A pair of identical twins from Chicago have opened up about what it’s like for one to serve as a pregnancy surrogate for the other.
Courtney Essenpreis, 36, already had two children of her own — so when her twin Amy Fuggiti struggled to get pregnant after years of IVF, she stepped up to offer her womb to her sister.
Now Courtney is due to give birth to her niece in October, while Amy and her husband Anthony, 38, join her in the delivery room.
Both Amy and Courtney always knew that having children would be a bit trickier for them.
Speaking on the podcast Pregnantish this week, they explained that they were both born with a chromosomal disorder called Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome, a condition that mainly affects the eye but can also impact facial features, teeth, skin, and the heart.
Because there is a 50 per cent chance that any child they had would inherit the condition, they were prepared to go through additional medical steps to get pregnant — specifically, IVF paired pre-implantation genetic testing, which would reduce the risk of passing on the disorder.
Courtney managed to have two children this way, and Amy was told by a doctor that she’d be pregnant in six months — but that wasn’t the case.
‘Six months came, six months went. Another six months came, another six months went, and six years later, here we are,’ Amy said.
‘There were so many opportunities for things to go wrong. It was disappointment after disappointment,’ she added to the New York Post.