THE GREATEST GIFTS OF ALL
It’s easy to get carried away with the parties and present giving at this time of year but, as these five women have discovered, the best things in life don’t always come wrapped up…
Not all the best presents come wrapped
This will be my daughter Lilia’s first Christmas. She will be nine months old and I can picture her crawling around the tree, merrily ripping open presents and playing with the paper. She is the one gift that her father and I wished for and it’s been a long, emotional road to get here. We married in 2012 and started trying for a baby straight away. A few weeks after our honeymoon I discovered I was pregnant. But there was no time to get excited, as it quickly became clear it was ectopic. The baby was growing inside my right Fallopian tube, causing unbearable pain. The tube ruptured and I was rushed into surgery to have it removed.
It was the start of a rollercoaster of raised hopes followed by crushing disappointments. Over the next four years, I had three more pregnancies, including twins, that all ended in miscarriage. Surgery after the first miscarriage led to a rare condition called Asherman syndrome, which caused severe internal scarring, leaving doctors describing my uterus as ‘90% obliterated’. As well as that I was told I had a low egg count.
It became clear that I would never be able to carry a child, nor have a baby that was genetically mine. We discovered that our best option was to find both an egg donor and a surrogate. We joined Surrogacy UK and got to know two amazing women in its network: Janine, who donated her eggs, and Beccy, who agreed to carry our baby. We all quickly became close friends. As we went through the IVF process, Beccy was such an incredible support and I was so hopeful that I would finally have a child.
On the first try, in April 2017, Beccy fell pregnant. Steve and I were with her when she did the test and we were all so excited. I thought because somebody else was carrying my baby, it would be safe. But from the first scans, it was clear the pregnancy wasn’t going well. The heartbeat
‘WE HAVE THE FAMILY WE’VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF’ Just when lawyer Baishali Clayton and her husband, Steve, had given up hope of becoming parents, an amazing thing happened…