A woman has given birth to her own nephew, after offering to be a surrogate for her sister who had fertility issues.
Aliciamarie Rodriguez, 31, agreed to carry a baby for her sister Amanda, 28, after she faced multiple health complications and five miscarriages in six years.
The sisters from Florida, US, say the unusual arrangement has only brought them closer together now that baby Oliver (who was born in August) is in the world.
Aliciamarie said: ‘I was with my sister when the doctor recommended she get a surrogate, and I didn’t even give her a chance to ask for my help. I volunteered myself, because she and I are very close.
‘She’s always been very maternal, and I would’ve felt like a terrible sister if I hadn’t jumped in to help out, especially because I had already started my family.’
Amanda, an academic advisor at the University of Florida, who first suffered a stroke in 2014 when she was just 21, was diagnosed with Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS), more commonly known as sticky blood syndrome, and Lupus.
Marketer Aliciamarie was living in Italy at the time, but moved back to Florida to help her family while Amanda was receiving treatments.
After a year of these treatments, Amanda was able to recover and started a relationship with her now husband, Hector. But the couple were dealt a devastating blow when they started trying to have a child.
Amanda said: ‘When I locked down my husband, I told him it was very important that I start trying for a baby early on because of my APS.
‘I got pregnant a year after we first started trying, but I only found out I was pregnant because I had a miscarriage in the hospital.’
A second pregnancy followed, although Amanda had another miscarriage after 18 weeks. She went on to experience three more pregnancy losses.
Aliciamarie had given birth to her son, Julian, in 2019, and had to have an emergency c-section, so the sisters decided to wait a year for her to recover before going ahead with the IVF.
Amanda’s highest grade egg and her husband Hector’s sperm was implanted into Aliciamarie in January this year, with the whole process costing over £11,500 ($16,000) for the IVF and lawyers for the surrogacy paperwork.
Amanda said: ‘I think this is a really beautiful story for me to tell Oliver when he gets older.
‘My sister and I have definitely got closer as a result of her doing this for me…
‘When I saw him I was almost in shock, because it was like, “that’s mine, that baby is biologically mine, that’s insane”.
‘When Oliver and my sister met for the first time it was so beautiful, and I have those photos for the rest of my life. I’m so grateful to her.’
Aliciamarie added: ‘A lot of people asked about how I would feel giving up the baby, or growing the baby and forming this connection with my nephew and then having to give him up.
‘Something I want people to understand is that I don’t feel like I am giving the baby up.
‘I went into this procedure open minded, and I knew he wasn’t mine to begin with.
‘I look at what I’m doing as a favour to my sister, I’m just giving him back to where he came from.’
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