Are you ready to be shocked—and we mean REALLY shocked? Good, because we have one amazing, bizarre, and ultimately heartwarming story for you today that is guaranteed to blow your mind. It all starts with a surrogate with a dream who ended up encountering one heck of a legal nightmare…
Just this past week, a California mom by the name of Jessica Allen went public with her incredible commercial surrogacy experience; it’s a tale that she tells because she wants other potential surrogates to “learn from her story.”
In an interview conducted by The New York Post, Allen reveals the harrowing tale that started when she applied to be a gestational surrogate mother with a San Diego-based agency called Omega Family Global. Allen told the paper that she wanted to earn a large sum of money to help purchase a home.
The married 31-year-old already had two children, so she hoped this experience would not only earn her some extra cash—about $35,000—but also would “give [the couple who hired the surrogate] a blessing of a child.”
Roughly 6 months later, Allen was matched with a family who wanted to use her as a surrogate. The couple was from China, a place where gestational surrogacy is illegal. Allen signed a contract—one in which a special stipulation was added stating she must spend one hour with the baby after the birth—before beginning the In Vitro Fertilization process.
Luckily, the IVF procedure took on the first attempt; Allen was told that she was pregnant—and just 6 weeks later she was given the news that she would be delivering twins.
Once she hit the 38-week mark, Allen gave birth to the twin boys via C-section, but her request to spend an hour with the babies before handing them over to their legal mom was completely ignored. Instead, the twins were whisked away to the NICU.
According to Allen, the next day, the twins’ legal mother showed up at her hospital room and showed her a picture of the boys. It was quite the sight—one appeared Chinese, but one had much darker skin, like that of Allen’s two biological children.
The surrogate says that the Chinese mother came to her bedside simply to ask why one of the boys was “different.”
As it turns out, the two were very different. Due to an extremely rare medical event called superfetation, Allen had gotten pregnant via the IVF, as well as the conventional way, by her husband, right in the same one-week period.
Once the Chinese couple realized that only one of the twins belonged to them biologically, they threatened to put him up for adoption. Unsurprisingly, when Allen got wind of their intentions, she and her husband fought to gain custody of their son—and thank god they did! Now the little guy, a super cute 9-month-old baby by the name of Micah, lives with his family back in California. We only have one thing to say: WOW!
To learn even more details about Allen’s one-of-a-kind pregnancy, including details of the surrogate’s legal battle with her agency, be sure to watch the video below. Well, she sure will have an interesting story to tell her son once he gets older!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on Jessica Allen’s surrogacy nightmare. Have you ever been a surrogate before? If so, what was your experience like? Should Jessica’s son have contact with his ‘twin’ in the future?
