My partner died in July 2018. We were together for more than 25 years. I am a pediatric oncology nurse and he was a pediatric nephrologist. We met in our early twenties when I was newly graduated from nursing school and working on an inpatient pediatric oncology unit and he was newly graduated from medical school and a pediatric resident doing a rotation on that unit. We both committed our professional lives to caring for children with life-threatening disease and their families. I always wanted children but he was honest with me from the beginning of our relationship that he did not because he had known since he was 12 years of age that he had a disease which meant that his life would be short and hard and he wanted to minimize the number of people who loved him and would be impacted by the challenges of sharing his life and by grief at his death. I chose to live my life with the man I loved rather than abandoning him to seek a relationship with another man who wanted children. However now, facing life without him, I want to have a child. Not to ‘replace ‘ him as his place in my life cannot be filled by anyone else, but as an affirmation of life and love despite the immense pain of missing him. I believe that I still have great capacity to love and be loved and that my relationship with him, particularly during the last 28 months of his life when he was totally dependent on me for care, taught me much about unconditionally loving and caring for another person which will inform my capacity to parent. I believe that he would want me to have a child as it always saddened him that this was something I wanted but did not have because of his disease. And having a child would give his parents the opportunity to be grandparents – an opportunity they long ago abandoned hope for – a gift of new love I could give them.

The risks associated with attempting pregnancy at my age justify use of a gestational carrier. Due to my age and unpartnered status I also need to use donor gametes and I have chosen to use donor embryo to give an opportunity for life to an embryo which has already been created. I think that use of a donor embryo and gestational carrier is a beautiful origin story for a child – a story full of the love of an intended parent who wanted him/her very much and the altruism of embryo donors and a surrogate who made his/her birth a possibility – and I would be proud to share this beautiful story with my child.

I am profoundly grateful that surrogacy may permit me to have a child. I do not have a specific level of involvement that I wish to have. I will respect and honor the level of involvement my surrogate wishes me to have with pregnancy and birth; within any logistical constraints that may be imposed by time, distance, and cost. I am open to remaining in contact with my surrogate and if at some point my child wished to meet his/her surrogate and the surrogate also wished such a meeting I would be delighted to facilitate it and to see them develop whatever relationship the two of them wished to have.