A three-month CBC investigation revealed that a lot of women who become surrogates feel internal and external pressure to have multiple babies. And experts warn that there isn’t enough medical oversight of women who have babies in quick succession.
Elizabeth Roberts needs a hysterectomy due to complications from her second surrogacy. She says there needs to be better medical standards in Canada to prevent surrogates from pursuing back-to-back pregnancies that may put their health at risk. 4:47
After Elizabeth Roberts had her two kids, the 39-year-old knew she wanted to help someone else build a family. Having watched a friend volunteer to be a surrogate, Roberts signed herself up in 2016.
The Halifax nurse filled out an online application for one of the biggest surrogacy agencies in the country, and within days, her profile was live.
“I didn’t quite understand what I was sinking my teeth into. I just knew that I wanted to help people,” Roberts said.
In the years since, Roberts has been a surrogate twice. And while her pregnancies have been relatively uneventful, she is now preparing for a hysterectomy, which she believes is because of her back-to-back pregnancies.
Dr. John Kingdom, a high-risk obstetrician at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and professor at the University of Toronto, said it’s possible that Roberts’s complications could have been caused by having pregnancies in quick succession.
But he’s even more concerned that Canada does not have mandatory wait times for surrogacies. He said that leaves women like Roberts vulnerable to manipulation.
“I think we should recognize that surrogates are altruistic, kind people who are at risk of power imbalances,” Kingdom said.
‘Like online dating for surrogacy’
Roberts said as soon as her profile went live in 2016, she was flooded by parent profiles and it broke her heart.
“It was like online dating for surrogacy,” she said. “There are so many intended parents out there and only so many surrogates.”
Roberts connected with one couple right away, prepared her body with painful progesterone injections and estrogen patches and hoped for the best.
“I had put a lot of pressure on myself, because literally all their eggs were in my basket. And I was just hoping that my basket would hold onto them.”
The embryo transplant worked, and nine months later she delivered the couple’s baby girl. Roberts remembers the birth like it was yesterday.
She recalls “looking over and seeing the parents hold their daughter, and the dad looked up at me and he just had tears streaming down his face, and he just said, ‘Thank you.’ Any questions that I had ever had through the entire journey just disappeared in that moment.”
CBC News spoke with dozens of surrogates as part of an exclusive investigation, and nearly every woman described the intense emotional high they experienced right after giving birth to surrogacy babies, some describing it as addictive.
“I think that is the thing that you’re searching for when you go into this,” Roberts said. “We’ve done this huge, incredible, amazing thing — what are we going to do now? And so I knew right away that… I was going to hav