WOMB FOR ONE MORE
Meet the ‘twinblings’: When mom and surrogate both get pregnant
This mom is expecting just months after her first daughter was born.
When Lara Beth Levy took a pregnancy test in July, she was bowled over by the results. “I’ve taken quite a few, and none showed positive so quickly,” said the 34-year-old, who had suffered miscarriages and dealt with fertility issues for years.
But the craziest part wasn’t just that she was pregnant: It was that she was already expecting a biological daughter in mere months, via surrogate.
Levy and her husband, Fritz, welcomed Cora in November, and they’re expecting baby No. 2 — another girl — later this month.
“They’ll be roughly 15 weeks apart,” said Levy, who lives in Dallas. “It’s still very hard to believe. It’s crazy — I’m excited and nervous, but so grateful.”
She added: “We knew my pregnancy would blow people’s minds.”
With news swirling around the circumstances of Hilaria Baldwin’s newborn daughter, Lucia, born just about five months after her son Eduardo, a confused public armed with a basic understanding of biology is left wondering how it happened.
Although Baldwin has not directly addressed how little Lucia made it Earth-side, sources confirmed to Page Six that her sixth child was indeed born via surrogate. The phenomenon has come to be known as “twinblings” or same-age siblings from different pregnancies.
Levy never imagined that after trying to conceive for three years, having resigned from her demanding marketing job just to focus on her fertility and in vitro fertilization treatments, she’d have a baby on her own. (To add to the complications, Levy underwent a prophylactic double mastectomy early in 2020, having discovered she was a carrier for the BRCA1 gene mutation.)
The Levys worked with agency ConceiveAbilities to help pair her with a Dallas-area surrogate, Celeste Remediz, who had a successful embryo transplant on the second try in March 2020.
Hearing that was exciting enough: “So many times we doubted if we’re going to have biological children for years, especially after a failed transfer,” Levy said. But finding out she got pregnant naturally elicited pure euphoria, if not disbelief.
“I would’ve never assumed we would get this lucky,” Levy said. “I didn’t think I’d be able to experience this.”
Her husband processed the news with uncommon calm. “He said, ‘This is amazing, we’ll make this work,’ ” recalled Levy. It wasn’t always easy for her, though. She was plagued with fear of losing the baby based on her past experiences. “It took me three months — sometimes I’m still processing it.”
Levy and Fritz were in the delivery room as gestational surrogate Remediz, a mom of three, delivered Cora on Nov. 29. Remediz asked Levy, then 23 weeks along, if she was ready to do this herself in a few months. “It didn’t scare me,” she said.
The hard part was telling friends and family.
“It was such different reactions to the pregnancies,” said Levy, who added that while she waited until well into the second trimester to share the good news of the surrogate’s successful embryo transfer of Cora, revealing her own pregnancy took more care.
“It took my in-laws five minutes to comprehend,” said the new mom. “Everyone knows how hard we worked for Cora. Everyone said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ”
Dean Hutchison, vice president of legal services at Circle Surrogacy & Egg Donation, a surrogacy agency headquartered in Boston, told The Post that the “twinbling” phenomenon is rare, but magical when it does happen.
“On a handful of occasions, suddenly the surrogate finds out she’s pregnant and the IP [intended parent] finds out she’s pregnant,” said Hutchison, who recalls that in July 2018, his agency had biological siblings born about two weeks apart, with the surrogate delivering before the mother.
“There’s probably no medical reason why,” he said. “People suggest that the stress related to their own fertility issues goes away [with a surrogate], and that stress relief itself helps them. It’s a cool experience when it happens.”
As for Levy, she’s basking in Cora’s newborn phase while awaiting the arrival of her little sister later this month.
“We went from thinking we might not have biological children to now having two,” she said, taking stock of her blessings. “It’s going to be a really loud house for quite some time, and that’s OK with us. I think of it as a beautiful story.”