It Took 3 Women to Make This Baby

Elisa Polka, egg donor; Beth Brenner, mother; and Sylvia Hernandez, surrogate
On an unusually hot spring day in 2007, Beth Brenner was hosting an intimate celebration at her stylish New York City
apartment. Beth, a fortysomething magazine publisher, had invited two friends to toast the successful result of their
long-standing collaboration. Her guests: Sylvia Hernandez, a 37-year-old single mother who'd raised two teenagers in
Visalia, California, where she worked as a supervisor at a bank; and Elisa Polka from Jacksonville, Florida, a 26-year-old
former beauty pageant contestant, who was headed off to graduate school in the fall.
The three women's interests ran the generational gamut: Elisa spends her free time talking to friends on Facebook and
planning her upcoming wedding and honeymoon in Africa; Beth is never far from her Treo, which she uses to keep on
top of countless business deals and coordinate her social life with her husband, Bob, an attorney; and Sylvia is very
family oriented—close with her kids and her eight siblings on the West Coast. But they were all there to admire the
same living, breathing near-miracle: Beth's three-week-old daughter, the snub-nosed, dark-haired, pillow-cheeked
Natalie Cate Brenner. Elisa had provided the egg that, once merged with Bob's sperm, was implanted in Sylvia's womb;
Sylvia, for nine months, had carried the baby as a surrogate; and now that Natalie was here, Beth would forever be her
mother. One woman's egg, another's uterus, a third's wide-open heart—together they'd created a new life, and
changed one another's lives in the process.

Years of trying
"We always figured that at the point that we wanted to have children, we could do it," says Beth Brenner. "We had been
successful at everything else we had done. Why couldn't we have kids when we wanted to?"

And yet when Beth went off birth control in her thirties, she didn't get pregnant. For several years she and Bob refused
to let the issue become all-consuming. "We were working, traveling," says Beth, the publisher of Domino (a magazine
owned by Glamour's parent company). "I'm sure people said, Look at those two, they love life!'" Only when Beth hit 40
did the couple meet with a fertility doctor to discuss the possibility of in vitro fertilization (IVF), implanting one or more
embryos in Beth's uterus. At Beth's age, the doctors said, her chances of success would be higher with the eggs of a
donor than with her own. Beth accepted the news with the same pragmatism that had gotten her ahead in business:
Rather than dwelling on losing her biological connection to the child, she focused on what would get her a happy,
healthy baby. A donor egg it would be.
Three times, Beth was implanted with another woman's fertilized eggs, and three times she had to hear the news from
a nurse on the other end of the phone that her pregnancy hadn't taken (getting one such phone call in an airport
bathroom was a low point, says Beth). She also underwent surgery for a kind of endometriosis, which can reduce
fertility.
After the third attempt failed, Beth's doctor suggested that she and Bob consider surrogacy—hiring another woman to
carry their embryo or embryos (costs can run as high as $80,000). They were less than enthusiastic. The logistics, as well
as the overwhelming dependence they'd have on the surrogate, were intimidating. "The idea of having someone else
be such an integral part of this very personal process…I wasn't immediately comfortable with it," says Bob. Besides, he
wondered, What kind of person does this? "That somebody would go through pregnancy for someone else was hard for
me to fathom," he admits.
Even professional counselors who work for surrogacy centers point out that it's not an option for everyone. "This
arrangement can be fraught with tension," says Hilary Hanafin, chief counselor for the Center for Surrogate Parenting.
It's practically routine for surrogates and parents to have conflicting opinions about the pregnant woman's eating habits
and lifestyle. Extremely rare, but far more devastating, are legal battles between surrogates and would-be parents over
the fate of their unborn child. In any of the eight states with legislation that discourages surrogacy, it's easy for a
surrogate mother to have a change of heart and keep the baby—or babies—she was hired to bear. (Although according
to the Center for Surrogate Parenting, it's the intended parents who back out far more often than the surrogate.) In one
2003 case, a surrogate carrying triplets in Corry, Pennsylvania, took advantage of some missed paperwork and won
custody of all three newborns; the biological father sued and was granted custody last year. Disturbing results on
genetic tests have yielded anguished clashes between intended parents unprepared to raise a disabled child and
surrogates unprepared to terminate their pregnancies.
Daunted, Beth and Bob gave IVF one more unsuccessful attempt. Then one evening, as they sat in the sand dunes
behind their beach house, watching kids playing in the water, something clicked for the couple. If using a surrogate was
the answer, fine. They were ready to do what it took to make a family.
The right egg

In 2004, at around the same time Beth was in the throes of IVF, Elisa Polka, then a 23-year-old education specialist at a
domestic violence shelter in Jacksonville, was contemplating becoming an egg donor. She'd spent many weeks
researching the process and was well-schooled on the details: Compensation averages $5,000 but can go as high as
$15,000; there would be up to two months of shots; and she'd need to abstain from intercourse for the month leading
up to the donation. She'd read the list of potential side effects and was willing to take on the risks involved. (Doctors
have long debated a link between the drugs used to stimulate egg production and ovarian cancer, but no such risk has
been proven.) "It sounds cheesy," Elisa says, "but the more I learned about it, the more it felt like a calling. There are
people who can't conceive, and I can help them." Her family was supportive. They were accustomed to her
unconventional choices—taking her grandmother skydiving, for example, or going scuba diving to get over her own
fear of the water. But this was also consistent with her interest in public service and the future she imagined as a
psychologist helping others. Plus, the money would be nice: She could help pay for her mother's return to college, put
something away for her own studies, and yes, maybe splurge on "some really cool jeans."
Elisa had successfully provided eggs to two different couples by the time Beth and Bob found her profile on a website
called Egg Donation Inc. "We knew people who'd tried to get pregnant, and it seemed like they were obsessed with
having this perfect baby—the donor had to have gone to Harvard," says Beth. "Our approach was to look for a donor
who would somehow resemble us physically, and who was someone we'd want to be friends with."
That someone was a young woman whose picture showed her smiling, sunny face tilted up at the sky. She described
herself as the kind of person "who could fit in, in almost any setting." What really struck Beth, however, was her baby
picture, which she'd posted on the site. "That picture kind of looked like me," says Beth. "She was the one."
A surrogate's hard choices
Not long after Beth and Bob had selected Elisa as an egg donor, the Center for Surrogate Parenting—based in
California, where laws make surrogacy easy—forwarded them a letter from a potential surrogate named Sylvia
Hernandez, from Visalia, California. Of her desire to carry a baby for another couple, Sylvia says, "I just wanted to do
something good in the world—an act of kindness that went beyond volunteer work." She did have her concerns—what
if she got too attached to the baby? Or what if her surrogate pregnancy upset her kids, Gabriel, 14, and Kiri, 17? "They're
so used to having me all to themselves," she says. "But I became a mom at 18 and put my life on hold for them all these
years. I wanted to do something gratifying for myself." She went through a lengthy screening process (35 percent of
women are found to not have the temperament to handle the surrogacy) and was accepted.
Of the three profiles the Center had given Sylvia, Beth and Bob's moved her the most. "They'd done everything right—
fell in love, got married, built these successful lives," says Sylvia. "And then when it came to this last step, starting a
family, they couldn't do it! I read their letter, and I thought, I have to help them."
Once they got used to the idea, Sylvia's two children supported her decision. But her boyfriend of almost three years, a
truck driver, did not. He was stunned; he'd hoped to have a child with Sylvia but she'd refused. If Sylvia didn't want to
take on the work of raising another child, he told her, then she should at least have a child with him and let him raise it.
Why deny him and help someone she'd never even met?
"It's different," she tried to explain. "This isn't my child, but one with you would be." Eventually, they broke up.
Now committed to the idea of carrying Beth and Bob's child, Sylvia agreed to meet them. Over lunch at a quiet
restaurant, an anxious Beth and Bob—would Sylvia think they were worth carrying a baby for?—poured their hearts out
about everything they'd been through in the past years. "We felt it was important for her to know how hard we'd tried
to have a baby on our own," says Beth. Sylvia responded with tremendous empathy, and the couple left her feeling that
they'd misunderstood surrogacy at the outset—that there was nothing impersonal about it at all.
The new "immaculate" conception
The week of the transfer, Bob and Beth flew to Los Angeles so that Bob could provide sperm for the embryos that
would be implanted into Sylvia. Elisa arrived on another flight, having taken daily hormone shots for two weeks in order
to stimulate numerous eggs. She would spend 15 minutes under general anesthesia to have those eggs removed, and
they'd be mixed with Bob's sperm within hours. A few days later the doctor would implant the strongest-looking
embryos in Sylvia's uterus.
Bill and Beth's counselor at the Center for Surrogate Parenting had urged them to try to meet Elisa if they could. "The
day will come when your child's going to look at you and say, Who is my biological mother? What's she like?'" the
counselor had told Beth. "How important is it to you to answer that question?" Beth decided that "I absolutely wanted
to be able to answer that question—there are no secrets here."
Elisa had never met with the prospective parents in her previous donations and had her worries about getting together
with Bob and Beth ("What if I didn't like them and changed my mind?" she remembers fretting). Nonetheless, the day
after Elisa's egg extraction, she and her boyfriend had lunch with Bob and Beth, and the four hit it off. "In a lot of ways,
Beth is who I want to be in 20 years," says Elisa. "Successful, happily married." Bob was struck by the similarities
between the two women. "She seemed like she could have been Beth's younger sister," he says. "They're both smart,
quick and funny, in a self-deprecating way." He'd wanted a child who took after Beth—and here was the person who
could grant him that wish.
Once Elisa's eggs were fertilized, two embryos were transferred into Sylvia's uterus in a painless outpatient procedure.
Ten days later Bob and Beth lay sleepless in a Tokyo hotel room, waiting to hear the results of Sylvia's pregnancy test.
Anticipation had consumed them on this long-planned trip. It was a blow, then, when Sylvia called to say the pregnancy
hadn't taken. Beth was devastated. "After meeting Sylvia," she said, "I'd started to get incredibly excited about being a
mother."
She had to wait another two months, through a second attempt using frozen embryos, but finally Sylvia reached Beth
and Bob at home in New York City to tell them that one of the embryos had implanted: She was pregnant. After one
surgery, four failed IVFs and one failed attempt at surrogacy, joyous news replaced all the waiting. "Oh my God, it's
finally happening!" Beth cried. As soon as they passed the six-week mark, Beth sent Elisa an e-mail. "We wanted you to
be the first to know that our second attempt was successful!" she wrote. "Thank you, thank you, thank you again…for
helping to give us this amazing gift. Sincerely forever, Beth."
Waiting for Natalie
In the subsequent months, Sylvia's and Beth's lives ran on parallel tracks, as both women prepared for the impending
birth. Both chose Thanksgiving to break the news to their families. In Sylvia's home, the response to her surrogacy was
mixed. "It's a nice thing, but you're crazy," one of her brothers said. But her mother, a devout Catholic, took it
surprisingly well. Sylvia remembers: "She said, Well, the way I have to think about it is when I give blood to save a
person's life, I don't get to keep him.' "
Thanksgiving fell on Beth's father's birthday, and she gave him, as she does every year, a desk calendar. When he
opened it to a bookmarked page, he saw a picture of a baby pasted on May 12, Sylvia's due date, along with the
announcement: "Beth and Bob are having a baby." There was a split second of confusion before Beth explained that
they were using a surrogate. "It was a great moment," says Beth. "My parents are in their seventies. At this point, I don't
think they care how it happens, as long as it happens."
Meanwhile, Sylvia was starting to show, and her manager at work called her into her office. "Sylvia, are we pregnant?"
she asked gently. "I don't know about you, but I am," Sylvia said. "But don't worry, it's not mine!" Her boss nearly fell off
her chair, but quickly understood when Sylvia explained that she was a surrogate, a relatively familiar arrangement in
California. Sylvia was delighted to learn she'd get six weeks off for maternity leave, even though she'd be relinquishing
the baby.
In mid-December they all learned that Sylvia was carrying a girl. Beth called frequently, checking on the baby, but also,
over time, on Sylvia.
In turn, Sylvia came to feel not just protective of the baby but of Beth, too. She started making her a scrapbook, and
when Beth came to Visalia once to go with Sylvia to a sonogram, Sylvia threw her a shower. "I never wanted her to feel
like she was missing out on stuff," she explains. "When she asked me, What does it feel like to have the baby kick?' I
always felt bad—how do you describe that?"
She knew from the other surrogates in her support group that not all relationships were as easy as the one she shared
with Beth. One woman was late in her pregnancy with a couple's twins—and had just learned that the family had
changed their mind. It was decided that the babies would be put up for adoption, with the surrogate mother having
final say over who adopted them. The woman's dilemma shook Sylvia deeply. It made her wonder: Could she count on
Bob and Beth? "I called Beth and told her the story," Sylvia says. "I asked, Are you and Bob sure that you've crossed that
bridge?' And Beth said, Sylvia, don't worry, we have way crossed that bridge.'"
Bound by a contract
The relationship between Beth and Sylvia was remarkably free of power struggles, but they could not escape them
entirely. In February, with her kids' spring break approaching, Sylvia e-mailed Beth and Bob to tell them that she'd
decided to take a family trip to New York City—could she visit them as well? It never occurred to her that the surrogacy
contract she'd signed might forbid this. The 17-page document dictated what she could and couldn't do while pregnant.
Among the "don'ts" were: drinking, doing drugs, having intercourse with anyone who hadn't been tested for STDs, and
leaving her home state past week 26 without notifying Bob and Beth.
Even though Sylvia's doctor had cleared it, Beth tried, gently, to convince Sylvia—who would be 33 weeks at the time of
the trip—not to come. It wasn't just that Sylvia could stress her body; if she gave birth in New York, which doesn't have
surrogate-friendly laws, Bob's and Beth's names wouldn't go on the birth certificate, and they'd have to go through the
laborious process of adopting the baby. Sylvia did not agree—so finally, Beth picked up the phone and told her clearly
that she shouldn't come to New York, and that the contract said she wouldn't.
Sylvia sat stunned at her desk in Visalia after hanging up the phone with Beth. For her, so much of her decision to be a
surrogate was an act of independence—hadn't she even gone against her partner's wishes? The reminder that this was
a legal transaction was also painful. "That cold, hard reality hurt," says Sylvia.
An uncommon birth
Weeks passed, the baby grew and grew, and whatever tensions had surfaced between Sylvia and Beth were all but
forgotten in the anticipation of a new life. At week 38, Bob and Beth flew to California, just in case the baby arrived
early. But the due date came and went—and still no contractions. Anxious to have this baby that so many were waiting
for, Sylvia decided to induce labor.
The three of them had worked out a birth plan that allowed for Beth and Bob, as well as Sylvia's son and daughter, to be
in the delivery room. "I thought it was appropriate for us all to deliver her," says Sylvia. After three hours of labor, with
her daughter and Beth at her side, and her son and Bob behind her, Sylvia pushed. Beth could see the baby's dark-
haired head emerging, then retreating, until after an eighth push, and a ninth, out came Natalie Cate Brenner, wriggling
and raven-haired, as Bob and Beth wept with relief and joy.
It had long ago been decided that Beth would cut the umbilical cord, and now it was finally her moment. The nurse
handed her a pair of scissors, and with a snip, one bond was cut in order to let a new one flourish. "I felt like it was
something I needed to do," says Beth, "because it wasn't my egg, and it wasn't me giving birth. And so that was my
role."
Minutes later, Natalie Cate was placed on Sylvia's chest. As she briefly held the wriggling newborn she'd carried and
nourished all those long months, Sylvia did an emotional check-in: Did she feel this baby was hers? The answer was a
relief: no. "What I felt was satisfaction," she says. "Wow, we had done this!"
Sylvia had prepared some words she wanted to say to Beth as she presented her with the baby. "I wanted to mention
that this was a product of their love…and I wanted to tell Natalie, These are your parents, and they've been waiting for a
long time.'" In the excitement of the moment, however, Sylvia, beaming, simply lifted the baby toward Beth and said,
"Here she is!"
The next day Sylvia checked out of the hospital, and Bob and Beth took the baby to their hotel. Sylvia stopped by later
to see how they were all doing. As Beth held the baby, Bob gave Sylvia a gold bracelet—a love bracelet, Cartier calls it.
"We love you, and you will always be a part of our family," Beth told Sylvia as Bob screwed tight the clasp. Bob, initially
so concerned about surrogacy, had come to feel it was an extraordinary experience. "It truly took a village, a really
American village, to make this baby," he says. "It took this young woman in Florida and a first-generation Mexican in
California and us, this quintessential Manhattan couple, to produce a miracle."
A reunion
Six days after Natalie's birth, Sylvia's phone rang. It was Bob and Beth, calling from New York with the baby to say
"Happy Anniversary": The three of them had met for the first time exactly one year earlier. The couple seemed elated—
if tired—and Sylvia decided not to tell them that she was in serious pain. Her milk had come in, engorging her breasts,
an excruciation she'd just have to wait out. Also, she was having headaches because her blood pressure had
skyrocketed, a not-uncommon side effect of pregnancy. The doctor who'd performed the embryo transfer had let her
know he'd like to recommend her to other couples. Now Sylvia wasn't sure if she'd ever be willing to do this again.
By June, Sylvia had mostly recovered from her physical ordeal, and she flew to New York with her family to see the
town and, of course, to visit Bob, Beth and Natalie. At Beth's home, on that warm spring morning, Sylvia and Elisa met
for the first time, comparing notes on their roles in the baby-making process before focusing 100 percent on Natalie—
touching her tiny wrinkled face, her feet, her hands. Sylvia shushed her gently when she cried; Elisa, on the other hand,
looked alarmed, as if the baby might break.
"I'm still not sure if I want kids at all," she told Beth, "at least not for another 10 years."
"Just don't wait as long as we did," said Beth.
During their visit, Beth and Bob invited Sylvia and her kids to spend the weekend at their beach house. When she'd first
given birth to Natalie, with all those hormones coursing through her veins, she'd been afraid to hold the infant for more
than a minute—afraid she'd bond so quickly and closely that letting her go would break her heart. But now she felt like
her usual, rational self, and wanted to make sure "I got in my Natalie time," she says. Beth gave her all the space she
needed. And so hours were spent holding Natalie, talking to her, breathing in her smell. "I wasn't sure when I'd ever see
her again," says Sylvia, "so I needed to know that we'd had that time together."
Sylvia left for home feeling emotional but peaceful. And she'd resolved whether or not she'd ever be a surrogate again.
"For just anyone, no," says Sylvia. "But for Bob and Beth? In a minute."
Susan Dominus is a contributing editor at Glamour.