Rosanna Davison opens up about suffering 14 miscarriages before welcoming her daughter via surrogacy

Rosanna Davison has opened up about suffering 14 miscarriages before welcoming her daughter through surrogacy.

She and her husband, Wes Quirke, welcomed their daughter Sophia in November 2019. She appeared on Friday night's Late Late Show, where she spoke about their surrogacy journey and the difficulty that she had had in becoming pregnant. "It got to the end of 2015 and we were really keen to start a family so we went for it and it happened very quickly and it was all very exciting. I had the eight-week scan book I told all of my family at five weeks and everyone was just thrilled for us," she said. "And then kind of abruptly and painfully it came crashing to an end and I had a miscarriage. Tried again got pregnant very quickly again the same thing happened again at six and a half weeks. In total, we had 14 of these early miscarriages." She recalled how she and her husband went through a number of tests to try and fiure out the causes of the miscarriages. She visited five specialists in the UK and in Ireland, before she had success with one specialist. "I was told pretty much that my immune system was reacting to Wes' DNA seeing it as a foreign invader as it would a pathogen or a cancer cell and killing. So essentially my body was killing my babies," she said.

 

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The 35-year-old said that that the experience took a toll on her relationship with her husband, as she told how she began to question her role as a woman. "At the beginning, I questioned my role as a woman, I couldn't do what my body was biologically designed to do," she said. "There were a couple of times, I suppose we look back at them now and laugh, I tried to convince Wes to leave me and find another partner because I knew he was dying for a baby." The decision that surrogacy was something they were going  to try wasn't something they took lightly, according to Rosanna. "The idea of a stranger carrying your child in another country was awful. I played with the idea for a few weeks to be honest, I wasn't sure if we could go ahead with it," she said. She recalled the moment of Sophia's birth - and admitted that it's something that she thinks about "every day." "We'd seen our baby in the scans but we walked in and she was crowning and my mum was there too, she pushed me over as the surrogate was pushing the baby," she said. "Then Sophia came out and I cut her cord and it was just, how could you prepare yourself for watching a stranger give birth to your child? It was just the most surreal, terrifying, emotional, amazing experience. I think about it every day," Rosanna continued, as she praised their "amazing" surrogate. "It was a big mash of everything, watching this woman, this amazing woman, I can never thank her enough, giving birth to the child, it was the moment we'd been thinking about for years and wishing for and hoping for and I was balling my eyes out." She added that by sharing her story, she was hoping she may "give hope and inspiration" to people who may be going though a similar situation. She also emphasised how important it was to open up conversations around fertility and surrogacy. You can watch her interview on The Late Late Show here