After years of struggling with infertility, an unlikely solution for Chicago couple Breanna and Aaron Lockwood came from Breanna’s 51-year-old mother, Julie Loving, who volunteered to be their surrogate.
But, as you may have guessed, their pregnancy journey didn’t begin that way.
The Lockwoods got hitched in June 2016, and Breanna’s grandfather’s escalating battle with cancer put a jumpstart on the couple’s plans to have a baby. Lockwood tells OprahMag.com that they wanted to have a baby before his passing, hoping that he would get to meet his great-grandchild. Their attempts to conceive proved to be more difficult than they expected.
“I kind of always thought it was going to happen really quickly,” Lockwood says. “You spend your whole life preventing—and when you stop to preventing, it doesn’t happen right away.”
She adds: “I really struggled with talking about it; it put a strain with family and friends and your marriage. It’s something that really rocks someone’s world.”
After months of trying on their own, the couple visited Dr. Brian Kaplan, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at Fertility Centers of Illinois, who suggested they begin fertility treatment. Two heartbreaking miscarriages later, Lockwood says she developed Asherman’s syndrome, which is a condition that is acquired from scarred tissue in the uterus. For Dr. Kaplan, it was time for a new option, but Lockwood was determined.
