A local election candidate has spoken about her experience acting as a surrogate mother for friends and her relief that she didn’t feel a bond with the child following his birth.
Westmeath-based Fine Gael candidate Becky Loftus Dore, who is a mother of four, gave birth late last month to a baby boy who was conceived through donor IVF. She says, during the pregnancy, she tried to distance herself emotionally from the child she was carrying.
“To be honest, I didn’t feel any connection or bond during the pregnancy. Right from the beginning, I knew I had a job to grow it. It has no biological connection to myself or my husband. It was something that I put into the deal: I wasn’t going to donate my egg or anything like that. It was a complete donor embryo.
“Even though my head had worked out what was going on, and my family had worked out what was going on, I was waiting to see the role my natural hormones would play when I saw the baby. Would there be a connection, would there be any kind of bond? But there wasn’t, which was fantastic”.
