After years of miscarriages, I had abandoned the prospect of giving birth. Then, as we prepared to conceive using a surrogate, the impossible happened
T
he first time I miscarried, I blamed myself. After getting pregnant early on in our relationship, at 34, I had a flash of doubt that my partner Alex and I weren’t ready to be parents. Then, a few weeks later, the pregnancy was over.
My second early loss, just a few months later, hit me harder. We went to a fertility specialist, and the tests on both of us came back clear, but then I couldn’t get pregnant at all.
By the time we married in December 2018, Alex and I had been on a relentless treadmill of fertility interventions for three years. I’d held my breath during my third pregnancy in May 2017, devastated when it ended, only to be followed by a fourth loss a year later, at 10-and-a-half weeks.
