the ultimate gift .

• Published date: 27 February 2021

Raglan siblings Cooper and Eily know their 7-month-old cousin, Florence, back in Ireland, is extra special as their mother carried her in her belly for their aunt and uncle.

The 33-year-old is now 22 weeks into in her fourth pregnancy and the children are excited they “get to keep this one”.

The sisters’ surrogacy journey wasn’t easy, as they navigated legal issues both here and in Ireland, where surrogacy is not recognised, to get three embryos flown 18,000km across the world.

It was a rare and complicated case, which Kiwi health officials say challenged them.

And then our borders closed as Covid-19 raged around the world.

If the new parents hadn’t left Dublin when they did, with just 24 hours notice, there’s no telling whether they would have been allowed into the country to collect the child they had long hoped for.

WRITTEN ON Stuart Hamilton’s wish list during his battle with cancer was “get Amy a baby”.

The father of four didn’t live long enough to meet his granddaughter Florence but when he died in March 2019, he knew the process to create her had started — his youngest child Katie had agreed to be a surrogate for his third-born, Amy White.

White, 38, had cervical cancer when she was 25. It was picked up late, as regular smear testing for women in Ireland didn’t start until age 25. She had to have a hysterectomy, which removes the uterus, rendering her unable to conceive naturally.

“It was always in the back of our mind that myself or my older sister would do this for her,” Katie Richardson tells the Weekend Herald.

“But at the time when Amy had her cancer, none of us were having our own children so we didn’t really register that side of it. Whereas Mum and Dad did, they were just distraught for Amy.

“My dad battled eight years of cancer, and it was just his dream . . . he had this wish list of things he wanted to do before he passed away and one of them was ‘get Amy a baby’.

“He just missed it but he knew how far we were down the legal process and he knew that Blake and I were doing our best to make it happen.”

Richardson moved from Ireland to Auckland in 2009 and met her future Kiwi husband, Blake. The pair moved to Raglan in 2013, where she is a physiotherapist and nutritionist, specialising in women’s pelvic health.

In 2014, her sister started a relationship with her husband-to-be, Reggie, whom she had known for years and who knew about her cancer and the fact it would be difficult for them to conceive. But the couple both knew they wanted a family.

“There’s never been a doubt I wanted children,” White tells the Weekend Herald from Dublin where she was five weeks into Ireland’s third lockdown.

“He’s got six kids in his family, four kids in my family. Both our families are really close.”

Over the years, White kept an eye on surrogacy and adoption in Europe but she says not a lot of countries’ laws aligned with Irish ones. And the adoption process was lengthy.

Meanwhile, Richardson struggled with endometriosis and was told in her-mid 20s she might find it difficult to have her own children. But she had no problems and had Cooper in 2015.

The sisters’ older sister, Gilly Staunton, suffered hyperemesis gravidarum — which causes severe nausea and vomiting — during pregnancy, so it ruled her out of helping White.

“As Gilly and I were having our own children, we started to realise what Amy and Reggie were missing and how hard it was going to be for them,” Richardson says.

The couple went back to Ireland in 2016 and told the Whites they were willing to carry a baby for them. Blake had been “amazing” in agreeing to support her through the process, Richardson says.

“It’s a huge thing to ask him to do. When you’re pregnant, your partner deals with a lot but at the end it’s for their baby, but in this scenario, Blake’s not getting anything out of it. It was really selfless of him to do.

“He just said, ‘If this is what you want to do, I’ll support you’. And he went along with it. He turned up to all the counselling, all the legal things we needed to do and didn’t bat an eye.

“If he wasn’t my partner, would I have been able to do it?”

But the couple wanted another child before they started the process, and for Richardson to have finished breastfeeding. So the following year, Eily was conceived, with the couple becoming parents of two in February 2018.

ONCE THE two couples decided on New Zealand as the best place to start their journey, the sisters got in touch with Fertility Associates and Auckland barrister Margaret Casey QC, who specialises in medical ethics, international family law issues and reproductive law.

Even though surrogacy was not an option in Ireland, White was able to have embryos...