As a bill that seeks to regulate aspects of surrogacy goes before cabinet, Prime Time spoke to families who have used international surrogates.
Cathy Wheatley was seven months pregnant when she had a spontaneous uterine rupture.
The Wheatleys decided to go to a clinic in Ukraine, where they met Ivanna, who would eventually carry and give birth to their twins Ted and Elsie. "I’m pregnant for nine months. I don’t work. But I have two kids. And my kids have basic needs" Ivanna said. "It obviously gets harder every time to pick yourself up after it and try again. But we still felt very strongly that we'd be able to do this."
"Within a month, we were matched with a surrogate who matched my blood type, and we went ahead. But unfortunately, at the 20-week scan, we discovered there was a fatal fetal abnormality within the heart.""We did Zoom or Skype calls with Mariana, our surrogate. Her first response after every checkup was, 'now, can we tell Kathy & Brian?'"
"I didn't know what to say, really. That ‘cancer’ word anyway, you're all over the place," Brian said. However, due to the lack of regulation around the legal status for parents of children born through surrogacy, the Egans were left in a precarious situation. Brian and Kathy decided to take a case to the High Court, saying the State had failed to recognise Kathy as Luke’s mother.
Mary initially thought that surrogacy was for well-off people:"My view was Elton John did surrogacy, really rich people did surrogacy. We were ordinary people, already indebted from all of the IVFs we had done."
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