Modern-day storks

Lori picked up the home pregnancy test Saturday night, but knew she shouldn’t take it until Sunday morning, just to be sure. The next day, she took the test, and waited. After two minutes, the word “pregnant” appeared in the window. Lori was thrilled.

Her husband was excited, too, if a bit bemused.

“Congratulations?” he said. “Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

The pregnancy was a new experience for both of them. It wasn’t because Lori had never been pregnant; in fact, she and her husband have two beautiful sons. But this time was different. Still full of elation, Lori grabbed the phone to share her morning news. She didn’t call her parents, or her best friend. She called the two people she knew would be even more excited than she was: the newly conceived child’s biological mother and father.

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Because pregnancy is an intimate process, surrogates must consciously detach themselves. Photo by Jena Schleis

For many people who lived during the 1980s, the term “surrogacy” recalls news coverage of Mary Beth Whitehead and the bitter battle over “Baby M.” Whitehead, who was the biological mother of the child, contractually agreed to carry the baby for another couple but later sought custody of the child. More recently, surrogacy has cropped up in a spate of TV shows and movies, including the 2008 comedy “Baby Mama,” which pairs Tina Fey, a successful businesswoman in her late 30s who desperately wants a child, with Amy Poehler, a woman she meets through a professional surrogacy service.

Surrogacy services play matchmaker between surrogate mothers and intended parents. Mary Murphey, program director of the Surrogacy Center in Madison, has worked with women and men from all over the world to help them realize their dreams of being parents. For Murphey, intended parents looking to use a surrogate are victims of a sad paradox.

“You spend most of your reproductive life — think about this — trying not to get pregnant. Then when you do want to get pregnant, you think it should be easy,” she explains. “Sex becomes a job, and it’s not fun anymore.”

Founded in 2002, the Surrogacy Center follows strict vetting procedures. Before being matched, intended parents, surrogates and their partners take personality tests and undergo psychological evaluations to determine if they are emotionally stable enough to shoulder the challenges of surrogacy and pregnancy. The center also uses these tests to match intended parents with surrogates who share similar views on sensitive issues such as abortion.

“The ideal surrogate comes in here and says, ‘This is not my baby. I don’t have to raise it, so I will agree with whatever the intended parents want,’” explains Murphey. “Ultimately it’s the surrogate’s choice because it’s her body. If there is any risk to her whatsoever, they will terminate the pregnancy.”

The center also requires all potential surrogates have children of their own. This ensures they have a healthy track record for pregnancy and will not be at risk; it also plays a psychosocial role in detaching surrogates from the children they carry. Surrogates do not have to be married but must provide evidence of a supportive home environment.

[youtube width=”400″ height=”300″ align=”right”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9_z8Z-wytI[/youtube]

According to Murphey, using a surrogacy service has several advantages. It gives intended parents access to lawyers, medical professionals and psychiatrists to ease the process and prevent custody disputes. The Surrogacy Center also has a high success rate: 85 percent of surrogates become pregnant when two embryos are used in the implantation process.

Because Wisconsin is one of the most surrogacy-friendly states in the country, the center attracts hopeful parents from all over the world. This is largely due to what attorneys Carol Gapen and Lynn Bodi, co-owners of the Surrogacy Center and founders of the Law Center for Children & Families call a “lack of law.” Only one Wisconsin statute mentions surrogacy, mandating that the surrogate’s name appear on the child’s birth certificate pending legal action by the intended parents. Once the child is born, the surrogate and the intended parents appear in court to have the intended parents deemed the legal parents. Gapen and Bodi then use the existing law of paternity to argue that the intended parents are the legal parents of the child based on their biology (if applicable) and intent — hence the term “intended parents.” After this is done, the child is issued a new birth certificate with the parents’ names on it, and the old birth certificate with the surrogate’s name on it is destroyed.

Many states and various countries have completely illegalized paid surrogacy because of cases like Whitehead’s. As a result, women and men travel thousands of miles to take advantage of the openness of Wisconsin’s law. Margaret Klein and her husband live in New York City, but their hopes of having a child brought them to Wisconsin and the Surrogacy Center’s doorstep.

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Klein, 51, discovered she was infertile during her first marriage. When she married her second husband, the couple began considering adoption. This halted after they came across a Newsweek article about surrogacy.

“We read about surrogacy and decided that if it was really a viable option that it was way more appealing than adoption,” Klein explains. “Simply because we could utilize my husband’s biology — his genetics. So we could have at least half of the equation a little bit more in our control.”