A California woman paid by a gay couple to carry an unborn baby to term for them was pressured by the men to end that child’s life after she received a breast cancer diagnosis during her second trimester.
“It was frustrating because I wanted to give them a family,” second-time surrogate Brittney Pearson, 37, told the Daily Mail. “They said they cared but they didn’t. I felt betrayed and heartbroken.”
Pearson’s doctors initially found a chemotherapy treatment that would allow her to safely carry the child until weeks into her third trimester.
“They said that the pregnancy could have saved my life too because when you’re pregnant, all your cells are growing more rapidly, so the cancer grew a lot faster, and that’s how we found it. So it could have stayed smaller and dormant for way longer and been way worse before we found it,” Pearson explained in an interview with Jennifer Lahl of The Center For Bioethics and Culture Network.
If the baby boy was still unwanted at the time of the projected 34-week delivery post-chemo, Pearson noted that there were even several families lined up who were willing to adopt him after birth.
“The first thing I thought after I was diagnosed was I want to keep this baby safe and bring it earthside,” Pearson explained. “I would have been there, I would have given him every chance of survival. I had people ready to help.”
Pearson said her medical team tried “literally everything
