You’re lying in a delivery suite in hospital giving one final almighty push before your baby is born.
There are lots of other people in the room but you’re focussed on nothing and nobody other than your primitive need to deliver your daughter safely into the world.
And then….she’s out. The midwife picks her up and hands her to someone else, another couple who were standing behind you as you pushed. They are her parents.
After nine long months of pregnancy, you will never breastfeed this baby girl. You won’t even hold her until later. You definitely won’t take her home. And she will never call you mum.
This was Shannon Garner’s experience when she gave birth to Elsie, the daughter of a gay couple she’d never met before she offered to carry their baby.
Hear Shannon talk about her experience here:
“The thought of carrying a child that was genetically mine and then gifting that on to someone else, I couldn’t wrap my head around that,” Shannon said in the latest episode of No Filter.
So instead, the mum-of-two decided to gift her uterus to Jon & Justin a gay couple from New South Wales' Blue Mountains.
"When you break it down it was for a gay male couple who wouldn't be able to grow a child, so I was like 'I can grow a child, so this is it,' I wasn't taking anything away from them, it was just a 'this is what my body is designed to do and when she comes out, I am going to give her to you, and I hope that my emotions stay in check'."
Shannon’s written a book about her experience called Labour Of Love that she hopes Elsie will read some day so she understands how it took a village of love and science to bring her into the world.
I had so many questions about surrogacy and how her husband and kids felt about it and how you endure the heartache of leaving that hospital with empty arms and what her relationship is with Elsie and her two dads now …...and Shannon was gracious enough to answer them all.
Listen to all of this episode of No Filter, here:
To buy Shannon's book, go to apple.co/mamamia, where you will find every book we talk about on any of our shows in one place.
