She’s Been a Surrogate 9 Times—Here’s Why She Keeps Saying Yes
6 min readAt 39 years old, Emily Westerfield has spent the last decade of her life either pregnant or working to get pregnant. In February, she gave birth to her 12th baby; she has also previously birthed two sets of twins. But Westerfield’s no trad wife, she’s a gestational carrier, better known as a surrogate. Of the 12 babies she’s carried, nine have been for other families.
An estimated 3,000 babies are born each year via surrogacy in the U.S. That’s well under 0.1 percent of the total births in the country each year, putting Westerfield in rare company. Even so, with rising infertility rates and delayed parenthood trends, using a gestational carrier is becoming more common in modern couples’ endeavors to start a family, and, though the data is difficult to track, fertility experts cite the field growing significantly in the last decade and a half.
Westerfield before and during delivery.
There are a lot of misconceptions about surrogacy, many of which harken back to the early days of the practice when a surrogate would often not only carry the baby but also donate her own egg. That method is now called “traditional surrogacy” and is uncommon. The current preferred nomenclature of “gestational carrier” denotes the now normal practice of a surrogate serving solely as the carrier, but not having any of her DNA contribute to the creation of said baby. This typically means for hetero couples, their sperm and egg are used, while, for same sex-couples, donor eggs or sperm are used, creating a less emotionally messy and legally complicated process for both intended parents and surrogates.
Before Westerfield entered the world of surrogacy, she led a quintessentially normal life. She grew up in a small Ohio town and studied sports management in college, but as a “nurturer by nature,” she decided to shift into nursing and got a job at the hospital ER. She also got married, had three kids of her own, with all uncomplicated pregnancies and births.
Her epiphany came when her husband’s cousin, a very dear friend, began struggling with secondary infertility (the term for when someone is unable to get pregnant again after having a child). After one particularly heartbreaking conversation with her, Westerfield found herself trying to lighten the mood. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” she recalls. “I said, ‘You can take one of our kids! Or better yet: I’ll have a baby for you!’ I was totally joking, but it got my wheels turning, and I started thinking, What if I really did that?”
Her wondering turned to Googling, and soon, she’d fallen down a rabbit hole researching surrogacy. The more educated she became on the topic, the more convinced she was that she wanted to do it. That would certainly not be everyone’s reaction, but this is a woman who once attended a local county fair, saw a poster of someone seeking a kidney donor, and immediately signed up as a donor (although she didn’t ultimately end up donating a kidney). Westerfield is an innate giver: “I find it so rewarding to help people and make people happy,” she says.
The next step was to get the other parties involved in the process on board with her plan. “It was an immediate ‘hell no’ when I brought it up to my husband,” she says, laughing. “I was searching how to talk to your spouse about surrogacy.” Their cousin also wasn’t keen on the idea, but even with that initial door closed, Westerfield could not stop thinking about becoming a surrogate. “Mentally, I was all in,” she says. “I was determined I was going to give someone a baby.” Clearly a woman of conviction, Westerfield didn’t need long to convince her husband. “With more information and more education, he began to understand, or at the very least realize what a huge passion this had become for me,” she says, adding with a laugh, “or he got sick of me nagging.”
Westerfield soon learned that there were numerous ways to become a surrogate. To find “intended parents” to work with, you can go through a surrogacy agency, you can connect with a friend or family member, or you can pursue a so-called “independent journey,” where the parties involved meet via online forums and figure out all the interviewing, screenings, background checks, and legal processes on their own. Ever the go-getter, Westerfield chose the latter. “I found a platform online where people post as egg donors, intended parents, or potential surrogates, and share their stories,” she says. Westerfield shared her own story and was inundated with responses. Within one year of posting on the forum, she gave birth to her first surrogacy baby in December 2015.
Westerfield with her husband and family.
At this point, Westerfield jokes that she has a “platinum uterus” because of the number of successful transfers, uncomplicated pregnancies, and deliveries she’s had. She gave birth to twins in 2017 (a double embryo transfer in which both embryos took), and a single baby in 2018. She then experienced a miscarriage after an embryo transfer in 2021, but went on to have a second set of twins that same year (this time due to a surprise split of a single embryo). Westerfield had another baby in 2022 and another in 2024, and her most recent baby was born in early February 2026. That’s a total of nine surrogate babies, making Westerfield likely the most prolific surrogate in the U.S. (U.K.-based surrogate Carole Horlock is widely recognized as the world’s most prolific surrogate, having carried 13 surrogacy babies.)
Westerfield can easily rattle off the names of all nine of those babies and stays in touch with all of the families she’s worked with. “We send Christmas cards and call on birthdays, and while I don’t see [the children] very often, I have seen them all since their births,” she says. “I’m like distant Aunt Emily.” Her first surrogate baby is now 10 years old; her parents recently reached out to Westerfield to share that they’ve started explaining to their daughter the role Westerfield played in her life.
In 2023, Westerfield started her own surrogacy agency called Carrying Dreams. As a “full-service” family-building agency, Carrying Dreams bills itself as a “one-stop shop” for both intended parents and surrogates, with Westerfield and her team guiding them through everything from egg donation to pairing together to the complexity of surrogacy laws and the paperwork involved in the process (massive 40-to-70 page contracts that can take six weeks to complete). In fact, that complexity was a big part of Westerfield’s motivation to start her own agency. Although she wasn’t daunted at the prospect of figuring out surrogacy with no guide, she realizes most people are. “I can’t carry a baby for everyone who wants one,” she says. “But the next best thing is that I can still help people through the process of building their family.”
The agency will also now be her full-time focus, as she says surrogate baby No. 9 was her last. “I feel like I’ve done my due diligence, and I’ve helped so many people, but I’ve been pregnant or trying to get pregnant for a decade now, and I’m going to be 40 soon, and my own kids are getting older,” she says. “So it’s time to refocus.”
Money is, of course, a major piece of that family-building process, which naturally leads to one key question: What does a full-time surrogate get paid? Westerfield shares that surrogates typically ask for around $60,000 per baby, but there are some who ask for more. Westerfield herself has seen a range in her compensation—she received just $25,000 her first time as a gestational carrier, and has earned between $40,000 and $60,000 each subsequent time.
Considering the significant physical impacts of having a baby, along with the time commitment of undergoing in vitro fertilization, being pregnant, and then recovering from birth, this compensation seems startlingly low, which is why most surrogates are in it for more altruistic reasons. “Yes, I am compensated for my pain and suffering, but I don’t consider this a job,” Westerfield says. “It’s about helping other people attain their dream of becoming parents,” adding a job requirement: “You need a big, fat bleeding heart.”