Amy is a midwife and a heavily pregnant surrogate from the Bay of Plenty. She is carrying a baby for a gay married couple she met online. This is her story, as told to journalist Janhavi Gosavi.
The first time I had dinner with the parents of my surrogate child, I knew they were the right people to have a baby for.
They had flown to my home from Otago to meet me after months of speaking over messages and phone calls.
We were all excited and a bit nervous.
I didn’t know if it was okay for me to drink alcohol with my meal, in case it made a bad first impression. They didn’t know if I would get spooked and pull out of becoming their surrogate.
Twenty months later, I am now in my third trimester, 34 weeks pregnant with their baby.
It’s been a privilege but it’s also turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.
When I was training to become a midwife, I learned about surrogacy and how it helped people make families.
It seemed like an amazing, wonderful thing to do but I was very young at the time and had not had my own children yet, so I parked it.
A few years ago, a friend floated the idea of me donating my eggs, which sent me down my path of eventually becoming a surrogate.
I remembered how much I loved being pregnant with my own children and wanted to go through it one last time before it was too late.
There is no other time in your life when your body changes so much.
Feeling a baby move inside you and grow from week to week – it felt weird to think I might never experience that again.
In 2024, I created an account on a website called Love Makes Families, which connects surrogates and donors to parents.
I found myself drawn to a gay married couple who seemed open and genuine.
They wrote honestly in their profile about why they wanted a baby and made it clear how loved their future child would be.
The process of getting to know them felt a lot like online dating.
The dads and I had long conversations about our expectations, what pregnancy-related costs they would pay for, and what kind of contact we would keep post-delivery.
Being a midwife, I wanted to discuss every possible scenario, including whether they would want to terminate the pregnancy if the fetus had a fatal condition.
A scenario I did not consider was me being bedridden for three weeks because of hyperemesis, a condition that causes extreme nausea and vomiting.
It had made my other pregnancies difficult, but this pregnancy is shaping up to be the hardest nine months of my life.
In my first 20 weeks of being pregnant, if I was not at work, I was in bed, feeling guilty that I might be a bad parent because all I could do was put food into the air fryer for my children.
When I would go to work, I would cry on the way there because the last thing I wanted to do was to be upright and mobile.
I’m still sick now and have found myself doing the unexpected: counting down the days until I can birth this baby.
I don’t want to wish the pregnancy away and I’m so excited for the couple to become parents, but I’m also excited to feel better soon.
My kids’ reactions to my surrogacy have been surprisingly mature.
At first, they didn’t want me to have the baby because they worried they would be sad about not being able to keep it.
My 8-year-old daughter changed her mind after she snuck into a Skype call I was having with the dads and told me she thought they would make good parents.
Adults, on the other hand, have struggled more at wrapping their heads around my decision.
Some people tell me I’m “amazing”, which makes me feel awkward because I’m bad at taking compliments.
Others go, “Woah, why would you do that?”
People want to know if I knew the parents already (I did not), if I used my own egg (I did), and a few love to share stories about how they almost did it themselves before backing out.
One lady at the supermarket asked if I thought it would be hard to give away my baby, which I thought was quite an intense conversation for the supermarket.
Most of all, people want to know how I could stand to “give a baby away”.
From the beginning, this hasn’t felt like my baby.
I do love it and I’m protective of it, but it’s different to when I carried my own children.
It truly does feel like I’ve got someone else’s baby growing in me – it’s mine for now but it’s not mine forever.
In seven weeks, I will be flying to a birthing centre to push a baby out for the last time in my life.
After the delivery, I will stay with the baby near the couple’s home for 12 days until I can sign over legal guardianship to them.
Under current law, I am considered the baby’s legal parent at birth.
The dads will eventually have to adopt their own child, even though one of them is the biological father, which is a process that could take up to a year.
The Improving Arrangements for Surrogacy Bill is going through its second reading in Parliament and, if it is turned into law, it will remove the need for this kind of adoption.
My plan is to stay present in this child’s life as an aunty figure, who will be kept updated on major milestones and will visit every so often.
I did not know my dad growing up, so having an open adoption is extremely important to me.
If this child ever has questions about where they came from, I want them to know they can call me up any time.
Across our in-person visits, I’ve seen how great the couple are with my kids.
I know that love is going to multiply tenfold with their own baby, and it’s been a privilege being part of making that happen.
Amy’s last name has been omitted to maintain her privacy.
Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.