A year after giving birth for a couple she was matched with through a charity, i speaks to surrogate mother, Joanna Towers, who gave birth in 2024, about the aspects of surrogacy she hadn’t anticipated
I wasn’t sure I was going to go through with surrogacy until I was on the table having the embryo inserted.
I’d talked about it on and off for years. My husband James and I had no trouble at all with having our own family – we decided that two was the right number for us. But I often thought, “God, imagine if this hadn’t been able to happen for us?”
My parents were baffled when I first told them – they didn’t want me to put myself at risk. I think they thought I’d just forget about it eventually. But when I hit my 38th birthday I thought, if I want to do it I need to get on with it. The process moved quite quickly once we started and James is unflappable, so he just took it all in his stride once the decision was made. We were also undergoing a house renovation at the time, so it wasn’t the only drama in our lives.
My kids – Elodie and Teddy – were about three and five. It was a breeze telling them about the surrogacy – kids are so open-minded. And part of the reason I wanted to do it was to show them an example of trying to do something brave.
I contacted a surrogacy agency called COTS in 2022. They got back in touch with me, I had a DBS screening, and then they gave me some profiles of families who were looking to match with a surrogate. I looked through about 10 and there was a Venezuelan/Portuguese couple who were really quite different from me and my husband, and just so fun and sweet.
The agency requires you to have quite a big “getting to know you” process before you commit to anything. You have to find out whether you get on as people, and then, with the support of the agency, they make you drill down into what your opinions would be on any number of eventualities, like multiple pregnancies, birth defects, things like that. They also give you counseling sessions to make sure you have thought of everything that might happen.
We were ready to go by October – the couple had three embryos ready to go and we did our first transfer in November 2022, which was successful. But unfortunately, I miscarried at eight weeks. It was heartbreaking for the couple. I felt a little guilty because it was just such a waste of everybody’s efforts and money and hope. But we knew we were going to try again. We had another transfer in March – which didn’t work – and then we tried again in July of 2023, which became baby Audrey.
When you think about surrogacy hypothetically, everybody says, “oh, it’s going to be so hard to give that baby away. How will you do it?” But actually, if you speak to anybody who’s done it, it’s not an issue at all, because you are never in the headspace that it’s your baby. I work in the NHS, so I have about 15 patients a day. When they started to notice that I was pregnant, they’d all say, “oh, congratulations!”. I just refused to say “it’s not my baby” – because it’s such a can of worms. So I wouldn’t say anything. I did quite enjoy telling people that James wasn’t the father though, as they were always quite taken aback by that.
What I did find difficult was the lack of privacy running up to the birth after I got pregnant. The hardest part was towards the end. The parents of the baby, who lived in London, came to stay with us for the final two weeks in case we went into labour. They hadn’t had a baby before and are the nicest people you could ever meet. But I don’t think they really understood that very pregnant women just want to hide in a box and be on their own.
I spun out a little bit in the last couple of weeks, just because my hormones were telling me to go to ground and I was finding it difficult having the parents there in celebration mode. My husband James was amazing – he could see that I was really struggling. He was so good at coaching me when I did feel on the verge of yelling at them. He very gently kept me on the right path, saying, “you know, we can’t make them feel unwelcome at the birth of their own child” – and was really good at going in between me and them and saying that I needed a little bit of space at this point.
That was by far the most difficult thing with surrogacy. You think: “It’ll be fine. I’ll be pregnant with someone else’s baby”, but actually, you can’t simulate your hormonally-driven thought processes when you’re pregnant. I didn’t anticipate how difficult I would find that. I don’t think I behaved perfectly the whole way through, to be honest, but I think they forgive me.
As soon as the baby was here, all of that tension melted away. And I think they got why I was stressing so much. We have such a good relationship now that I think they can put my rage in a bit of perspective.
We’ve got a WhatsApp group with the parents and they’re constantly sending us funny messages and updates which haven’t stopped since baby Audrey arrived in April 2024. It fills my cup.
I only ever intended to do it once, but I’m so glad I did. I found it physically much more difficult to recover from a birth at 40 and I don’t think I could put my husband through that again. I approached the whole thing as my sacrifice but by the time we’d gone through it, I realised just how much I had asked of my husband and kids – I never asked them if they were okay with the plan. It was actually quite a lot to take for granted, because it’s something I did for personal satisfaction and they always just supported me.
It’s very easy for people to make judgements on people who opt for surrogacy when they’re sitting there with their family of three and don’t need to go through those difficult decisions. But the reality is that surrogacy is nobody’s Plan A. I wish it was a more normal thing to do. The ratio of prospective parents to surrogates is three to one and some hospitals have seen so little of surrogacy that there aren’t really very good pathways in place for the process to run smoothly. Obviously, it’s challenging – but once you’ve done it, you have satisfaction for the rest of your life.
