A woman said she wants to get a divorce from her husband because the child they had with a surrogate isn’t hers.
The 36-year-old woman wrote on the Retweet Am I the A**hole site that she and her husband had been married for seven years but were having trouble getting pregnant. Before they finally chose a surrogate, they had tried for four years.
“We had what I thought was my child by surrogate more than two years ago because it turns out I can’t carry a child to term after four years of trying to get pregnant with no luck despite medical help,” she wrote. “Being a mom was always my dream.” There aren’t enough words to describe how devastated I was to learn that I have a medical condition that would make it very hard for me to take a baby to term.
In the end, she had to have big surgery to get rid of growths in her uterus if she wanted to improve her chances of getting pregnant. However, because of problems during the surgery, her doctors had to do a partial hysterectomy instead. Even though her uterus was taken out, her ovaries were still there, which made her and her husband start looking into how much a surrogate costs.
“A close friend from college who already had two children offered to be our surrogate to save money.” After two unsuccessful IVF attempts that did not lead to pregnancy, she got pregnant on the third attempt and gave birth to a boy for us.
She noticed a few red flags after her friend gave birth that she hadn’t paid much attention to at the time but were obvious now. She was more worried about being the main breadwinner. She worked three part-time jobs and one full-time job to pay the bills and cover the medical and legal costs of having a surrogate.
In the beginning, her friend and her husband talked more, and when she got home from work on the weekends, she would often be hanging out at their house while her husband was there. “I thought it was nothing bad, and it was good for her to get to know my husband better since she was trying to carry our child.”
“I also thought it was strange that our son has brown eyes while we both have blue eyes,” she said. Then I learned that this doesn’t happen very often, but it can happen sometimes because many genes control eye color.
All of these red flags were raised, though, at a recent doctor’s visit, where a metabolic panel and blood tests showed that their son had a blood type that would not have been possible if the woman was his mother. After getting the DNA results that showed she wasn’t the child’s actual mother, she thought it was the clinic’s fault at first. However, her husband admitted to having sexual relations with their surrogate friend more than once. He said he didn’t think their trysts could lead to pregnancy because he “pulled out” and thought he was partly to blame for their inability to have children.
“I’m so angry and hurt all at the same time that words can’t even begin to describe it!” she said. “I felt betrayed right away by my husband, my friend, and now also by the fact that I know my child isn’t mine.”
She has since cut ties with her friend and talked to a divorce lawyer about how to legally give up her rights to the child. This way, she won’t have to pay child support to her husband and won’t have to deal with daily reminders of how her husband and friend lied to her. The woman said that both of her parents called her “immature” for wanting to give up her parental rights. They also told her that she could end her marriage, but they didn’t think she should end her relationship with her son, even though he wasn’t physically hers.
People who read the comments agreed with the woman and said she was right.
“He lied… it’s not yours,” one wrote.
“You’ve been betrayed very badly,” said someone else. “Just looking at the child would make me feel betrayed all over again.” The problem doesn’t have to be dealt with by your parents and friends. They can’t vote.