Surrogate says she nearly died carrying triplets

Surrogate says she nearly died carrying triplets

Nancy says she signed the contract that made her a surrogate mother mostly to help someone else experience the joy of having children. It was a decision that nearly killed her.

Carrying triplets for complete strangers, the Ontario woman developed first high- blood pressure, then congestive heart failure, before she was put into a medically induced coma last fall to save her life — and that of the infants.

Nancy, 47, survived and revealed her story this week, as tragic news emerged of an American surrogate who fared less well, dying during delivery of twins and leaving her own children behind.

Those and other cases underline the little- discussed risks of bearing someone else’s kids, and raise more questions about a practice that appears to be increasingly popular — and largely unregulated — in Canada.

Some experts argue it is more reason to allow surrogates to receive commercial payments, others that new rules are needed to better protect them. Some advocates argue surrogacy should be banned altogether because of the dangers, and other reasons.

“At what point are we just using these women?” asks Jennifer Lahl of California’s Center for Bioethics & Culture, who opposes surrogacy generally. “Women didn’t get this far to be treated like breeding animals.”

Canada allows contract surrogacy, but not commercial payment of the women.

Nancy says she still supports the practice, but bemoaned the lack of information surrogates receive about the hazards, and the way they sometimes are treated.

“Did I feel like an employee? Damn straight I did,” said the mother of five, who asked that her full name be withheld because of ongoing legal action. “Like a piece of trash. They used me and just threw me away like I was nothing.”

Karen Busby, a law professor and human- rights expert at the University of Manitoba who studies surrogacy, argues the “vast majority ” of the arrangements actually work out well, while serious, life- threatening complications for any pregnant mother in Canada remain very rare.

But she says rules are needed to make it safer for what the industry calls “gestational carriers.”

Busby advocates regulations that limit the age of surrogates and the number of times they can carry someone else’s babies; ensure they had healthy pregnancies before and have completed their own families; and restrict the number of embryos used in trying to get them pregnant.

Meanwhile, consultants say demand is swelling for Canadian surrogates, a trend that seems to be confirmed by statistics from the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society.

Clinics here carried out more than 400 in vitro fertilization cycles on surrogates in 2013, the association says, double the number just five years earlier.

The risk of maternal death in childbirth in Canada is still low — six to 11 per 100,000 deliveries in recent years. But surrogates, and others, undergoing fertility treatment face elevated dangers.

The rates of pregnancy- induced high blood pressure, pre- eclampsia ( hypertension with protein in the urine), gestational diabetes and hysterectomies are all several times higher for women carrying twins or more. And multiple pregnancies are made much more likely by IVF.

Evidence even suggests that pregnancy involving donated eggs — almost always the case with contract surrogacy — is more likely to trigger hypertension or postpartum hemorrhage.

Sally Rhoads- Heinrich, a consultant who helps bring together surrogates and “intended parents,” said she has seen an increase in serious complications among her mothers lately, possibly because their average age is getting older as demand outstrips the supply of younger women.

One suffered a cardiac arrest while giving birth in Saskatchewan in 2013, another developed a blood clot in her lungs and two others lost their wombs; all are unable to have more children, said the owner of Surrogacy in Canada Online.

Bare- bones reports emerged in recent days about an Idaho woman who died because of a rare complication called placental abruption. She had been a surrogate five times, but also had her own family.

For Rhoads- Heinrich, the rare but real risks reinforce the need to loosen Canadian laws and allow surrogates here to be paid fees, not just their costs.

Busby says clinics should also be mandated to treat surrogate mothers — not the would- be parents who foot the bills — as their true patients.

Yet Rhoads- Heinrich says the opposite is often the case, the paying clients are given top priority, the carriers secondary billing.

Nancy’s experience would seem

Once you become a surrogate and something goes wrong, there’s no support. There’s no support for you whatsoever.

to support that view.

She signed with an American surrogacy agency and, by coincidence, ended up working with a Canadian couple, who she says paid her expenses and a bit more.

Nancy says she received a “twosecond blurb” about risks before she had two embryos inserted in her womb at a clinic in Mexico. Using more than one embryo at a time in IVF greatly boosts the chances of a multiple pregnancy.

She says she heard about the heightened risk of pre- eclampsia with triplets only when she was diagnosed with the condition late in her pregnancy.

Two days later, Nancy was struggling to breathe, and doctors diagnosed potentially deadly congestive heart failure, which causes fluid to accumulate in the lungs. Worried that her sky- high blood pressure could trigger a stroke, they induced the coma, then conducted a caesarean section.

Worse was to come, as excessive bleeding required that her uterus be removed.

It ended Nancy’s hopes for one more child, and brought on instant menopause.

Then, to add insult to injury, she says that two Internet support groups threw her out when she began complaining about her experiences online.

“Once you become a surrogate and something goes wrong, there’s no support,” Nancy says.

“There’s no support for you whatsoever.”