When Micaela Roy gave birth two weeks ago, she was eager to hand the baby girl over to a woman she met on Facebook just 18 months prior.
Nearby, Sylva Lloyd and her husband Kim had waited longer than most to hold their daughter, grateful to their surrogate for making them parents after a traumatic fertility journey.
Readers are advised this story discusses stillbirth and contains photos and other content that may be distressing to some people.
"Micaela saved my life, my heart was broken," Ms Lloyd says.
"When she put Delilah in my arms it was just so healing."
Delilah's nursery in the couple's Tweed Heads home was ready and waiting for her, with Ms Lloyd, an artist, having hand-painted the walls in anticipation of her daughter's arrival.
"It doesn't even feel real does it? It feels like a dream. She's just so beautiful," Ms Lloyd said while propping her baby up, freshly dressed after a feed in a cosy red onesie.
Ms Lloyd and her husband had also been in the delivery room before but this was the first time their baby had come home from the hospital with them.
After years of reproductive health complications and six months of IVF treatment, Ms Lloyd fell pregnant with her first child, Roman in 2020.
"It was the perfect pregnancy, everything was perfect, he was perfect. I was good and healthy," Lloyd said.
"Then I fell into early labour and there were operations and being in the hospital and everyone doing everything they could … then they told us we were about to meet our baby boy and he wasn't going to make it.
"It was just my cervix that collapsed and they couldn't do anything about it. His little feet didn't touch the ground but he was here with us for the best part of an hour while we got to say goodbye."
After months of treatment to see if the couple could have another child doctors "finally called it and said I needed a hysterectomy", Ms Lloyd said.
Heartbreaking road to parenthood
The Tweed Heads couple then attempted to use Ms Lloyd's sister as a surrogate with their remaining embryos which ended with another pregnancy loss.
After taking time out to travel and grieve, Ms Lloyd convinced her husband to post their story on a Facebook page for Australian surrogates.
"Sylva kept saying 'What if we find a nice lady that's got lots of kids who wants to help us?'" remembers Kim.
Which is exactly what happened when Ms Roy and her husband Simon read their story and got in touch.
"I didn't need any couple that I was doing surrogacy for to prove anything … as long as that included loving each other that was enough for me," she says of the Lloyds.
"If people can come together with so much love after having something so traumatic and so awful happen then they really, really, deserved it."
After a speed round of "surro-dating", where the 'intended parents' or IPs see if they are compatible with the surrogate, Ms Roy had the Lloyds's embryo implanted via IVF.
Ms Roy's youngest daughters confirmed the pregnancy news to the Lloyds by telling her "our mummy has your baby in her tummy" in a phone call.
Two surrogates in the birthing suite
Another surrogate was involved bringing Delilah into the world with midwife Julie Laherty attending the labour while 35 weeks pregnant herself with her second surrogacy for another couple.
With roughly 120 surrogate births per year in Australia, according to a mix of data captured by IVF clinics and surrogate advocates, the presence of two surrogates at the one birth makes the situation a rare one.
People are often curious, Ms Roy says about volunteering as a surrogate and whether she finds it difficult emotionally and mentally to hand the baby she carried over to their parents.
Delilah is the eighth baby Ms Roy has delivered, after having six of her own children and two surrogate pregnancies.
"Having six children of my own is quite a lot of children and it's great, it's busy and it's hectic. But it does mean that there is nothing in me that wants another baby," she says.
"I refer to my surrogate babies as passengers — they're just coming along for the ride."
Ms Roy said she felt no sense of grief either time she acted as a surrogate.
"If your head is in the right space it truly is one of the most rewarding and amazing things you could do for someone and when you're looking at the family you helped create, it's just beautiful."
The expense of surrogacy
Ms Laherty says while some processes are "very necessary" for the protection of all parties "some of the costs are unnecessary".
"Having more Medicare funding would make surrogacy more accessible," she said.
While paid surrogacy is illegal in Australia, couples pay for the surrogate's pregnancy expenses, mandated counselling, legal costs and IVF.
Ms Lloyd says the couple "stopped counting" the costs but estimated their IVF bill alone ranges between $40,000 to $50,000.
"Because I don't have a uterus we don't get any Medicare rebates [for IVF] which doesn't seem fair," says Ms Lloyd.
Under NSW law, the surrogate and her spouse or de facto partner are the automatic legal parents of the baby.
It can cost the intended parents between $4,000 to $15,000 in NSW to adopt their own child according to surrogacy lawyer and surrogate Sarah Jefford.
"There's no reason NSW should charge $1,351 just for filing a parentage order, on top of the lawyers, counsellors, IVF and covering the surrogate's reasonable expenses," Ms Jefford said.
"Everyone else is allowed to make money but the surrogate is at sea with any kind of financial compensation."
Review of surrogate process
Ms Jefford and the Lloyds would like to see the legal process streamlined into something more administrative that could be completed through Births, Deaths and Marriages as opposed to parentage order that involves filing through the Supreme Court.
A spokesperson for the NSW Department of Communities and Justice said: "The preconditions to a parentage order are intended to protect the birth parent and the child from exploitation and to ensure parties are aware of their legal rights, including the ability to change their minds."
Legislation dealing with surrogacy in NSW is currently under review with the government encouraging the public to make submissions on the issue.
Meanwhile the Lloyds are encouraging potential surrogates to come forward if they think they can help others become parents after doing their own research.
"You start a whole other family for someone, we can be grandparents now," Ms Lloyd said.
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