Kirsten Reddeman says she knew from the age of 18 that she would give birth to her sister’s daughter.
Her niece, Sadie Carruthers, was born a year and a half ago through traditional surrogacy. By donating her egg and body for nine months, Reddeman’s sister is now a proud mom – a title she may never have gotten if it weren’t for her sister and surrogacy.
Reddeman’s sister, Sara Murray, says she and her husband, Kevin Carruthers, would still be childless if Reddeman hadn’t stepped in.
Murray says she and Carruthers were eager for a child.
“I had her name picked out from the time I was a child. I always had a name I wanted for a girl,” Murray says.
It was a big commitment for Reddeman, but she says it was a natural decision. Her sister, a cystic fibrosis patient and recipient of a double lung transplant, wasn’t well enough to conceive or carry her own child.
“So I offered up my body to do that for her,” Reddeman says.
This sisterly gift is one of the most common surrogacy arrangements in Canada, says Patricia Gervaize, a psychologist with over 20 years of experience in infertility.
“These women feel it is the ultimate altruistic act,” Gervaize says.
Gervaize is the director of reproductive health psychology at the Ottawa Fertility Centre, where she helps infertile couples find alternative ways of starting a family.
Gervaize has chosen to work with women who know one another very well, where “the relationship between the women is what motivates the behaviour.”
Surrogates are usually women who have already had their own children, Gervaize says. She explained that this experience gives them greater acceptance that the baby they carry will be the best gift someone could receive.
She says the women who offer themselves as surrogates don’t see their action as a sacrifice, because they just want to help the intended parent.
“And the sisters will fight for the [surrogacy] right – it’s the sense of ‘this is what I can do for someone I love,’ ” Gervaize says.
Surrogacy, like other treatments for infertility, isn’t necessarily a choice based on popularity, Gervaize says. For the most part, an assisted reproduction method is chosen based on what is possible for the intended parents.
In Canada, commercial surrogacy is illegal. Women cannot receive payment for birthing another’s child, which has caused surrogacy to become purely altruistic in nature.
“I don’t think you can pay somebody enough to carry a pregnancy anyway,” Gervaize says.
She explains that it is women who truly care about the woman trying for a baby that come forward and offer to donate eggs, be a surrogate, or both, as in the case of Reddeman’s surrogacy.
Reddeman’s niece is biologically her daughter – she was conceived using Reddeman’s egg and Carruthers’ sperm. Despite this genetic link, Reddeman says she has never thought of Sadie as being her own.
“She’s my niece. It’s almost forgotten that I carried her,” Reddeman says.
All of the adults involved – Reddeman, her husband Andrew, Murray, and Carruthers – spent an hour with a psychologist at a Mississauga fertility clinic prior to the insemination.
Reddeman says speaking to the psychologist helped to set aside some of the worries she had about carrying a child for another woman, even though that woman is her dearly-loved sister.
She says the psychologist helped her to understand that the love she has for her own children is not “bred in,” but comes from raising them. Reddeman took the counseling to heart, which she says helped her create a strong separation in her role as a carrier for the baby and as an aunt, rather than a mother.
“We never referred to the baby as being a brother or sister to my boys,” says Reddeman. She placed herself as the aunt to the baby, and her children as cousins.
Although the term ‘surrogacy’ can often bring to mind a lab-created embryo implanted in the womb of host woman, Reddeman and Murray did things a little differently.
They decided to skip the big-business bucks of assisted baby-making. Instead, they chose a do-it-yourself approach.
Because of Murray’s medical issues, they decided to forgo difficult and expensive hormone treatments and surgical procedures. They decided for the health of both women, it was better to use Reddeman’s egg and Carruthers’ sperm.
“We decided we would try it at home first. We watched my cycle, and when my temperature peaked, he gave a sample and we injected it,” Reddeman explained.
“Absolutely it was financially easier!” laughed Reddeman. “It costs a whole lot of money to do it the other way.”
The alternative method is through a fertility clinic, like the one where Gervaize works. The cost of implanting an embryo would have been around $9,000, excluding the cost of drugs, according to the Ottawa Fertility Centre’s website.
Gervaize says many infertile or same-sex couples seek infertility treatments because adoption is a complicated process, and being matched with a child is not guaranteed.
She says it is always amazing to see how many people will step up to offer sperm or egg donations, or to be a surrogate.
This was the case with Murray, who says she and Carruthers had tried to adopt, but were consistently rejected by adoption agencies because of her health. “We had been messing around with things for too long,” Reddeman says.
Surrogacy allowed Reddeman’s sister to be a big part of the pregnancy. The sisters live close to one another, so mom-to-be Murray was able to help Reddeman get her family ready in the mornings and be at all of the pregnancy-related appointments.
“She knew where this baby was coming from, and she was a big part of the experience,” Reddeman says.
Murray says the pregnancy was distant for her, because it wasn’t her body. This was because the baby wasn’t always with her, she says, although she knew it was her baby and she could feel her kick in her sister’s stomach.
“In [Sadie’s] baby book, I wrote down the date of every appointment and everything that happened,” Murray says.
Reddeman says the experience is what has made the process worth it.
Murray’s road to motherhood was bumpy, but the day in the delivery room was a kind of long-awaited destiny. “That second, she was a girl, I just – everything was meant to be,” she says.
“It’s an incredible thing to do, when you think about it,” Gervaize says.