Sophie Beresiner was 35 years old, fighting cancer, and ready to start a family with her husband when her doctors gave her a year to get pregnant and have a baby before continuing her cancer treatments. Pressed for time, she and her husband decided to use IVF. The ticking clock and pressure to conceive turned her quest for a baby into a game she had to win.
After learning that she had “absolutely no ovarian function whatsoever” she was devastated — as anyone would be. “Five failed rounds of IVF with donor eggs followed before we admitted defeat and I restarted my cancer medication,” she said. “By then nearly 37, I already felt ‘too old’ to start the family I had imagined would be complete by now. It was devastating — but it felt impossible to give up on our dream of children entirely, to reconcile the waste of such huge emotional and financial investment.”
Her efforts finally awarded her a baby girl who was born via donor egg and surrogate in 2020 — their “last available embryo,” she said. It would be a year before UK law recognized her as the baby’s mother, however, listing the surrogate on the birth certificate with Beresiner’s husband, and considering Beresiner to be the foster mother. But the actual biological mother of this baby girl wasn’t even factored into that equation. For some, she is just a footnote in the baby’s story, but for the child, she will likely become the mysterious main character.
Two years later, another baby girl was born via a different surrogate. It is unclear if she was created using the same egg donor, as Beresiner had said that the first baby girl was the last available embryo they had. However, she too will likely wonder about her two other mothers who helped create her and then disappeared.
In all, Beresiner used 32 donor eggs, which she said led to the creation of 10 human embryos. Five of those were transferred to her uterus and four more to surrogates. Just two of those children survived to birth. In her quest to fulfill her desires for a child and to not “waste” her efforts, at least eight children died.
WATCH: Jennifer Lahl shares dangers of egg donation and surrogacy for women and children
The two who survived were created with the intention of separating them from their biological mothers and birth mothers and of denying them contact with their two other mothers. The now-adults of children born via donor eggs and surrogates have shared the trauma they endured because of this separation.
An anonymous woman conceived via egg donation explained, “I’m personally against [egg donation], based on how I feel about my conception and my life. It bothers me that I cost money, that the one woman I want most in this life is a stranger yet 50% of me. Sometimes I wish I weren’t born. I didn’t ask for this, and I never would have consented to it.”
An adult who was born to a surrogate said:
Something horrible happened to us at birth. We lost our mothers. They did not die, but they might as well have been dead because we lost them in the capacity of mother, and to a tiny baby, that feels like death…That makes us feel very rejected. That leaves a hole in our hearts whether we admit to it or it manifests some other way like in depression or a fear of getting close to someone else…
Sometimes it doesn’t show up until we are in our teens or [are] young adults, and like me sometimes it shows up as a baby when I scream my head off for six weeks and they call it colic… Nothing can console us… I wanted my mother and she wasn’t there… You can’t just substitute mothers and expect us to be OK with it.
Another explained:
When I was blessed to find my birth mom I subsequently developed relationships with my extended family. At 26, for the first time in my life, I saw where I got my sense of humor from, my physical traits etc. …
As a product of surrogacy… I am told, look how much your parents wanted you, they planned and saved to have you. You should be grateful and thankful for them. But at the end of the day, the adults were looking out for themselves, and what they needed and wanted.
IVF carries a high death toll with 1.7 million embryonic lives already lost and another one million currently frozen in labs. It also carries physical and emotional health risks for the children who do survive to birth. No adult has a right to a child, but children do have a right to life and a right to their biological parents. Research has shown that children raised by their married biological parents have better outcomes than their counterparts raised by single or non-biologically related adults. They tend to be healthier both mentally and physically and do better in school.
Beresiner believes that her daughters “take up an extra-special place in my heart” because they were born via surrogacy, but research and testimonials say otherwise. She calls the children and all the joys and stress that come with them her “reward for all my efforts.” But children aren’t products or rewards that adults win because they paid a lot of money or hired a lot of surrogates. Children — from zygote to adulthood — are human beings who have rights that deserve to be protected.
