Whitney Port, who starred on the popular MTV reality show “The Hills” in the 2000s, has opened up about using a surrogate to have children, saying that the surrogate they chose miscarried twice.
Port is married to producer Tim Rosenman, and they have one son, Sonny, born in 2017. She seems to have since suffered secondary infertility, having experienced three miscarriages and a chemical pregnancy. A chemical pregnancy occurs when a miscarriage occurs very early in pregnancy; many women are often not even aware it took place.
The couple has since tried to have children by hiring a woman to be their surrogate, but those attempts have failed as well, according to her podcast, With Whit. “We decided to go down the surrogacy road at the end of last year, after a really long journey of not being able to conceive on our own,” she said, adding, “We found an amazing surrogate and we ended up doing two transfers with the surrogate. Both transfers ended up miscarrying. The last miscarriage was just a month ago.”
“And it’s worth saying that both were after seven and a half weeks, where we were told we had a 97% chance of successful pregnancy,” her husband, Tim, added. “So to have that back to back, the odds are really crazy.”
READ: ‘Handmaid’ epidemic: How renting wombs creates a class of ‘breeders’ for the elite
The couple still have three children frozen as embryos, and are trying to decide if they want to keep trying… or if they want to simply destroy this current batch of embryos and create some more.
“We’re kind of at this beginning phase again where we still have three embryos left, two that are tested, one that’s untested,” Port explained. “We are deciding, do we try a new lab? Do we do another round of egg retrieval to get new embryos? Like, are all these embryos from the last batch not good, or do we put in one of the embryos that’s already made in the surrogate right now and just get that going while we make a plan to do another egg retrieval?”
Again, we see Port using language that dehumanizes the children that she, herself, has chosen to create. These are human beings, yet they are being described no differently than cuts of meat someone chooses at the grocery story: fresh or frozen, high quality or low quality, leftovers or surplus.
There is also the commodification of women, in which the wealthy elite — like Port — purchase the bodies of less privileged women to carry children for them. If anything is evocative of “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the United States, it’s not abortion… it’s surrogacy.
