What's it like to be a surrogate?

For many people, it seems incredible to imagine that a woman can be a gestational surrogate – that she is able to carry the pregnancy to term, tolerate the morning sickness, interrupted sleep, aches and pains etc, and then after 9 months, voluntarily hand that baby over to another person/couple.  But a significant number of generous women feel that they are able to do just that, and for the surrogates I work with, it is less about handing the baby over, and more about handing the baby back to his or her actual parents – the term “extreme babysitting” is one that I hear pretty often.  Check out this story of one woman’s experience of being a surrogate http://www.instyle.com/lifestyle/moms/what-surrogacy-is-like

I had some of my family members scare me halfway through my first pregnancy telling me that it was going be hard for me. I started wondering, “Man, is this really going to affect me that much?” And it doesn’t. Your mindset doesn’t change. At no point do you decide, “Okay, I’m going to keep this baby.” It just doesn’t work like that.