FAMILY
MY SISTER’S HAVING MY BABY A personal tale of family, surrogacy, and access to fertility care for LGBTQI+ intended parents By S. W. Underwood
I’ll carry a baby for you.
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2020
Words that seared through the ambient noise of children chattering in boisterous play. Words that slipped through the cracks of a wall built to defend from the agony of my inability to carry my own child. Words spoken by Meghan, my baby sister and now a mother of five of her own children. Words are not often elusive for me. I’m a writer, a teacher and a researcher: words are my trade. Yet I sat in silence for minutes, I don’t know how many – vibrations tingling like electricity through my nervous system. Did I hear her right? Was this a joke? But she was serious. Very serious. She’d carried five babies through three pregnancies (the last a blessing of three!), and now she was done – done with her own babies, but ready to help me with mine. What motivates my sister to help me and my partner create life is hard to capture in writing. And I know that trying to understand the depths of this gesture of love, this gift of life, will be an unending project I experience until my last days. 14
IN MAGAZINE
Often when I tell this story to friends, colleagues and strangers, their eyes swell with reverence at the lengths people will go to demonstrate their love. Their faces swell with the promising hope of a thriving community of LGBTQI+ parents, empowered by the communal compassion of incredible women like my sister. In these moments, I try to sit with the joy my sister and I are creating in other people – one we experience ourselves, of course. I try to breathe in their romantic reflexes and impassioned notions of what happens next. To most people, the announcement of a pregnancy is the beginning of a journey, the start of a path travelled by ancestors immemorial. You can imagine, then, the weight of sharing what happens next. Achieving pregnancy with a gestational surrogate woman in Canada is not easy. While legislation in Canada makes surrogacy legal, it must be altruistic. This means that you cannot compensate a surrogate or egg donor, though there are still fertility- and pregnancy-related expenses that can be costly, typically between CAD $40,000 and $80,000. In some provinces, subsidies are available for the first
