Life Under Construction

I was extremely interested to know how Cori handled the emotional aspects of carrying someone else\’s child and then giving that child away shortly after birth. Her answer, below.

I think this is the most common question I get asked, and for me the answer is easy — the baby is not genetically related to me; therefore it is easy to give the baby back to the parents when he/she is born. That is the short answer; here is the slightly more detailed one and one I use to explain the emotional process to the IPs who are sometimes concerned the surrogate might get too attached to the baby (our contracts are very clear by the way, the baby is NOT the surrogate’s, and they will NOT keep the baby, no matter what they try. Any time you have read where the surrogate keeps the baby, she used her own egg, and is essentially adopting the baby out, but changed her mind).

I tell the parents, “If you have to go out to work after the baby is born; you will find the best possible day care facility for your baby, one where he/she will be loved, nurtured, and taken care of. But at 6pm when you pick up your kid, you expect them to give you your child.” In a nutshell that is how I see being a surrogate — I am in the in-home day care!

Of course I had to go for psychological testing to ensure that emotionally I could handle everything; and there are many women out there who cannot. One of best friends who has six kids told me once, “I could never do that. That baby is in me, it’s mine.” When I reminded her that the baby would not have her genetic material, she said, “Possession is 9/10ths of the law – it’s in me, it’s mine!” She would never make a good carrier!

Now if the baby had been created using my egg, or my husband’s sperm, that would be my baby and I could never give it up! But the babies I carried belong 100% to the parents. I admire women who can give up a baby for adoption but I am not one of them.

People have asked about blood type, etc. That is all determined by the parents’ DNA, and not mine. The placenta and the umbilical cord all develop from the embryo that was implanted, so all I do is provide nutrients through the umbilical cord.

Tell us about your agency.

In 2007 I founded my own agency, Surrogate Angels of San Antonio, because there was a need for a local agency. Clinics were sending their clients to Houston and Dallas to surrogate agencies who were then finding surrogates in San Antonio. I have kept my agency small, and work with local surrogates, but international clients. I have many clients from South America and Mexico, as well as several local couples.

You can find our more about me at www.surrogateangelsofsanantonio.com and also on my FB page http://www.facebook.com/pages/San-Antonio-TX/Surrogate-Angels-of-San-Antonio/80028097546.

So, what are the nuts and bolts of surrogacy? What led Cori to take that big step from interest to action? She explains:

James 2:14 says that faith without works is dead. I have always been a practical Christian; if I see a need, I will fill it if I can. To me, that is not a case of praying and asking for God’s leading. He tells us several times in the Word that if we see someone hungry, feed them, if downcast, cheer them up and so on. I do pregnancy well; I have easy and quick deliveries — why not use that ability to help a hurting couple?

I have had people, Christians and non-Christians alike tell me that it must be God’s will that a couple is infertile, but I don’t see that in the Bible. God told us to be fruitful and multiply. He opened the wombs of the barren, and He is the giver of all good gifts. … Some women who have had cancer cannot carry their own babies. Some women are born without a uterus, but they have ovaries (Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser Syndrome).

So that is the main reason it appealed to me — I wanted to do something practical to help a family that wanted to have a genetic piece of themselves in this world, just like I do with my five kids.

How do you choose what families to work with?

When I first became a carrier, I worked through an agency in Dallas. I sent them my full profile (very long questionnaire) and, based on my answers, they looked at the Intended Parent (IPs) profiles and selected someone they thought I would like to work with. They organized what is known as a match meeting, where both couples meet in a neutral location, and you get to talk about everything and anything. The agency matches based on criteria like termination, selective reduction and shared values. If at any time I did not think I had a good match, I could call time. But the agency did a wonderful job the first two times, and then after that I founded my own agency, and so selected my couples personally after that.

On a personal level the couples I chose to work with had to be Christian first and foremost. They do not have to believe exactly as I do, and in fact none of the couples I carried for are non-denominational. But they all have deep levels of faith. I also looked for couples with common interests – you can only talk about a baby for so long before it gets boring!

They had to be pro-life and against selective reduction (that is when there are multiple babies, and lives are taken to reduce the number of babies). I was never ok with that, and I had to be sure the couples I carried for had the same values. At the end of the day the decision to abort or not comes down to the surrogate, even though biologically the baby is not hers, and I never wanted to be placed in a position where I would breach contract by refusing to have one.

How many families have you been surrogate to?

In total I have carried for 5 families (six pregnancies), but unfortunately one of those ended in a miscarriage of high risk mono-mono twins at 13 weeks.

I carried twins in 2005 for W&L
I carried a boy in 2007 for F&L
I carried a boy in 2008 for J&C
I carried a girl in 2010 for J&C (a sister to the one carried in 2008)
I carried twin boys in 2011 for J&L – these are the ones I tragically lost
I carried a boy in 2012 for C&A

How do the families respond to your decision and when they see their child?

These two photos say it all:

Most couples, when they meet me, or any carrier, cannot believe we’d be willing to do this, but I can’t think of a greater gift!

I notice you don’t refer to the families or children by name on your sites, but I have noticed that you know all their birthdays and refer to them with an alias. Do you keep in touch with the families?

The contract I have in place with all the couples does not allow me to name them. Although if you are observant enough on Facebook, you’ll notice I ‘like’ photos of two of the kids that I carried, and their parents comment often on my statues. I have kept in touch with all the families – I am particularly close to the couple I carried for twice, but that is a geographical thing too – we live one mile away from each other. Four of my five couples live locally and I see them, call them or email them periodically and see the kids a few times a year. One of the couples lives in California (they were transferred from TX while I was pregnant with their son) but they send me photos.

Tomorrow our final installment tackles the emotional aspect of surrogacy and gives us information about Cori\’s organization, Surrogate Angels of San Antonio. Stay tuned!

Cori and Terry Smelker and their family.

Several years ago, I met Cori on a Christian writers\’ website. She was pregnant at the time, and as I became better acquainted with her, I learned that she was actually carrying the baby for someone else. I had heard of surrogacy before, but not usually in a good light, so I was curious. I asked some questions and learned that Cori considered what she was doing as a sort of ministry to families where the wife was unable to carry the child herself. Cori has actually gone through this process six times now. I\’ve asked her to share her experience of being a surrogate parent, and we will be posting her interview over the next three days.

Below is the first installment from Cori.

How did you become interested in the surrogacy program?

This happened to me in bits and pieces. When I was 22, I was a new mom and I was visiting my best friend Cathie. She had recently married after being a single mother for over 10 years. She and her new husband decided they wanted to try and conceive. Cathie was already 35 by this point, and the last time she’d been pregnant was 12 years before. After a few months just as they were ready to pack it in and call it a day, she found out that nature had taken its course, and she was expecting. We were sitting in the kitchen and Cathie was alternately lamenting and laughing. Her sister, Maggie, came in about halfway through the conversation and suddenly exploded, “You have no idea how lucky you are! I would give anything, literally anything to have a kid and you’re not even one bit grateful for the kids you have!” Then she stormed sobbing from the room.

Cathie and I stared at each in stunned and shocked silence before Cathie just as suddenly left the room to comfort her sister. After a little while she returned to the kitchen. “Why didn’t Maggie ever tell me they wanted kids? I had no idea. I thought she was like me and wanted to be childless,” she said.

Maggie had been married for fifteen years and had tried for all those years to conceive, to no avail. Cathie looked at me with haunted eyes, “If I’d only known! I wish I could help her. I would have offered to help them in any way I could, even carrying for them if they had wanted me to.”

“Oh what a nice thing to say!” I said.

“No. I mean it,” Cathie told me. “If I was younger, and if this pregnancy was easier on me, I would carry for her.”

Right then, the seed was planted. I already had my first child, and wanted to, at some point have more. Perhaps one day…

But then Terry and I met, and we married in February of 1994. Terry adopted Warrick and soon after, in 1996, we welcomed the first of our children to the world. She was followed in quick succession by three others–another sister in 1997, and two brothers in 1998 and 2000. At that point we were too busy with our own family to really take notice of anyone else’s children or lack thereof.

Then in 2001 Terry was talking to the Music Director’s wife right before they were to get on stage to sing a duet. He teased her about getting pregnant. To his horror, she fell apart and between sobs explained she and her husband had been trying for seven years and were now turning to fertility specialists to try and conceive. Terry apologized profusely — he seriously had never made a gaffe like that before or since.

After she graciously accepted his apology, her husband elaborated, “When we first married, we thought it would be easy. But right now, I would sell my house, or take out a second mortgage, I would really do anything to try and become a father.”

They were about to start a round of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) using their genetic material in hopes that transferring healthy embryos right to her would do the trick and they could finally have the children they longed so desperately for.

It put fertility, pregnancy and family into a whole different light for us. I clearly remember standing outside the church sanctuary waiting to go on stage with the rest of the choir, and listening to Andy tell his friends that he hoped beyond hope this IVF took – for one thing he couldn’t handle one more disappointment, and for another, they were draining all their resources. At that point, the word ‘surrogacy’ raised its head again.

As we drove home from church I told Terry about the conversation. He agreed with me it was very sad, and we both prayed that they would have a healthy baby. I dropped the bombshell on him. “Honey? Do you think if it doesn’t work, you would consider us being a surrogate couple for them?” Of course I then had to explain the whole surrogacy thing. I wouldn’t say he was overjoyed with the idea, but he also didn’t nix it.

After a couple of weeks of waiting anxiously they received the news that IVF had worked and she was pregnant with twins. Thirty-five weeks later they welcomed beautiful fraternal girls into the world.

In the meantime Terry and I bought a house that needed a lot of work, I was busy with the kids, and the whole idea of surrogacy was shelved once more. At that point I had never really considered carrying for someone other than a family I knew, and because I hadn’t done any research I wasn’t even aware there were agencies that handled this sort of thing.

In 2003 we moved to Texas, and I went to the bus stop every morning with the kids. My attention was particularly drawn to a single pregnant mother who walked her six year old to the stop. I didn’t want to be nosey, but I did ask when she was due. “October” was the terse reply, and I dropped the subject.

October came and went and I couldn’t help noticing the belly was gone, but there was no baby. I asked McKenna where her brother or sister was, and she said, “Oh that wasn’t my brother.” At that point curiosity overcame me and I had to ask the mother, June, what happened.

“I am a surrogate,” she said. “That was the second baby I had for someone else,” she continued.

The second. Wow.

I must have asked her a million questions — how hard was it to find a reputable agency? How did they match you? What was the contract like? How long, from beginning to end did the whole process take? She answered each question very patiently.

I came home, and Terry and I talked about it and decided that this was something I should pursue. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first started the search. Would I be too old? At the time was I 35, and I know most doctors agree that after age 35 the risks go up for women desiring to get pregnant. But my body was only the conduit, none of my genetic material was to be involved, so would my age be a factor? Surely the doctors would be looking at the quality, age and viability of the egg of the person I would be carrying for, right?

That is how it started…

Tomorrow, Cori answers nut-and-bolt questions about the surrogacy process.

Cori and Terry have been married for almost 20 years. They have five kids, Warrick 24, Teagan 17, Hayley 16, Garrick 15 and Carson almost 14. When Cori is not running her agency–Surrogate Angels of San Antonio–she works as the Executive Assistant to their pastor, Dr Theo Wolmarans at Christian Family Church.