The real life accompaniment to Baby Mama

From the Sunday New York Times, Alex Kuczynski tells her own version of Baby Mama. She opted for surrogacy after years of infertility and failed pregnancies and IVF attempts.

At 31 weeks, my baby was kicking and stretching. On the sonogram screen, I could see that he was doing his customary sit-ups. The monitor broadcast the slushy sound of his heartbeat.Then she tore off the sonogram images and handed them to me with one hand; with the other, she reached down to wipe the gel off the stomach of the woman who was bearing my child.
I did not give birth to my son. He is the product of my egg and my husband’s sperm. After half a decade of trying to become pregnant, sometimes succeeding but always failing to carry a baby successfully to term, I came to the conclusion that if we wanted to have a child who was genetically related to us, we would have to find a woman with a more reliable uterus to gestate and deliver our baby. That was in April 2007. I was 39 years old. Exhausted by years of infertility, wrung emotionally dry by miscarriage, my husband and I decided we would give gestational surrogacy — hiring a woman to bear our child — one try. It was a desperate measure, to be sure, and one complicated by questions from all the big sectors: financial, religious, social, moral, legal, political.

What I appreciate about the piece is its directness and honesty. Alex covers many of the issues that come up for a couple choosing surrogacy, with humor and sincerity. She even touches on the issues of class that are implicit in these kinds of arrangements. Probably because Alex was already a writer for the NYTimes, she was able to tell her own story, which makes it seem less sensationalized than a piece written by a third person. But, for the same reason, there are more critical perspectives toward surrogacy that are still missing from these debates. I would love to see a similar article to Alex’s, written by a surrogate mom, for example. Even so, these stories are an important realistic counter to movies like Baby Mama.
More from feministing on surrogacy, here and here.