'I had a baby for my gay best friend'
Esme Shaller and Linus. Photos courtesy of Ben and Eduardo Kaufmann-Malaga.
“I’m tall, my mom has children. I’d be good at having babies. And I’ll have one for you!” Those are the words that Esme Shaller, now 36, recalls saying to her college friend Ben Kaufmann-Malaga, who’s gay. “He never took it seriously, but after I had two complication-free, full-term pregnancies with my daughters, I thought about it again.”
Then, in 2012, she heard an NPR series on surrogacy where the subjects were enthusiastic and joyful about the process. “I had really liked being pregnant and I didn’t find it hard,” Shaller, a psychologist in the Bay Area and a married mom of two girls, tells Yahoo Parenting. “I was intrigued, and I read a bunch about technology and fertility.” She and her husband Gary idly talked about what she’d told Ben back in their 20s and, she recalls, “Gary said it sounded cool.”
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They also considered potential emotional complications. “I thought about it a lot,” she says. “I know Ben and his husband Eduardo are awesome people, they’re good with my girls and they’d be great parents. It’s expensive to pay an egg donor and do IVF, let alone hiring someone to carry the baby. I figured I could offer to do that part.” Shaller was clear from the beginning that a baby wouldn’t come from her egg — she’d be a gestational surrogate, having no biological relation to the child she was carrying. “It’s very different from giving up a child for adoption,” she says. “There isn’t that genetic connection.”
Ben Kaufmann-Malaga, a scientist at a biotechnology company, and his husband Eduardo Kaufmann-Malaga, a senior support engineer, had moved to the Bay Area near the Shallers and were settling down. “We’d known we both wanted to have kids since our first date, but we hadn’t figured out our approach,” Ben tells Yahoo Parenting. Adds Eduardo, “It felt so overwhelming financially and emotionally. The plan was always to have a baby two years in the future.”
Eduardo, Ben and Linus.
When Shaller brought it up one day over crepes, they knew she wasn’t kidding, but they still wondered if she truly realized what she was offering. “We left brunch being like, ‘We’ll revisit this later,’” says Ben. But then they got a text from Shaller that said, “I am truly willing to do this. Now is a good time for me.” Ben says the message was like, “This is my window, take your shot.” Meanwhile, Eduardo felt that Shaller was an ideal option. “She knew the process, had thought about it for a while, and is one of our best friends,” he explains. “We were a little in shock but we called her and said, ‘Okay, we’d love this. Is Gary really okay with the idea? Then we’re bringing over dessert. Let’s do it!’”
The Process
The gestational surrogacy route gave the Kaufmann-Malagas strong legal protection as the parents. “We both wanted to have a legal tie with the child and this situation felt safest,” says Eduardo. “The process involves a huge cast — doctors, lawyers, a whole vanload of people.”
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Shaller went to their chosen fertility clinic for a checkup, and also had to have a psychological screening — something that was required of the Kaufmann-Malagas, too. “That made me feel a little judged,” says Eduardo. “Most people can just have kids, but we had to prove we were ‘okay’ to do it.”
Once the three friends had met these parameters, Ben and Eduardo had to search for an egg donor. “Spreading out the genetic connection and the gestational carrier over two people bolsters the legal rights of the intended parents,” explains Ben.
The couple worked with eight agencies in parallel, looking at biological traits and medical histories of potential donors, and even meeting one candidate in San Francisco. “It costs $1,000 to meet them because you’re putting a hold on them and each meeting is facilitated so the agency doesn’t get cut out,” says Ben, adding that they did a couple of Skype meetings as well, but never found someone who was a fit this way. The agencies’ profiles of the donors also left something to be desired. “There was a little about educational background and life goals, but then a weird set of questions like, ‘Do you tan easily?’ and ‘What’s your favorite animal?’” says Eduardo. “No one would make a biological decision based on that.”
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So after six months of poring through profiles from the agencies, they decided to go rogue. The couple put up a flier talking about who they were and what they were looking for. “We got a lot of responses, and we ended up finding a local, completely brilliant, lovely person,” says Eduardo. They met with her multiple times and talked to people who knew her to get a read on who she really was, and she did the same with them. A deal was made. (While Ben is reluctant to disclose how much they paid their donor out of privacy concerns for her, he says the rate typically ranges from $5,000 to $10,000.)
In addition to the time-consuming process of finding an egg donor, the Kaufmann-Malagas also found dealing with insurance to be a challenge. Eduardo knew that his insurance plan covered two IVF cycles. “But in our case, I couldn’t use the money because Esme isn’t covered in my plan,” he says. “I had a lot of discussions with the insurance company, explaining the surrogacy and how it was unfair that other couples could have two IVF cycles covered but gay couples couldn’t take advantage — I would have had to add Esme as a dependent for it to work.” In the end, the Kaufmann-Malagas had to cover the costs themselves and spent approximately $50,000 (of which about 50 percent would have been covered for a straight couple). Without Esme that expense may have doubled, with up to $30,000 for a gestational carrier plus $20,000 in agency fees, according to Ben.
The next step was to line up the egg donor and Shaller’s cycles. “I had to give myself daily injections of hormones and so did the donor, so that she’d release an egg at the same time that my uterine lining was thick,” says Shaller.
Once the two women’s timing clicked, the egg donor began visiting the clinic daily to watch the eggs mature so they could harvest as many as possible. Then they split the eggs into two batches and Ben and Eduardo each donated sperm to inseminate their half. “Though they harvest a lot of eggs, there are only a few in the Goldilocks-perfect zone,” says Ben, adding that both he and Eduardo were open to being the biological father, or not. At the end of five days, one embryo looked the best for implantation, so they transferred that one. “In my gut I thought the odds of it working right away were low,” says Ben. “There are so many moving parts, such complexity.”
The News
To everyone’s delight, implantation worked the first time. The good news of a positive pregnancy test was exciting but nothing was definitive… until the trio had an appointment at 10 weeks to hear the heartbeat.
“The sonogram showed a little flutter on a black and white screen,” recalls Eduardo. “We gasped and grabbed each others’ hands — it was amazing.” Shaller remembers the heartbeat moment as being “so fascinating because it was different from seeing my own kids’ heartbeats. Ben and Eduardo were misting up, and I was thinking like a scientist. I was really glad it looked like the physical part was going to work.” Both men’s employers allowed them time to attend doctors’ appointments, so at least one of the Kaufmann-Malagas was able to be present at each doctor’s appointment with Shaller during the pregnancy.
The dads-to-be shared the good news early with family, and later with close friends. Meanwhile, Shaller had a story to share too. “I mean, I didn’t tell people who shouted ‘Congratulations!’ from across the street, but anyone who had a real conversation with me needed an explanation,” she says. “It helped being in the Bay Area where there are lots of alternative families.”
Of her close circle, only Shaller’s mother expressed concern . “At first she kept mentioning medical risks, but I told her, ‘If I were just having my third child, you wouldn’t talk about the risks, you’d be happy,’ and she said ‘Well, that’s my family.’ But that all depends on your definition of family, and I was happy to take the low risk for Ben and Eduardo too.” Her mom did come around and was very supportive by the end.
Shaller didn’t accept compensation from the Kaufmann-Malagas, though they did give her a debit card to use for maternity clothes or any food cravings, and they were always encouraging her to use it more. Lots of people called her a “saint” for volunteering as a gestational carrier. “So many friends said, ‘I could never do that,’ and I get it,” she says. “There are thousands of things I’d never do, but this was easy for me. I’m not superhuman, I just have different limits, and this isn’t one of mine. If it had been hard for me I wouldn’t have done it — you do what you can do.”
For her daughters, who were 3 and 5 years old at the time, she read them a book called “The Kangaroo Pouch” about surrogacy, and talked about the process very factually. “Basically, it was, ‘Our mommy carries the baby and then the baby goes home to Ben and Eduardo,’” says Shaller. “We just told them what was happening — you need a man and a woman to have a baby, and Ben and Eduardo don’t have a woman so they need help.” The kids got it.
The Birth
”I was prepared for the actual experience in the delivery room to be hard because of hormones,” says Shaller. “But it turns out I didn’t feel mixed up at all — it was just awesome. The whole thing felt like a project I was doing, and by all standards delivery day was lovely.”
Shaller’s husband Gary, Ben and Eduardo all accompanied Shaller to the hospital, where one special moment was with a nurse who had grown up best friends with a gay man who died of AIDS in the 1980s. “When the four of us arrived, this nurse thought it was so beautiful, and she cried,” says Shaller. “Then she apologized for being unprofessional, but we were all touched. That was very cool.”
Meanwhile, Shaller’s water had broken and she needed to be induced. Her husband Gary was in the room as her coach, and Ben and Eduardo were called in from their room next door for the last 20 minutes of the birth. The baby boy went right into their arms when he was born. “Watching Ben and Eduardo become dads was an amazing moment for me and Gary,” says Shaller.
“Nothing can prepare you for that,” says Eduardo. “A new human being is in your arms, so warm and so precious.” Ben cut the cord, and both men did skin-to-skin bonding. They had their own rooms on the delivery floor and the recovery floor for two nights, and they headed back to start life as a family of three. They named their son Linus.
The Family
Shaller was able to pump breast milk for the first seven weeks after the birth, giving bottles to the Kaufmann-Malagas. “We all wanted to get those antibodies to the baby,” says Shaller. And the new dads? They were able to take two weeks of “baby bonding time” at full pay, plus some vacation time and California Family Medical Leave Act time. “We staggered our time and ended up with about three months where one of us was home with Linus,” says Ben.
He and Eduardo agree that California is one of the best places to have a family like theirs. “There have been no challenges with insurance or when we travel with him or anything,” says Ben. “We are both on the birth certificate.”
Their baby boy is now almost 10 months old. And what does Linus know of the woman who gave birth to him? “Esme is the special aunt to our sweet, quirky, creative boy,” says Ben. And Shaller says she loves Linus the way she loves other close friends’ babies. “I’m excited to see him and I feel a bond, but there’s not an extra layer because I gave birth to him,” she says. She adds that she looks back on the whole process with total happiness. “They never thought they’d have a biological child related to either of them, so they were just grateful and excited,” she says. “There was no drama, only joy.”
