‘I gave birth to my best friend’s baby — this part of being a surrogate shocked me’

After a battle with infertility left her two best friends feeling broken, Victorian mum Jaide made the “ultimate” offer to see their baby dreams come true. Then the unexpected happened.

There is nothing Nicole and her husband Dan love more than their little girl, Victoria ‘Tori’.

“She’s just delightful,” Nicole says. “She giggles and smiles and she’s cheeky.”

“Every time I hear ‘mama’, that’s what I waited my whole life for.”

Days out from her daughter’s second birthday, Nicole is telling me about the ‘Tori turns two-tu’ party she’s holding at the weekend.

A picture of a maternity shoot stands behind her as we’re chatting over Zoom. In it, she’s seen side-by-side with her best friend Jaide, and both are staring down at Jaide’s bump.

Jaide is weeks out from delivering little Tori for Nicole and Dan.

Victorian surrogate Jaide is pregnant with friend Nicole’s baby. Picture: Supplied

Tori is still too young to fully grasp the story Nicole is about to share – the unique journey that led to her birth.

But before Tori, Nicole and Dan had been left feeling broken and were grieving amid a battle with infertility.

After lots of struggles, the couple first fell pregnant with the help of IVF in 2015. They were beyond excited.

“We went for our seven week check-up to hear the heartbeat,” Nicole says.

“There wasn’t one.

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I didn’t want to see anybody – it was just devastating.”

There “wasn’t any sense of relief” when Nicole fell pregnant again, shortly before blood works confirmed the couple’s baby wasn’t growing.

“My rheumatologist said ‘your body is rejecting being pregnant, full stop, and I strongly advise that you don’t try to get pregnant again’,” Nicole recalls.

Nicole and Dan lost two pregnancies before considering surrogacy. Picture: Unsplash

Giving up on pregnancy was one thing, but giving up on experiencing parenthood was completely inconceivable.

After coming to the conclusion that adoption was “pretty much non-existent” in their state, Nicole and Dan began researching their final option – surrogacy.

Proposing the ultimate gift

Jaide can’t put words to how difficult it was to watch her friends Nicole and Dan go through such turmoil.

Already a mum-of-two by then, Jaide says all she wanted was to see her best friends’ dream of being parents come true.

While commercial surrogacy is available overseas, it’s illegal for intended parents (IPs) to pay someone to carry and deliver their child in Australia.

However, altruistic surrogacy, where a surrogate receives no compensation from the IPs other than reimbursement for medical and pregnancy costs, is allowed.

When Jaide found this out, a radical idea “just crept in”.

“Being enlightened to that idea of actually physically being able to do something of substance was amazing,” she says from her home in Broadford in central Victoria.

Jaide risked her own health and body to give her friends the ‘ultimate gift’ of parenthood. Picture: Supplied

“I’m a giver, and it’s the ultimate gift. It’s just something that I felt like I needed to do for her, but also for me to say I’ve given the most I could ever give in this life.”

First, she says she had to raise the idea with her husband Tom.

“It is a really weird conversation to start,” she admits.

“He’s always been my number one supporter and my rock, and who I go to for sound advice and he just was happy to hear me out … and also ask all of the hard questions.”

From the moment surrogacy was considered an option, the “brutally honest” conversations commenced – everything from Jaide’s health to who would make the ultimate call over termination if the situation arose.

“Nothing was off the table, nothing was taboo,” Jaide says.

“It was just, if we need to talk about it, we need to talk about it now.”

When the two couples “were as much on the same page” as they could be, Jaide made the offer in December 2020.

“It was almost like a proposal. ‘Tom and I would really love to offer to carry your baby’,” Jaide remembers.

“It was us as a team – Nicole, Dan, me and Tom.”

‘I was not going to be OK until I have baby in my arms’

To gain approval for the surrogacy, the ‘team’ had to do counselling sessions, police checks and source lawyers.

Nicole and Dan estimate costs of the entire process which included IVF, Jaide’s legal fees and medical appointments – which they were legally required to pay – totalled around $50,000.

After two years of legal and medical appointments, Jaide fell pregnant in March 2022 after a successful transfer of Nicole and Dan’s embryo.

“We tested every day … and the line just got darker and darker and darker and everyone just got happier and happier and happier,” Jaide says.

‘The line just got darker and darker and darker.’ Picture: Supplied

For Nicole and Dan, it was hard to put aside fear after so much loss.

“I tried to tell Jaide that I was not going to be OK until I have baby in my arms, because it was all terrifying,” Nicole says.

“It was double fear because I was so scared that something was going to happen to Jaide. I could not have lived with myself if anything had happened to her.

“The brilliant thing about our relationship was that there was never a time I thought she would take my baby. To have that fear removed just made it a totally different experience.”

As the baby she was carrying kicked inside of her, growing as her two children had before, Jaide says she always had Nicole in mind.

“It wasn’t about me,” she says.

“It was about creating something for Nicole, creating this dream, and growing their baby.”

Jaide said the pregnancy was different from those with her own children. Picture: Supplied

The incredible story behind Victoria’s name

After a gruelling pregnancy – Jaide horribly sick – the time finally came to plan “the passing of the torch”.

The team had it all planned out – Jaide would spend her final week of pregnancy with Nicole and Dan interstate and then check into hospital close by for a scheduled caesarean.

“We were so, so organised. We were high-fiving ourselves,” Jaide says, laughing.

But the “best-laid plans” began to crumble when Jaide started having contractions on her birthday — still in Victoria, six hours away from the baby’s parents.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and my waters had broken,” she says.

The baby was coming, and the call — multiple calls — had to be made. For upcoming IPs, Nicole says the phone should never be on silent throughout pregnancy.

“I missed eight phone calls and my husband missed 12 phone calls,” Nicole recalls. “I still can’t get over the guilt of that.”

The local hospital deemed it too late to send Jaide to a more equipped facility. They called in their team for an emergency C-section.

“I’m explaining to them desperately ‘this is not my baby, I need to get onto the parents’,” Jaide remembers.

Interstate, Nicole and her husband were making a similar plea at the airport after the couple’s flight was cancelled last minute.

“I was just like ‘I don’t think you understand, my child is about to be born’. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense to anybody,” Nicole says.

“That’s when it sunk in that we’re gonna miss it.

“I don’t think we ever anticipated that. It never crossed my mind that I would miss her birth.”

A turn for the worse meant Jaide had to be put under general anaesthesia during delivery.

As Nicole and Dan waited in line to board their plane, they received a call from Tom – their little girl had been born.

“It was like ‘oh my God, we have a daughter’,” Nicole says through tears.

“We’re having this FaceTime call in a public airport and I’m bawling and laughing.

“We decided at the airport that Victoria was what (her name) was going to be.”

Nicole and Dan’s baby girl, Victoria. Picture: Supplied

After a flight and an hour-long ride to the hospital, Nicole and her husband waited in the lobby for another 30 minutes until Jaide woke up from anaesthesia.

The ‘team’ had always planned everyone would be together for the moment Nicole and Dan met their baby for the first time.

“Jaide’s just an angel … you just can’t describe the extent of gratefulness and awe that someone would give themselves – and give so much of themselves – to somebody else,” Nicole says, holding in tears.

‘Love you all forever’: A card from Nicole to Jaide and her family after the birth of Tori. Picture: Grace Frost

‘Terrible’: Jaide listed as ‘mum’

Nicole and Dan were officially Mum and Dad. But not to the legal system.

When a surrogate gives birth to a child in Australia, she is listed on the birth certificate as the baby’s mother – even if she has no biological link to the newborn.

On every form, Jaide was listed as Victoria’s mum. Victoria was even added to Jaide’s Medicare.

“I think it’s terrible,” Jaide says.

“It’s already such an unsettling and sensitive process that it just creates this uncertainty where it doesn’t need to be.

“It should be clearly defined whose baby it is from the get-go, and that shouldn’t be able to be questioned.”

Legally speaking, Jaide was considered Victoria’s mother for the first four months of her life. Picture: Supplied

New parents Nicole and Dan had to get Jaide’s permission and have waivers signed to take little Tori home from the hospital.

“It was much harder than I thought it was going to be,” Nicole recalls.

“We’d been through so much, and now I can’t even call her mine?”

The team started the process of getting a parentage order interstate so Tori’s birth certificate could be rewritten.

But because Tori was born in Victoria, it made things even more complicated.

Victoria is the only state that does not accept interstate parentage orders upfront, but instead requires parents to also apply for a registration order before the birth certificate can be changed.

The process meant, legally speaking, Tori was Jaide’s daughter for the first four months of her life.

In another twist, surrogates in Australia are entitled to keep the baby they deliver if they choose.

This is despite the fact many IPs and surrogates – including Nicole, Dan and Jaide – sign surrogacy agreements outlining the intentions of each party before going ahead with embryo transfer.

Surrogacy and donor conception lawyer Sarah Jefford says parents have to face the courts for the rights to their child if a surrogate refuses to part ways with their baby.

“We give the baby more rights than the adults, so we can’t say (a surrogacy agreement) is enforceable and you must hand over the baby, because that would mean that the baby is like a product that can be bought and sold, or given and taken,” Ms Jefford says.

Surrogacy lawyer Sarah Jefford is demanding an overhaul of the parentage order system. Picture: Supplied

“What we actually say is that the child’s best interests are paramount, regardless of any agreement that the adults may have.

“The good thing is that doesn’t really happen. Surrogates are actually very keen to hand over the baby.”

Complicating the issue further, laws and regulations on surrogacy also differ between states in Australia – meaning even advertising for a surrogate could be criminal depending on where you live.

Ms Jefford says there needs to be “an overhaul of this parentage order process” to allow IPs like Nicole and Dan to be listed on their child’s birth certificate straight away.

Currently only about 120 babies are born via surrogacy in Australia each year.

“I also wonder if we need to start talking about compensating surrogates,” Ms Jefford says.

“The one person that does all of the work and takes all of the risk is unpaid, while the fertility industry is worth $600m per year in this country.

“Everybody else involved, the lawyers, counsellors, fertility clinics, they all make a lot of money.

“If we’re trying to make it more accessible, we need to start thinking about how we can actually compensate the people that do it.”

Jaide says making her best friends’ dreams come true was the best experience of her life. Picture: Grace Frost

For Jaide, seeing her best friends become parents was enough.

“If I went back in time, I would always do it again for them, over and over again,” she says, beaming from ear to ear.

Nicole sends me a photo after our chat – Tori is wearing head-to-toe in pink at her ‘two-tu’ themed second birthday party.

“The message to mums would be persevere, because it’s worth it,” Nicole says.

“Any sacrifices in terms of not being able to feel a baby kicking inside you, not being able to breastfeed, all of those things that you miss out on is still worth it because you have this miracle for life.

“And for Jaide, and all the surrogates out there, there’s no words to describe how amazing they are.

“Jaide is 100 per cent a part of Tori’s story, and Tori will always know that, and it will always be normal to her.

“I’m so proud to tell Victoria what her story is.”