From Reddit to celebrity

Across forums like Reddit’s BabyBumps (there’s a fair bit there which focuses on surrogacy stories – rants, nuanced outcomes and all) and r/IVF, women share honest, day-by-day accounts of the surrogacy process – both challenging and beautiful. One post reads:

“I didn’t expect to cry when the parents held their baby for the first time. It was their joy that got me. All the meds, the injections, the appointments – it was worth it.”

These grassroots narratives sit alongside stories from Resolve.org (the National Fertility Association, established in 1974) and agencies like those we’ve spoken to, showing just how varied surrogacy can be, and how much heart is involved.

Sharing their story with RESOLVE, Jenn and Brad Nixon received an infertility diagnosis in 2009 after two years of trying to conceive. In 2012, they did three IUIs and became pregnant on their third try, but they lost the pregnancy at sixteen weeks. Shortly after Jenn’s D&C surgery, doctors discovered she had previously unknown heart issues which had caused her cardiac function to suffer. After multiple failed heart procedures, Jenn and Brad were told it would not be safe for Jenn to carry a pregnancy.

“Once we found out that we needed to pursue other avenues to parenthood, right away we knew we wanted to do gestational surrogacy,” said Jenn.

The Nixons’ gestational carrier is a friend who volunteered to help them have a child – she did not ask for compensation.

“So I [Jenn] try to repay her in any way I can. Just any little thing that makes her feel loved – just anything to say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you for helping make me a mom!’”

Less IRL, for celebrities who’ve opened up about using surrogates from Kim Kardashian and Gabrielle Union to Priyanka Chopra and Lucy Liu, there’s almost always the same emotional through-line: gratitude, awe and an understanding of the women who helped them build their families.

As Vogue explored in Having a Baby with a Surrogate, modern surrogacy represents both scientific progress and the age-old human desire for connection.