Heartbreak to making history: Surrogacy now legal in Michigan

MID-MICHIGAN (WNEM) - A terrifying, near-death experience called a mid-Michigan woman to a new mission to make surrogacy legal in Michigan.

On a typical school night, you can find this mid-Michigan family of four gathered around the kitchen table.

But life didn’t always look this way.

“I will tell you it was the loneliest, most dark time of my entire life,” Stephanie Jones said.

Stephanie and her husband Justin began their journey to becoming parents like most couples and, after an uneventful pregnancy, they welcomed their bright, blue-eyed baby boy David in 2014.

But when it became time to try for a second, they never could have drawn up how their story would go.

“It was never on my bingo card,” Stephanie said. “I never thought at 20 or 25 or 30 when we started deciding to have children that this was going to be what our future was.”

In 2016 as they tried to expand their family, Stephanie was rushed to the hospital in excruciating pain. Soon, she was going in and out of consciousness.

“The only thing I was thinking about was my son,” Stephanie said. “I thought, ‘I cannot leave my son without a mother.’ I mean, his face just flashing between, in front of my eyes, just thinking, ‘I have got to fight for everything in me.‘”

Stephanie was several weeks pregnant and suffering from an incredibly rare cornual ectopic pregnancy where the fertilized egg had implanted in the fallopian tube. And it was rupturing.

“It was a mere minutes between my life and my death because, at that point, when they were operating on me, the doctor had to actually put the table at a 45-degree angle to keep the blood to my brain because I had lost so much blood,” Stephanie said. “Most women don’t even survive cornual ectopic pregnancy ruptures because of how critical and dire they are, just because you’re hemorrhaging.”

Stephanie was one of the lucky ones and, almost two years later, they got pregnant again. But lightning struck twice.

“So in 2018, on October 13, I had a recurrence of another cornual ectopic pregnancy, which is medically unexplainable,” Stephanie said. “No one that I’ve talked to, not one physician, not one doctor, not anyone can explain how or why that happened.”

It was then that her doctor told her surrogacy would be her only option to have her own children.

“I start Googling,” she said. “Like, ‘OK, we can do this.’ ‘Surrogacy.’ ‘Surrogacy in Michigan.’ I remember going from what I thought was the lowest of low to the absolute darkest corner of my soul when I remember Google telling me that surrogacy was banned and illegal in the state of Michigan.”

Michigan was the only state in the country with a ban still on the books.

“And I thought to myself, from that very deep dark corner of my soul, things were gonna change,” Stephanie said. “And that was rooted in my bones and until things were gonna change, I wasn’t gonna rest.”

She got to work and in 2019, she founded the Michigan Fertility Alliance.

“Michigan Fertility Alliance, I always say, was literally born when I nearly died,” she said. “And, you know, the thing that nearly killed me is the thing I’m most grateful for.”

Out of darkness came light.

As she began to grow her team of volunteers, she also worked on growing her family via surrogacy.

“We kind of scraped together our life savings and out to Portland I went because we had to create embryos, we had to go through the process and then we had to find a carrier,” Stephanie said. “Find a, you know, we call her an ‘angel without wings.’ Who was going to carry our daughter?”

That angel without wings gave birth to their second child, baby Leona, in surrogacy-friendly Kentucky in 2020 just as efforts to give Michigan families that same option started ramping up. It all eventually culminated in the Michigan Family Protection Act.

“It kind of brings Michigan out of the dark ages and into current times to represent the modern family and how all families grow, all families love, all families expand,” Stephanie said. “That’s really what is the most imperative thing of this bill package.”

Last year, the governor signed the Michigan Family Protection Act into law and, as of April 1, it’s in effect.

“April 1, people have options in Michigan that they’ve never had before,” Stephanie said.

Not only is surrogacy legal, but it also protects families who need fertility treatments and ensures that all children born through fertility treatments have secure parentage rights at birth, eliminating vulnerabilities and the need for a lengthy and costly adoption process.

Laws that support future Michigan families just like Stephanie’s.

“I always say you take your sorrow and you turn it into your superpower, and the superpower, the result, is this law that’s going to benefit hundreds of thousands of people.”

Something that will give all families the missing pieces they’ve always dreamed of.

While surrogacy is now legal, it is by no means cheap. Stephanie and her husband spent roughly $176,000 during their journey.

That’s why the Michigan Fertility Alliance already has a new goal in mind: getting insurance to help cover the cost of fertility treatments.

If you’d like to learn more about the Michigan Fertility Alliance, you can head to their website.

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