Making a family’s dream come true
St. John’s mom, inspired by her own daughter’s egg donation, carrying baby for Montreal couple
Every Friday for the past few months, Lesley Rumsey of St. John’s has made a special post on Facebook.
It’s her weekly “Joy Day” update, where she details her pregnancy progress, describing her number of weeks along (24 right now), the size of the baby (current comparison: an ear of corn), and how she’s feeling (no, the heat hasn’t been bothering her; she’s actually enjoying it).
Among those who look forward with excitement to Rumsey’s weekly updates are her family members, friends and the baby’s parents, who are waiting in anticipation for the day they’ll join Rumsey in the delivery room.
It’s Rumsey’s third pregnancy in 20 years — her own daughters are 20 and 10. The baby girl she’ll deliver in November is the daughter of Carl Mastrovito and Alexandre Béland of Montreal, a couple that has long wanted to start a family.
The soon-to-be new dads consider themselves lucky to have connected with a surrogate, especially Rumsey.
“We decided to invest in a surrogacy journey instead of a big, gay Italian wedding,” the fiancés say, laughing.
Together for five years, they took steps to start their family in February 2021 and began researching Canadian agencies specializing in egg donation and surrogacy. They engaged Proud Fertility, finding it had less of a business-oriented model than other agencies, and created two sets of embryos — one genetically linked to each of them — with the help of an anonymous egg donor.
After that, Mastrovito and Béland were put on a waiting list for a surrogate and were told it could take a while.
“There’s one surrogate (in Canada) for every five sets of intended parents, whether they are gay, straight or whatever,” Mastrovito explains. “Only 20 per cent of intended parents find surrogates.”
‘NATURAL’ DECISION
Rumsey had previously considered surrogacy after witnessing a family member experience infertility issues. But it was her older daughter Skylar’s decision to become an egg donor that inspired her to sign up with the agency.
“I definitely hadn’t ever thought about it as something I could do until I saw a video online about a woman who had donated eggs at around the same age as me,” Skylar explains.
“I decided to look it up and I found Proud Fertility. I made an account, and within a few days, they contacted me.”
The decision to donate her eggs, she says, “just felt natural” to her.
“Being a part of the LGBT community myself, if there’s something I can do to help people who want to have a family, I’m happy to do it,” she added.
The egg donation process involved multiple steps, from medical screenings and psychological evaluations to self-administered hormone injections to stimulate the maturation of multiple eggs at once.
Skylar travelled to Vancouver twice — once on her own for medical tests and again with her mom and sister for the actual donation process, which she describes as painless apart from some cramping the next day. She didn’t choose the anonymous route.
“You can decide whether you’d like to be contacted by any future children that are born from your donation, and I would totally be open to that,” Skylar says.
The agency will contact her if her eggs are selected by potential parents.
“She’s amazing,” Rumsey says of her oldest daughter’s donation.
‘THERE WAS A CONNECTION’
While the family was in Vancouver for Skylar’s donation procedure, Rumsey chatted with agency director Nathan Chan about the possibility of becoming a surrogate.
He sent her four videos of prospective parents to review. That night, lying in bed, she watched them. Mastrovito and Béland were the fourth video.
“I picked No. 4 and then I got the girls to watch them and they picked No. 4. I wrote the agent back and said, ‘It’s No. 4.’ He said, ‘But do you want me to send you more before you decide?’ I was like, ‘Nope, I’m good,’” she recalls.
“It was how genuine they seemed, and how nice. There was a connection. It’s just the way you feel when you meet someone.”
Mastrovito and Béland were at home doing the dishes when they received a text message from Chan letting them know they had been chosen by a potential surrogate. He sent them her profile and the connection was immediate for them, too. It was Rumsey’s personality and her humour that drew them to her, they say.
“I don’t want this to sound fabricated, because it’s true: there are a lot of profiles from out west and Ontario, and very little come from the (Atlantic provinces). As soon as I found out she came from Newfoundland, I told Alex, ‘This can’t be better,’” Mastrovito says.
“I’ve been there for work many times and I’ve never seen such welcoming people. I told Alex it’s like one in a million.”
After weeks of preparation, similar to what Skylar experienced, the embryo transfer happened in a Toronto clinic in January — with the dads attending via Facetime — and they’ve come to St. John’s twice to see Rumsey. They went with her in person to hear their baby’s heartbeat for the first time.
“I’ve noticed Lesley doesn’t check the monitors as much as she checks us and how we’re reacting,” Mastrovito says.
Rumsey explains it’s because she wants to see the joy on their faces. It’s a joy she shares, and it’s completely different from what she experienced when pregnant with her own daughters.
“There’s happiness and excitement with your own but there’s still a feeling of fear, like your life is about to change. This way, I get to enjoy the pregnancy and see my kids and my family have joy in it, but someone else’s extended family as well. The fear of ‘Oh sh*t, what did we do?’ goes to these parents,” Rumsey says, laughing.
‘A CRAZY JOURNEY’
Mastrovito and Béland will be in the case room for their baby’s birth and are looking for an Airbnb or furnished apartment in St. John’s to rent for a month around the time she arrives.
They’ve been preparing their daughter’s nursery and doing the necessary legal work to bring her home, which has been a frustrating process, to say the least, with government departments in Quebec seeming unsure of what to do in a surrogacy situation and sometimes not understanding that Rumsey is the gestational carrier, not the mother. In Quebec, they say, a surrogate always retains a legal right to the child.
The dads say they are keenly aware of how fortunate they are to be able to have a family through surrogacy, and wish governments made it easier for those wishing to have children but unable to do it themselves to access the services they need.
“To go through surrogacy is a luxury and that’s very sad,” Béland says.
“We always hear about the population declining and nobody’s helping those couples who would actually be good parents. It’s not because they don’t have money to support the children. It’s the sum of money they’re asking for. We’re very lucky.”
In Canada, egg donation and surrogacy are altruistic, meaning Rumsey and Skylar aren’t paid for what they’re doing, though they are reimbursed for their costs. Both women say their main compensation is being able to give such a gift to others. Rumsey has already offered to carry Mastrovito’s and Beland’s second child.
The dads say they are looking forward to letting their daughter know her story and her connection to Newfoundland and Labrador. They weren’t sure when they started their surrogacy journey how it would look; or whether their surrogate would stay in their lives after their baby was born or not. Now they know. “There’s so much emotion. It’s just a crazy journey overall, and for us, it’s gone so smoothly that we’re still kind of pinching each other,” Mastrovito says, explaining how much it’s meant to him and his fiancé to see the excitement and support of Rumsey’s family.
“It’s impossible for us to never talk again.”
Rumsey and her daughter recommend both egg donation and surrogacy to anyone who has ever considered it, urging them to go online and research it.
“It’s been an amazing experience so far,” Rumsey says. “Surreal is the word we often use.”