I have just watched Rebel Wilson chatting on the Today show, below on YouTube, and yep I am a bit late to the party on this, as it happened last month. I saw her baby announcement post on instagram and was pondering as to why Rebel Wilson used a surrogate rather than carrying her own baby.
It was in 2020 that Rebel went to see a fertility doctor in a bid to get pregnant, as a single woman IVF was going to be her best option because she suffers from PCOS – polycystic ovary syndrome. With PCOS you have irregular periods and as a result your ovaries don’t regularly ovulate or release eggs, which obviously you need to get pregnant. You may have high levels of male hormones in your body and polycystic ovaries where your ovaries become enlarged and contain many fluid-filled sacs (follicles) that surround the eggs, but the fluid sacs aren’t cysts. The problem with PCOS is that getting pregnant can be difficult naturally therefore often many women have to turn to IVF.
Rebel Wilson had three egg harvesting procedures, where they collected a total of 18 eggs, but unfortunately, none of these eggs made it to the embryo stage where they were able to be used. However, before Rebel went through the egg harvesting her fertility doctor said to her “You’d do much better if you were healthier.” It was this that put her on her journey to a healthier body and caused her to lose 80 lbs (36.2kg). Wow go you, is all I can say to her, as we all know losing weight is not usually that easy, and losing that amount of weight takes a lot of hard work and effort – so HIGH FIVE and if you reading this Rebel please tell us all your secrets!!
As a side note, doesn’t she look amazing?
Anyway back to the surrogacy, I am assuming that it was due to her PCOS that Rebel Wilson used a surrogate because although women with PCOS can get pregnant, the fact that her first three rounds of egg harvesting produced eggs that didn’t make it to embryo stage suggests that might be the case. Rebel did manage to get some embryos after a few more tries and one of those was used with her surrogate.
The fertility journey is hard, whether you have money or not. Rebel was lucky in this case to be able to afford to have a surrogate which resulted in a child. My love goes out to all of you that maybe aren’t in that position and are struggling with PCOS. It is one of those things that I think is hard to understand if you haven’t been through it, if you are reading this thinking that’s me, please do get in touch if you’d like a friendly ear.
