Sharing the Gift of Life

Jamie Thompson, a 'Test-Tube Baby,' Is Doubly Blessed: She Has Loving Parents and a Caring Surrogate Mother

On the day that Jamie Robyn Thompson was to share her 14th birthday celebration with family and the woman who gave birth to her, a movie spoofing surrogate mothers as trashy opportunists opened, and the news was rife with stories of infertile women "outsourcing" childbirth to poor women in India.

Kim Kovacic, Jamie's surrogate mother, is none of those things. And at Il Fornaio restaurant in Reston recently, there were balloons, presents and a "Happy Birthday Jamie and Kim" ice cream cake.

Fourteen years ago, Kovacic, a married, middle-class mother of three, signed a $15,000 contract with Carol Van Cleef and Doug Thompson, now of McLean, to carry the embryo that their sperm and egg had created in a petri dish. On her 35th birthday, Kovacic gave birth to Jamie. The two families, without a second thought or a hint of awkwardness, have celebrated together every year since.

In technical terms, Kovacic was a "gestational carrier" for Carol and Doug, the "intended parents." Kovacic, 49, short and easygoing with an impish sense of humor, and Van Cleef, 52, a tall, willowy, self-described type-A partner in a major law firm, couldn't be more different. But theirs is an intimate bond of flesh and bone, forged in science and the ancient yearning for a child that society has yet to find the words to describe, much less understand.

Kovacic, who lives in Herndon, brought two of her own daughters to the birthday dinner. The girls gushed about movies and bands and teased Jamie's 17-year-old brother, Peter. Jamie, sitting between Kovacic and Van Cleef, mentioned that she would be singing soprano in her upcoming chorus concert.

Kovacic looked at Van Cleef and raised an eyebrow. "I know she didn't get that from either one of us, did she?"

Kovacic has been Jamie's "special friend" at preschool. She has attended her graduations, school performances and confirmation. She babysat for her as a child. But the one thing she clearly isn't is Jamie's mother.

"I feel a special bond with her, and I'm very proud of her, but I don't feel like she's my child. It's kind of hard to explain," Kovacic said. When she was pregnant with Jamie, people indignantly asked her how she could give her baby away. Indeed, the body produces powerful hormones during pregnancy to help ensure that a mother bonds with her infant.

But in Kovacic's mind, she was giving Carol and Doug their baby back. "I would tell people, well, when you babysit kids, do you want to keep them?" So clear was Kovacic that the baby she was carrying was not her own that she lined up an infertile couple in the Midwest who would take the baby if Carol and Doug backed out.

"You could have grown up in St. Joseph, Michigan," she teased Jamie at dinner, nudging her with an elbow.

" Greaaaaat," the teen said, rolling her eyes.

Surrogate motherhood has been around since at least biblical times, when Sarah gave her maid, Hagar, to Abraham to have a child for her. By the 1980s, surrogate mothers typically used their own eggs and were artificially inseminated with the sperm of the would-be father. But the result was sometimes messy. In the late 1980s, in one of the first legal challenges involving surrogacy, Mary Beth Whitehead changed her mind halfway through her surrogate pregnancy and wanted to keep the baby. The ensuing court battle over the parentage of "Baby M" played like a Greek tragedy.