MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry opened up on a blog post yesterday to share that she welcomed her new daughter via gestational pregnancy.
She and her husband James Perry used a gestational carrier to deliver a baby that is genetically theirs.
“The birth of every child is miraculous,” she wrote. “This little girl is no exception.”
The 40-year old host of a self-titled political talk show that uses the hashtag Nerdland in social media for its program disclosed that at age 28, she had an uneventful pregnancy and delivered a daughter from a previous relationship. But then she developed fibroids and after years of battling them, eventually had to have a hysterectomy.
“I spent years suffering from the agony of uterine fibroids,” Perry stated. “Finally, in 2008, after fighting back with an arsenal of homeopathic and medical weapons, I decided to have my uterus removed. I wept for the children I would never have and made peace with the idea that one is enough.”
That left her unable to conceive with the man she later married…until she learned of a friend conceiving through a gestational surrogate and got convinced to give it a try.
“I read everything I could find, consulted everyone I could, and prayed a lot. In 2012, James and I began our journey with enormous faith and more than a little trepidation,” she wrote while noting that one of every 100 babies born in the United States was conceived via fertility assistance. “Because I had retained my ovaries, we were able to create our own biological embryos. In Vitro Fertilization was a physically taxing and emotionally brutal process. But for many people, it has changed their lives.”
Indeed Perry and her husband welcomed their daughter on Valentine’s day.
When life doesn’t go according to plan, you pluck a couple of lemons off of a tree and make a whisky sour! Boom!
