A woman who served as the surrogate for her twin sister has just welcomed healthy twin babies.
Whitney Bliesner is now a new mom to twins thanks to her own twin, Jill Noe, who carried the children for Bliesner due to a rare health condition neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), that prevented her from doing so herself.
According to Good Morning America, Rhett, a boy, arrived at 8:06 a.m. on June 7th 2019 and his sister, Rhenley, was born at 8:08 a.m.
“The whole day was just surreal,” Bliesner, who lives in Portland, Oregon, told Good Morning America on Tuesday (11.06.19). “I got to do skin-to-skin with them. It was an amazing feeling. It was like a dream.”
When she was a teen, Bliesner was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), a condition that causes tumours to form in the brain, spinal cord and nerves, according to Mayo Clinic. She had a tumour removed in 1999, which caused her left eye to close. After undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, she completely lost hearing in her right ear and later lost 40% of hearing in her left ear.
In 2016, Bliesner married her husband Peter. The couple wanted to start a family, but Bliesner’s condition made it risky for her to carry children. “I have a 50/50 chance of passing my disorder onto my child,” Bliesner explained, adding that pregnancy hormones might increase tumour growth.
Bliesner went through her options and ultimately decided on surrogacy. She had a friend offer to carry her child, but that plan ended up falling through.
That’s when her twin decided to step in and give her sister a selfless gift. Donor eggs were used as Noe underwent in vitro fertilization. Noe became pregnant with twins during the second attempt.
“It’s my best friend, someone I’ve come into this world with so it was really a no-brainer that I’d offer to be her surrogate,” Noe said of Bleisner.
Recently there have been many wonderful surrogacy success stories, from a woman who gave birth to a baby for her sister in law who was born without a uterus to a 61-year-old grandmother in the US giving birth to a child gor her gay grandson.
