After losing our newborn, many miscarriages and painful IVF, my wife and I have welcomed ‘Californian twins’ – born FOUR months apart. Here’s how we did it…

Are you smarter than a doctor? Our GP gave his colleagues a brain-teaser the other day, and none of them could figure out the answer. Let’s see if you can do any better.

A couple has a son and daughter born within four months of one another, with both children fully genetically related to both parents. How on earth did that happen?

The short answer is that my wife Kate gave birth to a beautiful baby last July, and a heroic surrogate named Ava delivered our other darling bub a short while later. But the full story will take a little longer to explain. 

Back in March 2022, we were blessed with our second child, an exquisite baby girl we named Zola.

Despite a complicated pregnancy Zola had been doing fine, so when Kate went into labour two months early we weren’t too scared – especially as a cocky doctor told us: ‘At this hospital, at 31 weeks, all babies survive.’

When Zola was born via emergency C-section, her health quickly deteriorated – and just five hours after she had arrived in this world, she was gone, her tiny body overwhelmed by a bacterial infection.

I’ve never felt so shattered and bereft. It was pure agony, and my wife and I were paralysed with grief. In the weeks of heartbreak that followed, we resolved to try for another baby and somehow move forward in the wake of our loss. 

As Winston Churchill once said: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’

Understandably, Kate wasn’t sure if she could cope physically or psychologically with pregnancy or childbirth ever again. Losing Zola was a living nightmare. She’d been through a hellish 72-hour labour with our first child, too, and that had also ended in an emergency C-section.

What’s more, by the time we lost Zola she’d been through ten years of invasive and painful IVF procedures, as well as multiple miscarriages.

The thought of going through all that again was too horrible to bear. And the doctors made clear to us that the medical risks of Kate attempting another pregnancy and birth were high. So in desperation we turned to surrogacy in the US.

I know that surrogacy – where another woman carries a child for you – can be a controversial subject. In the UK, it’s illegal to pay a surrogate, so you have to rely on volunteers, who are hard to come by and much more likely to drop out before the fertility process starts. Which means surrogacy is rare here – and the legal framework is much less developed than in America.

It’s also the case in the UK that if someone volunteers to carry an embryo for you, that you then have to apply to adopt the child, which creates a terrible psychological uncertainty about what might happen if the volunteer changes her mind and wants to keep the baby.

So, most British families who choose surrogacy are forced to go overseas, as we did.

We were in the hugely fortunate position of being able to pay the large sums it costs for the professional medical and ethical processes you find in the States.

The total cost – including an embryo transfer, legal fees and other outgoings like spending months in America before and after the birth – was big. I don’t want to say how much exactly; suffice it to say it would be enough to buy a property in many parts of the UK.

But having another child was priceless to us, and we resolved to spend every last penny we had if that’s what it took to grow our family.

I worked around the clock to pay for it. I’m a former senior adviser to David Cameron and now an entrepreneur with a couple of start-ups under my belt. Luckily that meant I could get some well-paid consultancy contracts, so we could just about cobble together the money we needed.

It felt logical to sign up with a surrogacy agency in Los Angeles, where we already had some embryos stored – created during the same round of IVF treatment that had led to Kate becoming pregnant with Zola.

We assumed it would be a speedy process to find a surrogate and get started. Oh, how wrong we were.

The agency had strict criteria. Any prospective surrogate needed to have carried healthy babies to full term and be finished with having kids of her own.

They also needed to pass a battery of medical and psychological tests, which ruled out several surrogates we had met. For example, one was barred because she’d previously had gestational diabetes.

The process dragged on. Twelve months after registering with the agency, we still hadn’t been matched with a surrogate. But then – joyfully – our prayers were answered by an amazing person called Ava. She is a 34-year-old mother of three from Mississippi – a devout Christian with a heart of gold.

When we spoke to Ava and her husband Joe, a high school baseball coach, we felt an immediate connection, even though we were thousands of miles apart. On that very first call, Ava told us she’d cried when she read about our fertility journey, and said she wanted to help. Then she made us a solemn vow: ‘I promise I won’t let you down.’

Some of our friends and family were sceptical about the whole thing. ‘How can you trust a stranger to carry your baby?’ they asked. ‘What if she drinks? What if she smokes?’

But we just knew. Ava was clearly a deeply responsible person so we didn’t hesitate for a second.

There was only one complication. Just as we were about to move forward, something totally unexpected happened: Kate got pregnant.

We were elated – but also terrified. Doctors had us doing near-constant scans and tests so they could be sure Kate and the growing baby were safe. And she needed a great deal of psychological counselling to be strong enough to endure another birth – if we made it that far. Given our history of miscarriages, we didn’t dare believe the pregnancy would last. Our faith in the future had been shot to pieces.

As a result, we really didn’t want to lose Ava. After everything we’d been through, the thought of our pregnancy failing without having a surrogate was too much to bear. So we pressed ahead on that front, too.

Even if Kate didn’t miscarry, we assumed it would take ages for Ava to get pregnant, as we had always needed multiple attempts at transferring embryos to Kate’s womb to get a positive result.

But then came another twist – Ava got pregnant on the very first embryo transfer. Wonderfully, improbably, we were about to have two babies, born just months apart.

It turns out this happens often enough in the world of surrogacy that our LA agency had a name for it: ‘Californian twins’.

Apparently, the reason it’s fairly common is that couples going through the surrogacy process relax a bit, stop stressing, and sometimes end up getting pregnant themselves.

As the days went by, both pregnancies moved forward. We tried to keep busy – Kate with her interior design business, me with technology start-ups. Every couple of weeks Ava had an ultrasound, which we watched via video calls.

It never ceases to amaze me how humans can adjust to completely novel situations and relationships.

Ava’s kids went with her to the hospital, and it was such a joy seeing their excitement at the life growing in their mum’s tummy. One of them would hold the mobile phone so Kate and I could watch the scan and ask the doctor how the baby was doing.

They understood full well that the baby was ours – and they couldn’t be happier for us, or more excited about the impending birth.

The months passed in a blur, and before I knew it, July was here and my wife’s own due date.

Kate had decided to have the baby in her hometown of Perth, in Western Australia. We’d relocated there from the UK soon after losing Zola so that Kate could be cared for by her family.

Thankfully, everything went smoothly with the birth, and just a few weeks later, we were boarding a plane to the US with our bubbly newborn and our six-year-old, heading to Ava’s hometown. From then on, we spent every day with Ava and her family, exploring the state of Mississippi and falling in love with its southern cuisine, from deep-fried okra to grits and biscuit (a bit like porridge and a scone).

After a couple of blissful weeks, it was time for Ava’s delivery.

An ultrasound the week before the due date revealed the baby had flipped into a breach position. Which meant the final phase of the pregnancy was a little nerve-racking, as we all hoped the baby would right itself – otherwise Ava would need a C-section rather than the natural birth she preferred.

On Ava’s due date, we all gathered at the hospital.

Kate and I were there with our two kids, the new baby not even four months old yet.

Ava and Joe’s children came, too, revelling in the fact they were getting a day off school, along with Ava’s parents, plus Ava’s sister and her children.

They took over most of the waiting room. The youngsters had a blast, playing together and waiting excitedly for the new arrival. Meanwhile, Kate and I were in the delivery room with Ava and Joe.

It was a homely scene – the doctor in charge had delivered all of Ava’s children, one of the nurses was a family relation and one of Ava’s close friends was on hand to take photos.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when we learned the baby was no longer breach.

Ava went into labour and while Kate held her hand, her husband, Joe, was by her side cheering her on the whole time.

Surprisingly quickly, Ava suddenly gave one last heroic push, the medical staff whooped and cheered, and a baby’s cry filled the room.

Kate sobbed with joy as she cradled our newborn. She later said how special it was for her to be able to hold her baby immediately after birth, which hadn’t been possible after her own deliveries because of the C-sections.

Our new arrival started breastfeeding from Kate right away – made easier by the fact that her milk was already flowing after giving birth herself so recently.

In what seemed like no time, we were out of the delivery room and in the private recovery rooms: one for me, Kate and our baby, and another for Ava and Joe.

We were just getting comfy when there was a knock at our door. It was Ava, holding a tiny bottle of colostrum – the super-thick and ultra-nutritious first slug of breast milk that’s especially important for newborns.

We fed it to our new baby, who was utterly perfect in every way.

If we’d been in the UK, we’d then have had to apply to adopt our child – a fraught, lengthy, bureaucratic process. But in America, the baby was legally ours from the moment the embryo was created. That meant filling out the birth registration forms was a breeze and no different than if Kate had given birth herself.

And then – courtesy of the 14th amendment of the US constitution – within weeks our new baby received a shiny American passport.

Donald Trump has since tried to close that legal provision for so-called ‘anchor babies’, but luckily we managed to get ours just in time.

We left the hospital a couple of days later and adjusted to the boisterous reality of having two babies born four months apart.

Their feeding and sleeping patterns quickly became synchronised – although unfortunately for us, the ‘wrong’ way round, meaning as soon as one went to sleep the other seemed to wake up.

But even though it was full-on, Kate and I had never been happier. We’d always dreamed of having three children, but we hadn’t dared to even hope this might be a possibility. And yet, here we were. Sleep-deprived, yes, but awash with joy and contentment.

Before we flew back home, we had one last blissful day with Ava and her family.

Appropriately enough, it was Thanksgiving – when American families come together to express their gratitude for the blessings in their lives.

We kicked off with lunch at Ava’s parents’ picturesque house on a lake, where tables

were crammed with delicious southern Thanksgiving specialities, such as sweet potato casserole made with candied pecans and brown sugar.

Several hours later, full to bursting, we made our way to Joe’s parents’ country home for an equally sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner.

The next day, Ava and Joe held our babies as we packed for our flight and, with tears in our eyes, we said an emotional farewell.

As a gift to remember us by, we gave Ava’s family a big globe on a wooden stand, inscribed with these words: ‘Our families are forever connected across the world. You made us whole.’

Carrying our two babies through the airport – one conspicuously bigger than the other – attracted lots of curious and friendly questions.

‘Excuse me, are they twins?’ people kept asking.

‘They’re “twiblings”,’ we replied with a smile – a mix of twins and siblings: one girl and one boy.

Which one was born via surrogacy, girl or boy? I’m not going to say. We’re not in any way shy about it – we just want to respect their right to privacy.

As soon as they’re old enough, they can decide for themselves what they choose to share.

And that’s where our story ends. My only wish now is that the kind of miracle we experienced becomes possible for more Brits with chronic fertility issues.

Because after years of IVF struggles, harrowing pregnancies and miscarriages, and the infinite agony of losing a child, our family is finally complete – thanks to the immense kindness of our surrogate Ava.