cultural presumption “that women feel a maternal attachment to every single child they carry,” Hanafin said. “And it’s just not true for all women.”

And what about the child? Hanafin said that is one of the questions that concerns her most about surrogate parenting, noting that the oldest child born in her program is only 5. None of the children born to surrogates since the practice was formalized about a decade ago are old enough to have been studied extensively.

Drawing on her experience in the adoption world, Hanafin views the children of surrogates as simply a variation on the adoptee theme. Both should be told the “absolute truth” about their origins, she said. “Children of adoption and children of surrogate parenting, if we can make the assumption, will adjust according to how well their parents handle the situation.”