Offering a ‘gift’ to people seeking kids

Surrogates hope to spare some heartbreak

Needles became pregnant with her first biological child as a 14-year-old. Her initial exposure to surrogacy was sitting pregnant on her family’s couch, crying about the mountain of unknowns that come with being a teenage mother.

She found a maternity show on TV, featuring a woman struggling through miscarriage after miscarriage and decided to use a surrogate.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God; here I am crying, when this is a blessing in my life, and I need to be thankful,’ ” Needles recalled “It doesn’t change that I’m scared. I’m still terrified. But I was thinking like, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to do this one day.’ ”

Em Hughes, a 31-year-old mother of two in Columbus also working with Compassionate Beginnings, is around 10 weeks pregnant as a surrogate. Hughes witnessed the heartbreak of infertility a little closer to home. One of her close friends and former college roommate suffered serious complications and several miscarriages while trying to get pregnant, and in a tearful conversation, Hughes offered to carry her baby and started researching surrogacy.

She didn’t end up being a surrogate for her friend, who eventually had her own child, but the idea of gifting parenthood to those like her stuck with Hughes.

“I just had the thought that if I could spare a family the heartache and the trauma of what my roommate was going through, then it would be time well spent,” Hughes said.

McNeil described the surrogates she works with as a “unique” and “serviceoriented” set of people, but they can be hard to find, and demand for them is increasing.

“The surrogates that people want to work with are not searching the internet, you know, ‘How much I get paid to be a surrogate?’ or ‘I want to be a surrogate,’ so it’s about trying to reach people who would qualify but have never thought of it themselves,” McNeil said.

That, McNeil said, usually starts with a story that touches someone’s heart.