Ties That Bond: How Surrogate Mother, 2 Fathers Built an Amazing Family

This article was originally published in The Arizona Republic on October 26, 2014, written by Karina Bland.

The three men wearing white scrubs stand to one side, watching silently as people in blue and green scrubs burst through the oversize door into the operating room.

Nurses. Surgical assistants. An anesthesiologist. Ten total, so far.

The elevator pings, and someone else in scrubs backs out pulling a heavy portable incubator. Then, another, and another. One for each baby.

The woman in the operating room is carrying triplets, two girls and a boy. She had gone in for her weekly checkup the day before, the babies heavy in her belly, her legs so swollen she couldn’t bend them. The doctor had admitted her as a precaution.

But now her red blood cells are deteriorating, and her liver is shutting down. Doctors suspect HELLP syndrome, a life-threatening form of preeclampsia. The only treatment is to deliver the babies, now.

It is six weeks too early.

It is just after 9:30 on a Friday morning. The incubators sit there now, plugged in and waiting, alongside the three men in white scrubs.

The doctor who is to deliver the babies, Winston Eddy, stops to talk to the men. He reminds the men that multiple births are almost always high risk, for both the woman and the babies. And he’s here to explain another precaution.

Because there are so many people involved in the delivery by C-section, only one of the men can come in. The woman had wanted them all there, all three. “My guys,” she called them.

The three men look at one another.

“You go,” Aaron says. Sid nods.

Jeremy hesitates. He knows how much it means for the other two to see this.

Go, the men say again. “We’ll be right here,” Aaron says.

Jeremy disappears into the operating room to be with his wife. The other two — the fathers of the babies — wait outside.

Starting in 2010, whenever Aaron Bell and Sid Cuecha could, they would sign on to the website of Growing Generations, a California surrogacy agency.

To have a child, the 40-something businessmen in Phoenix would first need an egg donor and then a surrogate to carry the baby.

They would spend a few moments during lunch, then again in the evenings, and log on for hours on weekends. They scanned the profiles of the women, reading their statements, studying their pictures and videos. This one was pretty and articulate. That one athletic and intelligent. Her face was nice. Her eyes were playful.

“It is a lot like online dating,” Aaron says, laughing.

When he and Sid met online 18 years ago, it seemed impossible that two gay men could ever become fathers. But that came to be what they wanted, more than anything. “Family is so important, to both of us,” Sid says.

A state away, in Lincoln, Calif., a mother of two, sitting in her kitchen, was sifting through the same website, reading about the couples who desperately wanted to have a family.

Heidi Grosser probably first heard about surrogacy on an episode of “Oprah.” It wasn’t something to which she gave any thought. But then she met a woman at bunco night who was a gestational surrogate, pregnant for the third time, carrying a baby genetically unrelated to her.

“I got totally teary-eyed,” Heidi says. “I thought it was amazing.”

She talked to her husband, Jeremy, and he suggested she look into it. By the time he got home from work the next day, she had filled out an application online. They had been married for 11 years. He knew that once she set her mind to something, she would do it.

“I think everyone deserves a chance to have a family,” Heidi says.

In their profile, the men wrote, “There is no doubt in our minds that our child will be the center of our lives.” Looking at pictures, Heidi could practically feel how warm they were. In one, Aaron and his sister are sticking out their tongues.

Her own son is named Aaron, too.

The first time Sid and Aaron, Heidi and Jeremy met, on Aug. 13, 2010, was carefully planned.

Heidi and Jeremy flew in from Sacramento; Sid and Aaron drove from Phoenix to the Growing Generations office in Los Angeles.

They were told to arrive at specific times, staggered so they wouldn’t run into each other before they could be properly introduced by a case manager.

Aaron and Sid were nervous, and scouring the neighborhood to buy flowers for Heidi.

Heidi and Jeremy were early and stopped at Starbucks.

As the appointment approached, Sid and Aaron rushed in the back door to the elevators, out of breath, and all four came face to face.

Awkwardly, they all shook hands, and then the doors to the elevator opened.

They squeezed in with the office workers and smiled nervously at each other each time the elevator stopped to let other people off. At the top, they realized the elevator went only as high as the 12th floor; they were supposed to be on 13. They searched for a stairwell in vain and then went back to the lobby and realized they needed to take a different elevator.

By the time the doors finally opened on 13,they all stepped off together, laughing.

The conversation to begin surrogacy, though, is a serious one.

Would Heidi be willing to carry multiples? the case manager asked. Were the men ready to parent and support more than one child?

Then, a tougher question: Would you be willing to reduce the number of embryos for medical reasons, to protect the health of Heidi or the babies?

There was silence. No one wants to think about the possibility. It’s a terrible choice to have to make, but they have to know up front. The couples looked at each other, and then nodded.

“Absolutely,” Aaron said, “if we had to.”

“If we had to,” Heidi repeated.

The couples went to lunch together afterward, and both left with the promise to see one another again. Even then, they felt a connection. But they had no idea just how much each one of them would mean to the other’s family — and how soon the possibility of losing one another would bring them even closer.

The door to the operating room in the Sacramento hospital eases shut behind the doctor. Aaron and Sid hover outside, listening.

“This is making me crazy,” Aaron whispers to Sid. The teams from the NICU mill about — 12 more people, for 23 in all to bring three babies into the world.

Then from inside the operating room, they hear a loud gasp, as if all the people inside have drawn in a single breath at once.

Someone pulls open the door. In that split second, Aaron thinks something must have gone wrong.

And then he sees the baby in the nurse’s arms. Baby A, a girl, turning pink and crying softly.

The nurse rushes her to the incubator in the corner. Someone calls out, “4 pounds, 14 ounces.”

Only a minute later, the door opens again. Baby B, also a girl but smaller. Someone calls out, “3 pounds, 11 ounces.” And she’s a shocking shade of violet.

She’s not breathing.

Her face disappears under an oxygen mask. In the second incubator, gloved hands rub her chest, jostle her gently.

“Breathe,” Sid says softly, over and over again. “Breathe.”

A nurse from the lab had called with the results of Heidi’s test for the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin, better known as hCG, which is produced during pregnancy, on Jan. 30, 2011.

Any reading above 25 indicates pregnancy. Heidi’s result was 797.

“Congratulations,” the nurse said. “You are very pregnant!”

An ultrasound at four weeks showed that Heidi was carrying triplets. She called Aaron to tell him.

“Oh, my God. Wow,” he thought, and in that same instant, he worried about Heidi and how a multiple pregnancy would affect her health, and that of the babies — would they be premature, or have birth defects?

And then Aaron realized Sid was boarding an airplane to visit family in Los Angeles. He told Heidi he would call her right back and called Sid.