It's no mean feat to give birth to three sets of twins. Yet that's what this mum did.
But straight after having them, she gave them away.
That’s because she’s a surrogate who helps people to make families of their own.
After having two kids, Jacob (8) and Ava (5), Kirsten Langhammer felt her family was complete. However, she really missed being pregnant.
A co-worker suggested she consider surrogacy, and after a quick Google search, Kirsten had the life-changing decision made.
She was going to be a surrogate.
While commercial surrogacy is illegal in many countries, it’s legal in certain states of America, so Kirsten’s dream of helping others had no major barriers. For each pregnancy, she was compensated $28,000 but she says "if I was doing it for the money, I'd charge a lot more than that!"
She offered her services to Circle Surrogacy, and was one of the 2% of 1,200 monthly applicants to be accepted.
The first couple she helped was Gabriel Manzon and husband. When Gabriel came out as gay, he was sad to realise that he might never have a child of his own, so Kirsten’s help meant the world to him.
“I feel very blessed and grateful to have a human being who would give up nine months of her own life to give birth for another family,” he told Today.
Luckily, Kirsten took to the pregnancies very well. She knew that she was just carrying someone else’s children, and even after delivery, didn’t feel emotionally attached to the kids. “The last thing I wanted to do was to take care of a baby. I’m just an oven,” she joked. “These aren’t my babies.”
Where she did become emotional was watching Manzon and his husband holding their twin daughters for the first time.
So happy with how the first experience went, Kirsten signed up to help another couple, this time James Lewis and Randy Roberts from L.A.The couple had suffered prior failed attempts with a surrogate, so were nervous.
But they were delighted when Kirsten fell pregnant with their twins, a son and a daughter (pictured below).
Surrogacy number three came a year later, but this time neither Kirsten nor the couple in question wanted twins.
It wasn’t to be however, and the doctors told Kirsten she was having two babies.
“Was I really going to say no?,” she said. “Apparently, my uterus is magical!”
With three C-sections under her belt now, having given birth to eight kids in eight years, Kirsten is aware that there’s a risk going forward, so she won’t. Probably.
“I’m 99.9 per cent sure I’m done,” she said.
Wow. What a woman. Thanks to people like Kirsten, people who can’t conceive but want children of their own have the option of doing just that.
