A woman is ready to leave her husband and potentially give up parental rights after finding out that her 2-year-old son isn't biologically hers. For years, the woman, 36, really wanted to be a mom but she struggled to conceive. She and her husband, 35, whom she has been married to for seven years (and has been with for nearly 10), started to explore surrogacy as an option.
Noting that getting a surrogate is "really expensive," she said, "my close friend since college who'd already had 2 kids of her own offered to serve as the surrogate for us to cut down on costs." With the help of the surrogate, she was finally able to become a mom to a baby boy after many years of trying.
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Initially, the woman was so thankful for her friend's help, as she "had always wanted to be a mom," but found out that she was "unable to carry a child to term" due to a medical condition, the woman explained to the people of Reddit.
It took some time for the surrogate/college friend to become pregnant, but "after two disappointing IVF sessions that did not result in pregnancy," she eventually did.
When the college friend/surrogate helped the woman become a mom to a baby boy, the woman felt "so happy" and was also extremely busy after the birth of her son, she said.
After four weeks of parental leave, she returned to work. She is the "primary breadwinner" in her family, so prior to her son's birth, she had taken on extra work to cover the costs of welcoming a child via surrogacy.
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Her busy schedule, which left her feeling exhausted a lot of the time, made it fairly easy to overlook some red flags, she now realizes. Sometimes, when she came home from work, she would find her husband and her college friend/surrogate hanging out together.
It seemed normal at the time, and she thought it would be "good for her to know my husband better since she was in the process of hopefully carrying our child for us." In retrospect, it was not normal. But alarm bells didn't go off until she took her son to a doctor's appointment.
Prior to going to see the doctor, she noticed something a bit odd: her son has brown eyes but she and her husband both have blue eyes. Even then, she blew this concern off after learning that such a phenomenon is not common but also not impossible.
At the doctor's appointment, though, her doctor delivered some shocking news: based on her baby's blood type, it would not be "biologically possible" for her to be the baby's biological mom.
Devastated and shocked, she immediately assumed the fertility clinic was to blame. She was "heartbroken and angrier than ever" and talking to lawyers as she grappled with this news. Then her husband revealed the truth.
"My husband confessed that he'd slept with my friend (our surrogate) on a few different occasions during our struggle to have her get pregnant with our embryos," the woman wrote in her Reddit post.
"This means what I thought was our son conceived by IVF and carried with a surrogate, isn't my son at all and was in fact conceived the old fashioned way, which I can't ever do. Livid and absolutely broken at the same time doesn't even begin to describe how I feel," she wrote, adding that the fact that she was betrayed by both her husband and her college friend left her feeling angry and heartbroken.
Now, she says she's looking for "a clean break and a fresh start."
In addition to filing for divorce from her husband, she is thinking about giving up her parental rights — a decision that many of those who are close to her disagree with.
"When I told them I refuse to stay in a cheater marriage and I'd rather adopt someday with a better more trustworthy partner, they also told me I was wrong and that maintaining my parental rights isn't much different than if I adopted outright," she wrote. "They said it isn't blood that makes a family."
While her family is supportive of her decision to get divorced, they don't think she should abandon the child that she has already been raising for two years. Many Redditors supported her decision to leave, with some pointing out that men who are in a similar situation often make the same decision.
"If these roles were reversed and you were a man saying that his wife had cheated and had another man’s baby, people would have no problem telling him that he’s within his rights to leave and have nothing to do with the child if he doesn’t want to," one person responded. "Your situation has a few extra layers but is essentially the same scenario morally."
However, some doubted the legitimacy of this story, especially because they noticed some holes in it, in addition to some claims that don't quite add up, medically speaking.
One person, who says they've dealt with infertility and the IVF process, said, "This is a wild story, but it's not real."
Another person pointed out another hole in the story: "Baby’s blood type is established and reported at birth for the parents knowledge so she wouldn’t have found it out two years later …"
Of course, if the story is true, it would be devastating for the woman, which is why many Redditors assured her that she was not in the wrong.
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
