After a 35-week pregnancy punctuated by emotional distress and self-doubts, a single woman in her early 30s became Israel’s first surrogate mother on Thursday of last week.
A 4.7-pound boy and a 4.9-pound girl, twins, were born by Caesarean section at Rambam Hospital.
The babies were immediately whisked away and shown to their biological parents — a couple from a religious moshav in the north who have been childless since they married more than a decade ago.
“It was extremely dramatic, with lots of tears,” said Prof. Yosef Itskovitz, director of the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department, who presided over the pregnancy and the births.
“The biological mother…fainted when she heard the news, and the surrogate required psychological and social support during the pregnancy. At times she regretted the arrangement, which she agreed to mostly out of economic pressures.”
The surrogate, a single mother with one son who was also delivered by Caesarean, did not even see the twins, although she had been given an epidural anesthetic, which meant she was awake during the birth. The epidural was part of the contract with the biological parents.
“She heard the babies’ cries, but she was not allowed to see them, as this could cause bonding,” the Rambam obstetrician said. “But she did ask later, with tears in her eyes, about their weights and health.”
The biological father is a businessman and the biological mother, who has had eight miscarriages due to an immunological problem that causes her body to reject the embryos, is a university graduate.
The children must now be officially adopted, in accordance with the Surrogacy Law passed in August 1996. The two healthy babies were the first born under the law, which strictly regulates surrogacy arrangements.
There are dozens of infertile couples and potential surrogate mothers undergoing preparation for additional births, but no other surrogate pregnancies are under way yet, Itskovitz said.
The biological parents, who donated the sperm and the ova to produce the embryos, paid the surrogate thousands of dollars to carry the babies to delivery, and also covered her expenses under an agreement supervised by the Health Ministry.
Several other embryos were frozen and could be implanted in another surrogate mother later.
Itskovitz said that he had mixed feelings about surrogate motherhood.
“As an obstetrician and fertility expert, I feel it’s a fantastic thing for couples who have no chance of having a baby on their own. But since surrogates always have economic problems — although they wouldn’t do it if they weren’t altruistic as well — and there are risks in pregnancy, especially in having a Caesarean birth, the matter is not simple,” he said.
Itskovitz also felt it was difficult to explain why surrogate motherhood should be allowed while it is illegal to sell a kidney, which could save someone’s life.