This past January, we were in the air, mid-flight, when our baby boy Sunny was born via surrogate in Mexico. It hadn’t crossed our minds that he’d arrive six weeks premature. It was a very stressful 24 hours. Our surrogate Aurora had signs of pre-eclampsia, and her condition had remained stable up until about four hours before we landed in Mexico City. But for the safety of both her and our baby, the medical team decided to deliver Sunny by emergency C-section. We were able to access wifi on the plane, so we received real-time updates, almost by the second, as everything unfolded.
Once we finally arrived at the hospital and saw Sunny, the flood of emotions hit us all at once; relief, exhaustion, fear, and overwhelming love. Seeing Aurora safe, and tiny Sunny so full of life, was indescribable. Sunny had to spend his first few days in the ICU. As Sunny was born early and all the legal paperwork had been filed based on his due date, we were stuck in Mexico waiting for the legalities to be finalised for a few months longer than we had anticipated. We were desperate to see friends and family, but we also appreciated that this was a precious time together, free from the usual distractions.
It has been such a journey to get to this point. I’d tried everything to have a baby over the six years since I met Duncan in 2019. I was 40 then – we’d been advised my ovarian reserve was too low to conceive naturally. After two unsuccessful IVF attempts using my eggs, we decided to use donor eggs. There’s lots of grief involved in facing the realisation that donor eggs were going to be our only option. But soon we had 12 good-quality embryos using my partner’s sperm. We prepared for embryo transfer expecting it to be a success. By that point, I was 41 and we had three frozen embryo transfers in our hometown, Manchester, but none resulted in a live pregnancy. Then we paused it and had tests.
I am quite a spiritual person – I’m a yoga and meditation teacher. I started to wonder whether I was just not destined to have a baby. It helped me to talk about it and share what I was going through on my Instagram. While every loss has to be felt, it was our choice to continue, and we moved on.
I was diagnosed with a septate uterus, a congenital uterine malformation, which meant it was difficult to get pregnant. I had successful surgery to correct it. We started preparing for the fourth embryo transfer of donor eggs. Why wouldn’t it happen now? Yet we still didn’t have a positive outcome. It was a real low point. I felt we’d done everything to try to make it work: nutrition plans, acupuncture, reflexology. On the fifth and sixth transfers, the doctors introduced steroids. I still didn’t get pregnant.
Then we just stopped. We had thrown everything at the final three transfers and it had taken its toll mentally, physically and financially. The one thing Duncan and I decided was that we wanted to continue trying for a baby. We explored what other paths there were to parenthood. We admire people who choose to adopt but we felt it just wasn’t right for us.
Surrogacy was something we had never considered – it seemed so removed from anything we’d ever do. With the My Surrogacy Journey (MSJ) agency, we went down the UK surrogacy path. We didn’t know how long the wait would be because in the UK surrogates aren’t paid – it’s an altruistic gift – and there is a shortage of them.
We were settling in for a 12-month wait for a UK surrogate, although it now takes about two years. Eight months later, I found out that somebody I’d known years ago but lost touch with was contemplating becoming a surrogate with MSJ. After doing all the medical tests, Kay stepped in to help us. We went into the situation with a really positive mindset. We did three frozen embryo transfers with our UK surrogate but after two failed attempts, we had the embryos tested to check they were viable. Two of them were not of a decent enough quality to see things through to a pregnancy.
We did one final transfer with Kay and had a false positive pregnancy test. I was 44. It was really hard. In all the time we’d been trying, Duncan and I had never had any good news. I cried because I was so happy – then we found out it wasn’t a pregnancy after all. To come back from that took a lot of strength. Everything felt heavy, like I was wading through mud.
I know it’s very common for things to fall apart for couples going through infertility, but our fertility challenges strengthened our relationship. We felt united – we were totally aligned with what we wanted the outcome to be.
We’d used all the 12 embryos. We were at a crossroads. Do we start from scratch again in the UK? Or do we consider a new path that was presented to us in Mexico City? MSJ will always find a solution. I know there is a lot of controversy online around the ethics of surrogacy in Mexico, where surrogates are paid £12,000, so it was really important that we felt we were doing the right thing morally and didn’t feel that we were exploiting anybody.
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We were matched with Aurora, our surrogate, who we first met on an online video call. She had already been highly screened to make sure she was in it for the right reasons; this was not just a cold, transactional process. We knew from her profile that she was local to Mexico City and already had a good job with a regular income, which obviously filled us with confidence.
Next, we flew to Mexico City to meet various members of the MSJ team, the medical team and the legal team. We met Aurora for coffee with the MSJ team; she is a good person with a good heart. It was then that we all decided to go ahead together. In the meantime, we were scrutinised by MSJ, socio-economic tests, DBS background checks, psychological assessments, and counselling. We had to go through way more scrutiny for Mexico than we ever needed to for surrogacy in the UK.
No one can walk in your shoes. We haven’t got an insurmountable amount of money with which we could keep on doing this. The waiting lists for a UK surrogate are long and we couldn’t afford surrogacy in the US where it costs about £250,000. This was our last chance saloon. We created more frozen embryos using donor eggs – and with Aurora as our surrogate, we finally got a positive pregnancy test after six long years.
Just as we received the news we had longed for, our world was shaken. My sister Hannah suddenly died at the age of 32 – it was the same day as our six-week scan with Aurora. The joy of new life and the grief of losing my beautiful little sister collided in the most surreal and painful way.
Life is very different for me now. We are enjoying our time together in Mexico and creating a family for the three of us. We’d been waiting for this moment for more than six years, but we still weren’t ready when we jumped on that plane for his birth. But having Sunny in my arms is magical.
When you finally have a baby after such a challenging fertility journey as ours, it’s easy to think, “Is it OK for me to say I’m struggling?” or, “Oh my God, he’s been crying all night”. But I will experience motherhood just like any other mum. There will be moments when I’m overwhelmed. There is often a lot of negativity around surrogacy but our journey was filled with love, connection and joy. Aurora will always be part of Sunny’s life; we are close to all her family. And our child Sunny will grow up knowing he was born from a place of courage, compassion and community.
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