We longed for a baby. Now we have two, born four months apart

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It's quite the story, so there's only ever time for a potted version, says Rohan, a former senior adviser to David Cameron at the Downing Street policy unit. It goes something like this: he and his wife, Kate, employed an American surrogate to carry their baby after trying for years to have a second child (they have a son, Jozef, who's now six). Their whole 13-year fertility history is filled with an almost unimaginable number of disasters: 20 IVF procedures, multiple miscarriages including twins and then the devastating death of their newborn daughter, Zola, in 2022.

They thought there was no way they could conceive naturally, but just as they were matched with their surrogate, Ava, Kate found out she was pregnant. After so many heartbreaks neither was hopeful the pregnancy would last, so they pressed ahead with the surrogacy -- which is how they have ended up with two children 100 per cent genetically theirs, but born 17 weeks apart. One is now eight months old, the other four months.

"I guess there'll come a point when the age gap won't be so obvious and they will look like twins," says Rohan, 44. "But for now there are a lot of questions and we try to be open. So far, everyone we've met has been nothing other than incredibly sweet, at least to our faces." As it turns out, this happens often enough in surrogacy that the phenomenon is known as "Californian twins" or "twiblings" (a mix of twin and sibling).

'We were shattered and bereft'

The couple's journey to surrogacy (everything in the fertility world is a "journey", Rohan notes wryly) began after Zola's death in 2022. She'd been born in Los Angeles, where they then lived, at 31 weeks. It didn't seem alarmingly early -- one doctor told them confidently, "At this hospital, at 31 weeks, all babies survive." However, her health deteriorated quickly and she was taken to intensive care, her tiny body overwhelmed by bacterial infection. She died five hours later.

Only a few weeks after that they put a deposit down at a surrogacy agency based in LA, where they still had stored embryos from their multiple IVF attempts, and moved to Western Australia, where Kate, now 40, grew up and where her family live, to grieve and regroup. "It was so devastating losing Zola. We were shattered and bereft, and all we could think to do was to try to channel that pain and try, somehow, to move forward, even just a tiny step, with our lives and have something positive come out of such devastation," Rohan says. "Some people did say to us, can you trust a surrogate? But then you meet the people that step forward to do this for others and you realise it's a kind of vocation for them."

It was a year before they were matched with Ava, a 34-year-old mother of three and devout Christian from Mississippi. The agency had asked them to send a letter to prospective surrogates explaining why they'd chosen this path. "Ava said she'd cried when she read our letter," Rohan says.

They first met Ava and her husband, Joe, a high-school baseball coach, via video, together with their five children -- Ava's three and Joe's two. All seemed to go swimmingly -- then just a few weeks later Kate found out she was pregnant. However, there were no celebrations. "I had this overwhelming feeling that it wasn't going to work, so the fleeting happiness was followed by an almost

pre-emptive sadness," Rohan says. "We'd had so many heartbreaks, I didn't honestly think either of these was going to succeed. By then I think we had to numb our feelings to protect ourselves."

They continued their regular calls with Ava, who was thrilled by Kate's news and sent over boxes of candy and baby gifts. "She was even more delighted when we learnt that one baby was a boy and one was a girl," Rohan says. "She and Joe just loved the idea of us having the large family we'd never even dared dream about."

Rohan and Kate were "in the room", via video, when their embryo was transferred to Ava at the clinic in LA. "It was in the same clinic where Zola had been transferred to Kate. So there was this beautiful poignancy and symmetry. Whenever we'd done IVF, it had worked on the sixth or the twelfth go. So we really didn't think Ava would get pregnant first time. But she did."

However unlikely it seemed, both pregnancies advanced, and Kate and Rohan were present via video for all of Ava's scans. "Their kids would come to the hospital too, and one of them would hold the phone so Kate and I could watch and ask the doctor how things were going. Joe is a massive American football fan, and he and I would have these parallel, very blokey conversations -- about anything other than surrogacy, of course."

Kate and Rohan will not reveal in this article which child was born by surrogate. "I'm keen to talk about surrogacy, but for our babies I think it's their right to talk when they're old enough about how they were born and conceived," he explains.

'The whole thing felt incredibly natural'

Kate's baby was born on July 24, 2024. It wasn't without drama. The newborn had to spend four days in intensive care, with possible sepsis. "It was incredibly triggering because Zola had ended up in intensive care with sepsis and had died," Rohan recalls.

Thankfully, all was well and in October, a month before Ava's due date, they set off for Mississippi, with Jozef and their tiny baby in tow. The birth, on November 19, was a proper family affair. Kate and Rohan joined Ava and Joe in the delivery room; Joe was holding Ava's hand, while Kate was "at the business end". Rohan shuttled between the delivery suite and the waiting room, where Ava's parents and sister were looking after Kate and Rohan's baby. Ava and Joe's children were there too, along with Jozef -- all competing to be the first child to kiss the new baby. "It felt joyful and relaxed," Rohan says. "Ava had always said she loved being pregnant and giving birth, and she was giving birth in the hospital where she'd had her children, with the doctor who had delivered all three. For Kate and me, births had always been incredibly terrifying. And here we were in a room where it was proceeding normally, fairly quickly, no sirens going off or doctors rushing into the room.

"After our baby was born, Ava was crying with joy, Kate was crying with joy. We have pictures of them holding hands through the whole procedure. It's strange to say, because surrogacy is fairly new and I know some people don't like the idea, but the whole thing felt incredibly natural. It felt like a sort of extended family."

Because Kate was already breastfeeding her four-month-old, she was able to feed the new baby pretty much straight away. Ava also expressed colostrum (early breast milk) and gave the bottle to Kate. "If we'd been in the UK, we would now have had to apply [for a parental order] for our child -- because under UK law, the birth mother is considered the parent, even though the baby was genetically ours. But in America, the baby was legally ours from the beginning," Rohan points out. It's this that bothers him most about UK surrogacy laws.

It doesn't surprise him that the number going abroad for surrogacy has mushroomed. In March, official data revealed that 1,500 applications were made between 2018 and 2024 to become the legal parents of babies born to surrogates abroad. In 2018 the figure was 150; in 2024 it was more than 300. The US was the most popular destination, chosen by 642, followed by Ukraine (258) and Georgia (144). Other countries included Colombia, Ghana, India and Canada. This growth in foreign surrogacy has outraged some: 13 feminist campaign groups recently wrote to ministers warning that the practice was in danger of ushering in commercial surrogacy by the back door and could lead to the exploitation of women. In the UK, it's illegal to pay a surrogate, but in the US they can be compensated -- the pay can often account for up to half the cost. Rohan is in favour of modest compensation if both parties agree to it. He points out that the fee in the US has allowed surrogacy agencies to spring up, which provide an important caring and guiding role for both parties.

"In the UK, sadly, people are relying on volunteers. They're finding them through Facebook -- there's no agency to help, to do psychological and medical testing, to make sure that the surrogate really understands [the implications]. People are completely alone in the UK, and the legal system is stacked 100 per cent against them. It's an iniquitous situation.

"But the biggest thing that has to change in the UK is that the legal agreement between a surrogate and the parents has to be binding, as it is in the US. This is what's driving people abroad."

'There is a deep-rooted view of what a "proper" family looks like'

He and Kate are reluctant to reveal the exact cost of the surrogacy, but it was several hundred thousand pounds, which they just about managed to scrape together by Rohan taking on extra consultancy work as a tech investor. Much of the money was spent on having to stay in the US for an extended period, which wouldn't have been necessary if they could have used a UK surrogate. What would he do now if he had Sir Keir Starmer's ear, in the way he had David Cameron's?

"I would say that any important area of life where only the relatively well-off can do something is something that the British government should be looking at. If you have money, you can opt out of the broken, unfair British system. And if you don't have money, you're stuck."

Perhaps part of the reason the law hasn't changed is society's discomfort with the idea of surrogacy. If you were to put various family set-ups into a pyramid, at the top in many people's minds would be the heterosexual couple and their naturally produced children, and at the bottom would be the people using a surrogate, donor egg and sperm.

"I think there is still this very deep-rooted view of what a 'proper' family looks like, and it's reflected in government policy," Rohan says. "But we're going to have to grapple with this stuff -- look at the strides being made in artificial wombs, and the baby recently born to a woman after a womb transplant."

The other change he'd love to see is more men talking about surrogacy and infertility. It was his low sperm count that led them down the IVF path originally. (After a test he was told he had six million sperm -- "A bit below the normal range but keep plugging away and you should be fine," said the GP breezily. It turned out the true number was six, not six million.) Through lifestyle changes researched by Kate, he managed to raise it to four million, enough for IVF. "But I just felt so guilty it was my fault that my wife was having to go through these invasive, horrible procedures and I couldn't talk to anyone," he says. "When we were doing IVF, I must have gone for beers with a dozen mates, separately, who had all been through it. They would talk about intimate details of their wives' anatomy -- cysts here, a blockage there. But not a single one ever admitted to a low sperm count or any kind of issue. Yet half of all IVF cases involve an issue with the guy."

Rohan says he and Kate view each of their babies in exactly the same way, no matter their birth story. "Maybe it makes it easier for us that both babies have both our genetic material. The poignant thing we do think about is that our baby born by surrogacy is from the same batch of embryos that produced Zola. So it feels like there's a kinship between the two."

One of the aspects of surrogacy that intrigues them is the emerging science of epigenetics -- how your environment interacts with your genes. By that theory, what happens to the surrogate during pregnancy can be passed to the baby, even if they're not genetically related. It was why they wanted to find a surrogate who was well supported, so there was a low chance of stress being passed on in the womb.

Kate and Rohan think they will tell the children their history as soon as they are old enough, at the age of three or four. That was when they told Jozef that he was conceived by IVF, mixing Daddy's sperm with Mummy's egg.

"Who knows how each of the babies will embrace it?" says Rohan. "I guess the best we can do is just help them understand how much we were desperate to have children, how much we went through to have them, how glad we are that they exist in the world and how much we love them.

"I think as a society we've got really good at understanding that families come together in different ways -- blended families, mixed families. I'd love to get to a point where surrogacy is just another of those ways. And we should just be glad that there's another loving family in the world."