Woman Considers Signing Over Parental Rights After She Learns Her Son Isn't Biologically Hers

A woman on Reddit is seeking advice after she found out she's not the biological mother of her son

• A woman on Reddit is seeking advice after she learned the son she's raised for two years isn't biologically hers

• Her husband had an affair with their surrogate while they were trying to conceive, she says, and the son's biological mother is the surrogate

• She wants to sign away her parental rights to the child for a "clean break and a fresh start," but her family and friends disagree

A woman on Reddit is seeking advice after she learned the son she’s been raising for two years isn’t biologically hers — and that the child was actually conceived between her husband and their surrogate.

The mom recently shared in a post on Reddit that she and her husband of seven years had been trying for four of those years to get pregnant to no avail. Despite medical intervention and multiple rounds of IVF, she eventually found she was unable to have children.

“Devastated is an understatement regarding how I felt when I found out I have a medical condition that would make it nearly impossible to carry a baby to term,” the woman writes. “It was even more upsetting when I had to get a major surgery to remove uterine growths with the hope to increase fertility, and complications during surgery warranted a partial hysterectomy involving removal of my uterus only.”

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With her ovaries still intact, she and her husband began looking into surrogates, though the cost created a significant barrier for them. Then a friend, who’d already had two kids herself, offered to be their surrogate. A third round of IVF took and the poster's friend/surrogate birthed them a baby boy.

The poster admits to seeing some of the early signs that the child perhaps wasn’t hers. For starters, she and her husband both have blue eyes, while the son's eyes are brown. Occasionally, she would also come home to find her friend/surrogate already there, hanging out with her husband.

“I chalked it up as innocuous and it's good for her to know my husband better since she was in the process of hopefully carrying our child for us,” she writes, adding she never questioned her husband. “I was grateful to have someone helping us have a child.”

She says she was the “primary breadwinner” in the house and adds that much of her attention was devoted to working to cover the costs of surrogacy. It wasn’t until the child needed a blood panel done that she learned something wasn’t right. Though the poster's blood type is A+ and her husband’s is O+, their child’s blood type is B+.

“Immediately I started worrying it was the fertility clinic's fault and that they'd messed up and implanted a wrong embryo,” she writes. “I started lining up lawyer consultations to possibly sue the clinic and looked into having a DNA parentage test done.”

Once the results showed that she was, in fact, not the mother of their child, though her husband was the father, she began to make moves to pursue legal action, she writes. But it was then that her husband confessed to his affair.

“I was heartbroken and angrier than ever, talked to lawyers about medical malpractice in the fertility clinic we'd used,” the poster writes. “Then my husband confessed that he'd slept with my friend (our surrogate) on a few different occasions during our struggle.”

“Livid and absolutely broken at the same time doesn't even begin to describe how I feel!!!! I have been breaking down into crying spells over and over again about this,” the woman continues. “He claims he didn't ever think pregnancy could result because he pulled out and he had always assumed that he was the reason for our earlier struggles to conceive, both before my hysterectomy and during the IVF insemination process with this friend.”

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After taking some space for herself, the woman decided that not only was she going to seek divorce from her husband, but she also wanted to sign away her parental rights to the son she had been raising as her own, she says.

“I have seen a divorce lawyer to see about giving up my legal rights to this kid so I don't have to face such betrayal or owe child support,” she writes. However, this is where she wonders if she could be in the wrong.

Not only have her soon-to-be-ex-husband and ex-friend/surrogate tried to convince her that she shouldn’t give away her parental rights, but some of her friends and family members are in agreement as well.

“I just want a clean break and a fresh start. I'm also looking at relocating several states away,” she writes, asking if she is wrong "to give up my parental rights in the divorce because a kid I paid a lot of money to have born by surrogacy isn't biologically mine at all, but the ‘surrogate’s’?”

Related: Famous Families Who've Welcomed Children Through Surrogacy

Though not everyone in the poster's life is on her side, it seems the Internet is decidedly in favor of her decision to give up her parental rights.

“One of the things that gets me is that you were working extra jobs to pay for the surrogacy which I am assuming included her medical bills and financially supporting her?” one commenter poses. “I would speak to a solicitor about suing her for your money back. She knew that if she was having sex then there was always a chance that the child was biologically hers.”

“I will absolutely tell you what I tell men posting this. It would be wonderful if you love the kid enough to stay but if [you’re] in shock and damaged [too] much to do so you aren't the a— for walking away,” another chimes in.