Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.
Cortney Gibson built her career on caring for other people’s babies. As a teenager, she had what she calls “a gift” for it. “I was the popular babysitter in my neighborhood. People would hand me their crying babies at the grocery store,” she says. She left college following her freshman year to work in a few day cares in Greenwood, Indiana, near where she grew up. Then she transitioned to working as a nanny for seven years. Every time a job ended — because the children grew up or the family moved away — she felt devastated saying good-bye to the kids she helped raise.
At 29, she started her own business as a newborn-care specialist (colloquially known as a baby nurse). She threw herself into the work, traveling around the country to move into families’ homes and provide nearly round-the-clock care to their infants for about three months at a time. In her first year, she cared for two sets of twins and two sets of triplets, born between 28 weeks and 41 weeks gestation.
Through it all, Cortney assumed that one day she would get married and have kids of her own. But with her intense work schedule, dating was never her focus and relationships were difficult to maintain. “It became a joke like, Well, if I get to my mid-30s and I haven’t met someone, maybe I’ll just have a kid on my own,” she says. “But I had no idea what that would entail.”
By 2012, her business was a success and she had hired a team of newborn-care specialists to work for her. Over the years she had taken a number of assignments in Dallas and fallen in love with the area. With a staff in place who could handle the majority of the travel gigs, Cortney decided to make Dallas her home base, rather than moving from job to job.
Five years after she settled in Texas, Cortney, then 41, began looking into fertility treatments. She tried dating too. But most of her first dates began with a variation of, “‘Hey, just so you know, I’m trying to have a baby on my own. You don’t have to be involved, but just know that that’s what’s happening.’” It limited the dating pool.
A few weeks before her 42nd birthday, Cortney bought donor sperm and attempted her first intrauterine insemination (known as IUI), in which sperm is placed directly into the uterus using a catheter. It failed. Her reproductive endocrinologist told her the chances of getting pregnant at her age were slim and recommended she try in vitro fertilization (IVF), a more invasive and expensive procedure that would involve retrieving her eggs, fertilizing them in a laboratory dish with donor sperm, and then transferring the resulting embryo into her uterus.
Cortney didn’t think she could afford it. Her insurance covered diagnostic fertility tests but not fertility treatments or drugs — for an infuriating reason. In Texas, health insurance is only required to cover fertility treatments when a patient is married and using their spouse’s sperm for assisted reproduction. Cortney didn’t have a husband, which meant that she — and other single women like her as well as LGBTQ+ couples, and women whose husbands had undergone chemotherapy and didn’t have viable sperm — did not have a right to health-care coverage for fertility treatments. “There are apparently a lot of people in this country who believe that I don’t deserve to have a family,” Cortney says.
Cortney tried IUI two more times and both attempts failed. So far, she had spent about $8,500 on six vials of donor sperm with cryopreserved shipping, three IUI attempts, and the medications required for it. She began looking into medical tourism as a more affordable route to IVF and settled on a fertility clinic in Mexico. She stayed at a resort in Cancun, which she helped finance by concurrently hosting a retreat for other professionals in her industry. The trip — including the IVF cycle, medications, fees, the resort, and the flights — cost her about $22,000. Thanks to the retreat, she only paid about $13,000 out of pocket.
Her egg retrieval took place the day before her 43rd birthday. Afterward, she flew back to Texas to await news of the outcome. The clinic called a few days later: One embryo had survived, but it still needed to be tested to see if it was genetically normal.
Below, Cortney shares what happened next.
On hearing from a friend while she was waiting
While I was waiting to find out if I could move forward with IVF using my embryo, a friend of mine from the nanny community called me, kind of out of nowhere. She said: “I don’t know where you are with all of this, but I have some friends who want to give you their embryos.”
Her friends were a couple who had two children via IVF, not because the mother couldn’t get pregnant, but because she had a medical issue that required her to control the timing of her pregnancies. They had six extra embryos and had spent some time considering what to do with them. The options: Donate them to research, destroy them, donate them to someone, or pay to freeze them indefinitely. This couple felt that if they could help someone else, that would be the best way to use these embryos. And so they were chatting it over with some close friends who happened to also be friends of mine. And that’s how I came up as an option.
I was shocked. It’s really hard to get donor embryos as a single person. You can buy eggs and you can buy sperm and you can make embryos, but that is just as expensive as doing IVF. Still, at that point, I was focused on the IVF cycle I was in.
On finding out her embryo was viable
The genetic testing came back, and my one golden embryo turned out to be genetically normal. I returned to Mexico for the embryo transfer.
I think this happens to everyone who’s trying to conceive: It’s like the stages of grief except it’s the stages of the two-week wait to find out if you’re pregnant. The first couple of days you’re so cool about it, Whatever happens, happens. It’s fine. Then every single possible feeling that you have in your body, you’re Googling about: Is that a pregnancy symptom? Then you go on the chat rooms in the Facebook groups; they’re filled with women describing their situations and asking if anyone else had luck. Everyone’s just looking for someone to say, “Yeah, it worked for me.” You just want to know that it’s possible to get pregnant. I’d just turned 43 and I just hoped — just hoped.
Much to my surprise and delight, I got a very faint positive on a pregnancy test.
On miscarrying her pregnancy
Just as I was starting to believe I was going to have a baby, at 11 weeks pregnant — after hearing a heartbeat, when you’re generally considered to be in the clear — I learned that I had had a miscarriage. I needed to have a dilation and curettage (or D&C), a procedure to have the remaining fetal tissue removed.
I thought that pregnancy was the only shot I’d ever have. It gutted me. I had to stop working for a while.
I went to my reproductive endocrinologist in Dallas to get advice. Much to my shock he told me: “We aren’t going to do anything different next time. We would expect you to lose three pregnancies before we would change your protocol or test you for anything.”
I spent a lot of time grieving. But I couldn’t let that be the end. Since I had been able to conceive with my own eggs once, I wanted to try IVF one more time. I was not ready to use somebody else’s embryos, though I knew that if that didn’t work out, I might have them as a backup plan.
On working up to her second round of IVF
On my own, I began learning more about egg health. For the next year and a half, I put everything I had into optimizing my health to get and stay pregnant.
I found a new OB/GYN, who worked in the niche field of reproductive immunology, and I also hired a fertility coach. I radically revamped my diet and started a regime of supplements. I have celiac disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis — when an overactive immune system mistakenly attacks the thyroid gland. My new doctor also suspected I had endometriosis, which is often a significant factor in recurrent pregnancy loss and failed implantation of an embryo. I had a laparoscopy, and sure enough, I had stage-two endometriosis in my ovaries, tubes, and bowels.
I did all the things to try to make the last chance work. I didn’t know it then, but I had a lot of emotional stuff to work through. I sort of felt like I didn’t deserve to have a baby. From the outside, people would say that I was very confident and personable, but the tape that played inside my head was: There’s got to be a reason for the miscarriage and failures — and it’s you. I’ve been told most of my adult life that my body is broken, that I have these diseases, that I have an increased risk of this and an increased risk of that. So over time, it’s like the neurons that wire together fire together. If you’re told enough times that your body doesn’t work, your body listens.
I had to change the narrative to say: I believe my body can carry a baby. I made flash cards with affirmations on them and carried them in my handbag. Any chance I had, I would read them to myself. Because even if you don’t believe something yet, if you keep repeating it, eventually you learn to believe it. I read those affirmations so many times that I began to believe that against all odds, I could be a mom — and that I deserved to be a mom, too.
Later that year, I had a client whose second baby was due in December — a month after my baby would’ve been due had I not miscarried. I took care of the baby boy, but I didn’t like him much at first. But he healed me. In his own little baby way, he helped me process that grief. He is the reason that I kept going.
On meeting the family who wanted to donate their embryos
Even though I was planning another round of IVF with my own eggs, I still wanted to get a backup plan in place. I had already decided that if my second IVF didn’t work, I would move on with the donor embryos.
That fall I attended a conference in Philadelphia, which is near where the couple with the extra embryos lived. I contacted the couple and we made arrangements to go to dinner. They brought their kids, who were 1 and 3 at the time. I rocked their youngest to sleep while we sipped on margaritas and had Mexican food. We really liked each other and it went well. And so we decided to all think about it and get back together. We touched base several times over the next few months, and they continued to be enthusiastic about donating their embryos to me.
On starting the donation process as a backup plan
I hired a family-law attorney to draw up a contract, because everywhere except for Alabama, embryos are considered property. It’s not adoption; it’s the transfer of ownership. The couple were willing to give me all six of their embryos, so if it didn’t work, I would be able to try again multiple times.
It was a multistep process: I had to get lab work and a psych evaluation. Then we had to decide if we wanted to keep in touch. It felt like such a gift to have known donors who were willing and interested in meeting my child and allowing him to have a relationship with his brothers. We signed the papers and it was official: The embryos were mine.
On traveling for her second attempt at IVF
At 44, I knew this was going to be my last attempt at IVF. This time, I rented an Airbnb and lived like a local. For the last week, I moved to a hotel across the street from the clinic. It’s a crazy process, and you have to have the gumption and the willingness to jump into the unknown to do this on your own. I was not afraid. I went through a lot of hard things by myself. I did all the injections every night alone. I would see partnered people talking about how hard IVF is and making their partner help them. I did it all myself. I didn’t have a choice. If you want this, you just do it. I ended up spending about $12,000 between the IVF cycle and accommodations. I was using up a big chunk of my savings.
On facing an unexpected problem during IVF
One day at the clinic, the team determined that I had three cysts, which meant that I couldn’t take the stimulation medication needed to continue the IVF. It would cause my cysts to grow instead of my egg follicles. That was the end of my IVF journey.
I just lived in the rooftop hotel pool for a couple of days, stewing in my feelings about it. But I had already made up my mind what to do next, and I was so incredibly fortunate that I had donor embryos as a backup. Still, I grieved the loss. Maybe if I had endless money, I would’ve kept going.
But I came home ready to move forward. It took me all this time to get to an emotional place where I could say: I don’t care if we share genetics. I just want a family.
On coordinating the transfer of her donors’ embryos
Getting access to the embryos was a lot of work. I had to correspond with the clinic where the couple had performed their IVF, which was in Pennsylvania, all while doing my own lab work and diagnostics locally in Dallas. I was also seeing a reproductive-immunology specialist in New York City virtually. The process could have failed or stalled many times. But because I’m stubborn and I am a manager, I was able to keep up with it.
On finally going through the embryo transfer
If you’ve never been through one, you wouldn’t have any idea what goes in to pulling it off. I had to get on a plane, fly from Dallas to Philadelphia, check into a hotel, get a ride to the clinic at 7 a.m. I had acupuncture to better my chances right before the procedure.
I met the doctor handling the embryo transfer for the first time while I was lying on the exam table. As she threaded the tube through my cervix to flush the embryo out of the vial, she said, “When I’m done, I’m going to hand this little window to the embryologist, and she’ll look at it under the microscope to make sure that the embryo has been flushed out. Once or twice a year, they’ll stick on the inside of the vial. But don’t worry, it doesn’t affect the outcome.” Two seconds later, she says, “Oh, looks like you’re one of the two.” So she flushed the embryo a second time, and he landed where he was supposed to.
I paid the clinic $3,500, and went back to the hotel to relax until I flew home the next day.
On learning she was pregnant again
A few days later, I felt a little twinge and I thought, I’ll just go ahead and take a pregnancy test. It was a faint positive.
I kept reminding myself everything’s great and the baby is going to be fine. Staying positive, positive, positive, positive. Because to this day, every time I go to the bathroom, I picture blood on the tissue. If you have ever bled in a pregnancy, it is terrifying, and it’s a trauma that doesn’t go away. I was trying to do everything I could to ward off the negativity, the doubt, the what if it doesn’t work?
When I made it past the mark when I had lost my previous baby, I felt like I could breathe. When I got to 14 weeks, it was like, Oh my God, this is really happening.
Because of my autoimmune issues, I was on a controversial medication called Neupogen that my immunologist recommended in order to suppress my immune system. It was $500 per vial, and I went through a vial every three days. It wasn’t covered by insurance, but it’s the only reason I stayed pregnant.
It was such a joyful pregnancy. People say they hated being pregnant, but I loved every minute of it — even though it was high risk and full of challenges. The pandemic started midway through my pregnancy, so I spent the second half alone. There was no one to see my cute maternity outfits. No one to annoyingly touch my belly. There was no baby shower. I have just one picture of myself with a bump that I didn’t take looking in the mirror. My neighbor stood out on the street on Easter Sunday in April 2020 and took it in my front yard.
On giving birth
I had been pregnant for exactly eight months when we scheduled an induction. I was pumped full of drugs, but the induction didn’t progress. After 40 hours, I was exhausted and still just two centimeters dilated. I needed a C-section. I remember being sleepy but strangely calm. I kept repeating positive messages: He’s going to be okay. I told my OB, “I just want to take home a baby. I just want him to be healthy and safe.” Because I wore a mask during the surgery and my glasses were fogged up, I couldn’t see anything. I remember thinking, If I can’t see anything, I just need to hear him make a sound. I heard the doctor call for suction, and then 30 seconds later, I heard my baby’s first cry.
On the first hours and days of motherhood
We weren’t able to do skin-to-skin contact right away. The nurses were getting him cleaned up, and I could barely see him, what with the mask and the glasses. I wanted to rip the IV out of my arm and grab him, but I couldn’t until they moved me back to the recovery room.
Nursing him for the first time felt surreal. I have been taking care of other people’s babies for so long that I had to keep reminding myself that this one was mine. I called my mom and burst into tears as I introduced her to her grandbaby, Sawyer.
When he was 14 hours old, Sawyer had to go to the NICU. Being separated from him was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to endure. I was on a magnesium drip, which meant I couldn’t get out of bed. I sent one of my colleagues from work with him to the NICU, and she watched over him all night, which is the only reason I did not crawl out of my skin. The next day I went to see him in my wheelchair. It was another day and a half before he finally was brought back to my room. That’s when I felt like, Now I really have a baby.
On having a child that’s biologically not her own
In the first few weeks, I had some thoughts, What if he looks at me and knows I’m not his biological mom? It wasn’t logical. I mean, obviously he knew my voice and my heart rate. And of course he was my baby. But I also couldn’t help but think about these things.
From an early age, I have told Sawyer a bedtime story about wanting a baby and struggling to have one and the wonderful people who helped me. I tell him the story often. I never want it to be a secret.
On moving back to Indiana
In Dallas, I was drowning. We were far away from any help that I didn’t have to pay for. When Sawyer was 2 and a half years old, I decided to sell my house and we moved to a farmhouse on my family’s farm in Indiana so that he could see his grandparents and aunt, uncle, and cousin several times a week. My son has male role models in my dad and my brother and other friends in our lives. I want him to grow up to be a well-rounded, great little citizen, despite not having a dad.
The trade-off is that I now have to drive an hour every day to Bloomington so Sawyer can go to preschool. I work out of a co-working space because we truly live in the middle of nowhere. Also, my business is still based in Texas so we fly there at least once a quarter.
On wanting another child
Sawyer is now 3 and a half years old. He talks about wanting a brother or sister. Every once in a while he’ll grab my face and say, “Mama, can you call the hospital and ask the doctor if we can go pick up my baby?” I would love to see him have a sibling. I’m an older mom. I’m not going to be around forever so I want him to have family when I’m gone.
I need two things to align to have another child. Having spent my entire savings to have him, I need to save more money. Even though I have more embryos and the transfer is only $3,500, I will need about $30,000 to cover the immunology, lab work, and medication. I also would have to work on improving my health. But if I could take care of money and health, I would do it tomorrow. I’m so lucky to have had the opportunity to get donor embryos. And someday when I know for sure that I’m done, I will pass them on to someone else. The couple who gave them to me said they wanted these embryos to help other people.
On life as an older, single mom
There are some benefits to being a single mother by choice. I don’t have to check in with anyone and I can parent how I want. But there’s also no one else to make decisions or to be a sounding board or contribute to the bank account. I have a couple of good friends who are also single moms by choice, and we spend a lot of time talking about our struggles. I will never date again. I have no interest in romantic pursuits because I’ve just wasted so much of my life trying to make relationships work. My life is so much more fulfilling now.
I’m 49, and I can’t imagine how different my parenting journey would have been if I had Sawyer when I was 38 or 28. Waiting for motherhood prepared me in such an amazing way. I make a point of telling Sawyer as often as I can how lucky I am to be his mom, how great of a kid he is, and what a blessing it is to get to be the one to raise him. Motherhood is harder than I ever thought it would be, but it’s also more rewarding, amazing, and wonderful. And Sawyer is a miracle. I mean, this morning he rolled over and said to me, “Good morning, my precious mama pie.”
As told to Yolanda Wikiel , 2024-04-04 18:00:48
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