The Pain of Infertility: One Couple’s Choices : When Artificial Insemination Didn’t Work, Westsiders Turned to a Surrogate
“Every month, when she had her period, it was like having a death in the family,” the husband said.
What people seem to forget in the controversy over surrogate mothers, the couple said, is the pain they suffer.
Anne Marie and Phillip (they asked that their last names not be used) were married in 1981 and immediately began trying to have children. After a year without success, she went to a gynecologist. The doctor did a postcoital test. “They found that my cervix was not letting sperm in,” Anne Marie said. Her mother took DES, she said, referring to the synthetic hormone used to prevent miscarriages until it was banned in 1971. The drug has been linked to cancer and other defects in the offspring of these women.
The couple tried artificial insemination next. For her, it was a painful process that induced severe cramping for about 20 minutes after the insemination. After three months, “I got pregnant.” But that ended in a tubal pregnancy. She shuddered at the memory. “It was hideous, to say the least.”
The couple tried artificial insemination again and she became pregnant. Tests revealed it was a normal, uterine pregnancy. “But I had a miscarriage,” Anne Marie said. She tried to get pregnant again, but couldn’t.
Joined a Support Group
That’s when the two joined a support group for infertile couples run by Nina Kellogg, a psychologist who also runs the Surrogate Parent Program in West Los Angeles.
“I just felt it would be helpful to be with other people who had the same problem,” Anne Marie said. “Because you feel real horrible. And that doesn’t come out much, the problems of infertility.”
The first thing you do when you get up in the morning is “take your temperature to see what day of your cycle it is. You have to have hormone shots and depending on what the problem is,” you go to the doctor almost every week. Anne Marie said she went six times a month, “which in itself was a horrible experience because you’re going to an (obstetrician’s) office and constantly seeing other women who are pregnant and happy.”
It gets to the point where you hate to see pregnant women “on the street, in the malls. You hate going to family functions and seeing all your relatives with their children when that’s what you want more than anything.”
Kellogg said Anne Marie’s reaction was not extreme but “totally typical” of the pain infertile women suffer.
Pressure on the Marriage
“I felt I had married my husband under false pretenses,” she said. “He married me thinking we were going to have children.” Under that kind of pressure, “sex itself takes on a whole different. . . .”
“Oh-oh,” interrupted Michele, the couple’s 20-month-old daughter, making a grab for the cookies on the coffee table.
Anne Marie smiled and continued. “Whatever the word is. You really can’t have regular sex while we were doing the insemination. We had to save up that sperm.”
“It’s on your mind constantly,” Phillip said. While he wanted children, he said he assured her that “my commitment was to spend the rest of my life with her.”
Anne Marie, 39, and Phillip, 40, finally considered adoption. Kellogg’s infertility support group is “very pro adoption,” she said, and “I think that’s what I wanted to do. But I don’t think he did.”
Phillip said when he found out about the surrogate program it appealed to him for several reasons. “It’s very difficult to get a healthy, white infant through adoption. The adoption process can take up to seven years and agencies prefer couples in their 20s. We felt, in the case of surrogates, we would be involved from the beginning: conception, monitoring the fetus through its various stages; we would have the whole nine months of participation. We also felt that the birth mother would not come back and want the child,” as sometimes happens with traditional adoptions. There was one other advantage, he said. The child would be “50% genetically ours.”
Like William Sterns, the father in the Baby M case, Phillip’s past was shaped by the Holocaust. “Most of my family were wiped out by the Nazis in World War II, and it was important for me to pass on my own genes.”
However, the couple said they would have adopted had the surrogate option not been available.
Genes Become ‘Irrelevant’
Anne Marie said she is not troubled that the child is unrelated to her genetically. She turned toward her daughter and said: “I guess it would be interesting if I could look at her and say, ‘Oh, is that something from my set of genes?’ But she is so interesting anyway, that it soon becomes irrelevant. I’m fascinated by her no matter where her genes came from.”
Phillip added: “I don’t really think of her in terms of my genetic child or adopted child. She is my child.”
The couple, who both work in the computer field and live in a middle-class West Los Angeles neighborhood, said they plan to have another child through a surrogate.
They plan on telling Michele and her sister or brother the history of their birth. They’ve already started a picture book describing the circumstances under which Michele was born, they said. “And if she wants to find out who her birth mother is one day, that would be fine,” Phillip said.