S4:E30 - The hidden grief we don't talk about

Surrogacy is legal in Australia. Most people don’t know that. This week I’m joined by Sarah Jefford — family creation lawyer, egg donor, and surrogate — who has spent the last decade working exclusively in family creation law. No divorces, no custody battles. Just helping people build their families in all the different ways that looks like today. She’s based in Melbourne, works nationally, and has both donated her eggs and carried a baby as a surrogate for a gay couple she met through Facebook. This episode is for any solo mum who has been on a long fertility journey and is now wondering whether surrogacy is the next option — or for anyone who has thought about being a surrogate themselves. Sarah explains how surrogacy actually works in Australia, why it’s so hard to find a surrogate, what you can and can’t legally pay for, how the legal process after birth works (and why it’s more complicated than it sounds), and how to share your story online without falling foul of the no-advertising laws. She also covers overseas surrogacy — including which states make it illegal for their residents to pursue it commercially overseas, and what happens when you bring a baby back to Australia. The numbers are sobering: fewer than 100 surrogacy births happen in Australia each year. Over 350 Australian children are born via international surrogacy annually. The laws haven’t kept pace with how people actually find each other — which is Facebook — and there are no agencies to help match surrogates with intended parents. But it does happen. Regularly. And the advice from someone who has done it — both as a surrogate and as a lawyer — is simply: build community, share your story, make connections. Your surrogate might already be in your orbit. In this episode:

She does both, and solo is easier. Merryn grew up thinking life would look a certain way. Her parents together, her aunties and uncles together, everyone partnered, everyone staying. She figured the same would happen for her. She spent her 20s travelling Europe, living in Perth, playing football, nursing, having classic terrible dating stories. She moved back to Victoria at 30, booked a fertility check just to see where things stood, and met someone through a friend from work. She thought she’d finally got it right. Two weeks after her son Sully was born, her best friend took her for a walk and told her she’d been contacted by the ex. It turned out Merryn’s partner had been regularly visiting his ex-girlfriend during night shifts and coming home to her while she was pregnant. She kicked him out. She tried to make it work for Sully’s sake. She eventually couldn’t. By the time Sully was 18 months, Merryn had gone back to the fertility clinic. She did two IUIs that didn’t work, then IVF — 22 eggs at 36 and a half, eight embryos. First frozen transfer. Positive. What followed was a pregnancy that started beautifully and got complicated — placenta previa diagnosed at 20 weeks, a bleed at 25 weeks, waters breaking at 33 weeks, and then at 36 weeks an emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic for a placental abruption. Sinclair came out at 2.4 kilograms. Merryn’s best friend was in the waiting room because they couldn’t have a support person under general anaesthetic. Sinclair spent three days in NICU, Merryn got a hotel near the hospital so she could feed him every four hours, and they went home. He is now 19 months old, platinum blonde, cheeky, a watcher, doesn’t talk much but is doing things the whole time. The Dennis the Menace of the family. Merryn is now 20 weeks pregnant with a girl — same donor, same clinic, first transfer again. Sully is six and has strong opinions about gender reveals. Sinclair has no idea what’s coming and is currently learning not to hit babies. And two months ago, Merryn moved into a duplex she built next door to another solo mum. Shared backyard, no fence, kids running free, baby monitor working across the wall, dropping each other’s kids at school, nipping to the shops while the other one watches them. Six weeks in and she says it’s already a game changer. She also does both — co-parenting Sully with his dad, and raising Sinclair and her daughter on her own. And she says, unprompted and clearly: solo is easier. In this episode:

She always knew Sam walked into a fertility clinic at 24 with her friend as her fake partner, because she assumed single women weren't allowed to do this alone. When the counsellor handed her a booklet with a section on solo mums, she had a quiet revelation: she didn't need to pretend anything. She went on the donor waitlist that day. Then she waited three years. Sam is an emergency department nurse in Canterbury, New Zealand, who grew up in a family with a cycle of difficult relationships and decided early that the best thing she could do for herself — and for a future child — was to do it differently. When she realised donor conception meant she could have a baby without any of that cycle attached to it, she felt, as she describes it, delighted. She was 28 when she finally got the call that a donor was available. She was 29 when she fell pregnant — on her first frozen transfer, the one she called the Easter transfer, the favourite egg that ever existed. She named him Dandy Lion while he was still in her uterus, because dandelions are resilient and they symbolise the sun, moon, and stars. She did her injection in the back of an ambulance. She showed everyone at work a weekly ultrasound. She threw herself a gender reveal party in the emergency department with blue lollies and a balloon pop. She found out she was pregnant on Mother's Day. Her son is now eight months old. Sam recently got back from Fiji — terrible weather, little shacks in the middle of nowhere, best memories she's ever made. She’s found a beautiful Canterbury solo mum community from a Facebook post. She goes to the Solo Mum Society book club at one in the morning NZ time. She's one and only, by choice, and completely at peace with it. This is one of the most joyful episodes I've recorded in five seasons. In this episode:

Every woman going through donor conception at a fertility clinic in Australia is required to attend implications counselling. And almost every one of them turns up expecting to be assessed, judged, and told whether they're worthy enough to be a mum. Narelle Dickinson has been working in this space for 30 years. She finds that deeply sad. Narelle is a reproductive psychologist, fertility counsellor, and the director of Lotus Health and Psychology in Brisbane. She specialises in the prenatal and perinatal field, works in the surrogacy space, supports families through birth trauma and pregnancy loss, and has spent 25 years doing donor conception counselling — watching the landscape shift from almost exclusively heterosexual couples to a community that now includes far more single women choosing this path as a first option, not a last resort. In this episode she explains what implications counselling actually is, what it's actually for, and how to get the most out of it rather than treating it as a tick-box exercise. She talks about what changes when you're using a known or recruited donor rather than a clinic donor. She explains why people who are using an unregulated recruited donor without going through a clinic should consider seeing a counsellor anyway — and what a donor who refuses to sit in a counselling room should tell you. She talks about the unexpected emotional waves that can come after a positive test, after the baby arrives, and years later when your child starts asking harder questions. And she closes with something worth carrying: the goal of donor conception counselling isn't getting you pregnant. It's helping you build a family. Those are very different things. Narelle and her team offer telehealth across Australia. If you're looking for an implications counsellor, make sure you're using an ANZICA-accredited practitioner — the Australia and New Zealand Infertility Counselors Association — whose reports will be accepted by any clinic. Find Narelle at: Website - lotushp.com.au. Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lotushealthandpsychology/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/LotusHealthPsychology/

The Plan Always Had a Next Step Claire always knew she'd be a mum. She told her mum at 18 that if she didn't find someone, she'd do it on her own. Her mum said she wouldn't need to. Claire filed that away and thought: well, if I do, I'm fine with it. At 30 she decided she was financially ready, had ticked off enough of her travel list, and started. She didn't make a big announcement. When she eventually told people, nobody was surprised. What followed was not the quick journey she'd hoped for. A pre-existing endometriosis diagnosis from 19 sent her straight to IVF with her doctor at Monash IVF Bondi Junction — no IUI, no mucking around. But what nobody had picked up was that Claire had a thin endometrial lining — a four or five, when the transfer window needs a seven to ten. Medicated cycles were cancelled last minute. PRP (platelet-rich plasma) treatment was tried repeatedly. There was no clear reason why. The Mirena she'd had in was the best guess. The first IVF cycle itself went beautifully — 12 eggs, 12 fertilised, five AA-grade embryos. And then none of them worked. She went through all five. Two of the transfers resulted in early losses at five weeks. She didn't know yet that she'd got COVID during her injections cycle. She still wonders. Second cycle. New protocol. PGTA testing this time. Four embryos. And then — right as she was preparing for her next transfer — she was caught in the NSW donor audit. Her overseas donor had been over-allocated to NSW beyond the state's family limit. The clinic emailed: we don't know if you'll be able to use this donor anymore. Possibly ever. She had just had a miscarriage. She had no next step for the first time in the entire journey. It was, she says, almost as hard as the losses. A solo mum she'd never met found everyone affected, organised them, told them who to email and what to say, and kept going until the clinic made an exemption. Claire had two vials of sperm left and was permitted to continue. On the 22nd of October, she transferred. Augie arrived nine months later. He is nine weeks old, already looks entirely like his donor, and has Claire's blood type — and that, apparently, is it. At 36 weeks Claire moved from Sydney to Orange to live with her parents for the year — her mum is a midwife, lactation consultant, and child and family health nurse, which turned out to matter enormously in the first weeks of breastfeeding. She'll move into her own place in January, set up a home daycare, and take Augie to Bali in between. She's the first to say she's more capable than she thought she'd be. In this episode: