LCFC# 20: I have a man's heart. Another woman will carry my baby
Dear Lamb Chop fans,
It’s been more than a year since I last wrote to you all. Let me explain why.
First, you should know, I am physically well. There are days even when I feel like I did decades ago before I started to feel the symptoms of my heart falling apart. In the last year, I’ve been full throttle at work, launching a podcast for my magazine and digging into generative AI to figure out how we can use it ethically in our newsroom. We’ve been gardening at the house with the endless energy and knowledge of our dear neighbor. I turned 40 in February and found the courage to write a letter to my donor’s family. But I’d say the reason I haven’t written is not because of work or life but because I’ve had this nearly unimaginable favor to ask of someone, another woman. And, for so many reasons, I’ve been reluctant to make that ask.
What is the favor, you ask. It is this: Will you carry my baby?
Yes, my husband and I have been working on starting a family. I’ve gone through two rounds of cycles to extract my eggs and let sparks fly (literally) in the embryology lab. It was two cycles of injections, going to sleep for a bit, waking up with a post-it with the number of eggs retrieved. Then waiting as they grew after fertilization, then waiting again for them to be tested for abnormalities. It took us six months, but we ended up with three healthy embryos. It felt like a victory. But it was more like hitting the halfway mark of a mile swim. Because now, for me, the real work, the reality of the experience started: The reality that someone else would spend the first nine months with our child, that we’d need help, a gracious soul to sacrifice her body for that time and the recovery time after to give me what might be the second greatest gift of all, the first being my heart and life and the opportunity to try to have this baby.
Those thoughts flood my mind when I think about this ask. Thoughts of A Handmaid’s Tale are there too, especially now in an environment there’s a political push for women to have more children and fewer reproductive rights. I fully understand that there is a risk in asking other women to carry children for those of us who can’t, given the potential exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies and reproduction. I think about the rights of the woman who may choose to help us weighed against our desire to have a child with our genetics. We will be using an agency and the resources at our fertility clinic to work through the thorniest of the legal and psychological concerns that arise. But there are always shades of gray that the best legal and psychological preparation cannot prepare us for. That’s true in transplantation too, so there will be experience to draw on. But for some reason, this ask weighs on me much more than the ask of receiving a heart from someone already destined to give it.
Perhaps I am not explaining this well at all, but this question, this favor to ask, has weighed on my mind since recovering from the transplant, having clear check-ups and dreaming about living beyond the next six months. I won’t say this angst is there all the time at the forefront of my mind, but this ask, and the weight of the favor, simmers subconsciously. I think part of my hesitation in thinking about this question is that I don’t like asking for help, some of it means accepting I will never have that experience of carrying a child myself, some of it is wondering if I in any way play the role of Serena (though I realize the circumstances are different), and some of it reminds me that though I have a mended heart now, the one I was born with did break. I will get through this stream of thoughts, and we will have this baby. And I am sure there will be those that judge me for my choice, and I accept that. I only hope I didn’t pass on a future broken heart to any of those embryos waiting in deep freeze for another woman to tranform those cells to child.