It should have been the happiest day of their lives.
Carolyn and Sean Savage had spent what seemed like an eternity trying to add a fourth child to their family. There were many miscarriages, many heartbreaks. Finally, the Ohio couple turned to in-vitro fertilization. It had worked, but Carolyn was told that because of her prior complications, this would be her final pregnancy.
Now they cradled a boy, 5 pounds, 3 ounces, a beautiful miracle.
Carolyn, groggy from her C-sec tion, held the boy in her arms in a hospital room at Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo. She cooed at him as Sean proudly videotaped the moment.
They had been waiting for this moment for years, but as they looked anxiously at the clock, they knew it would last only little more than an hour.
The boy she held in her arms was not her own.
‘TERRIBLE INCIDENT’
Shannon, 40, and Paul Morell, 39, from Troy, Mich., had similar struggles with fertility. After two miscarriages and three pregnancy attempts, they finally got pregnant through IVF with twin daughters. Three years later, they were ready for a third child, and decided to freeze six embryos.
But before Shannon could be impregnated, they got an urgent call from their fertility doctor.
“I’m so sorry, Shannon, but there’s been a terrible incident in our lab,” he said. “Your embryos have thawed.”
But it didn’t end there.
“Your embryos were transferred to another woman,” the doctor said.
Shannon was stunned. “Is she pregnant?” she managed.
“Yes.”
Due to a human error at the lab — Shannon’s embryos were filed under her maiden name, Savage, which is the same as Carolyn’s — another woman was carrying her child.
“I couldn’t have felt more violated,” Shannon writes in a new memoir, “Misconception” (Howard Books). “Of all the people in the world — of all the people who have embryos at this clinic — why did this happen to us?”
She grilled the doctor about the “other woman.”
“Was this woman willing to carry the baby of another couple?” she asked. “Was she the kind of woman who would erase the life of another mother’s child?”
She was conflicted. “Opposite desires tugged at me — I wanted my babies to survive, but in another woman? ” she writes.
One hundred miles away in Sylvania, Ohio, the Savages were given their own devastating news.
Sean was interrupted at work by a phone call from his doctor. His wife was pregnant, the doctor told him, but the baby was from another couple.
He struggled with how to break the news to his wife.
“I was upstairs in my bedroom, and he came to the door and said, ‘I have really bad news,’ ” she recalled.
Carolyn couldn’t believe it. “You’re joking, you’re joking, you’re joking,” she said. But when she looked at him, “he was white as a sheet,” and she knew it was true.
They were offered two choices: Keep the baby to term and hand it over to its biological parents, or terminate the pregnancy, which went against their religious beliefs.
“I kind of come to a consciousness, ‘I’m awake, it’s a new day,’ and I go to get out of bed and I can’t move,” Carolyn said.
“I think, ‘What’s wrong? Oh, right, I’m pregnant, only I’m pregnant with someone else’s baby.’ It smacks me in the head all over again.”
Doctors strongly urged Carolyn to terminate her pregnancy.
Still, the Savages decided there really was no choice. Carolyn became an accidental surrogate mother.
TWO MOTHERS
The Morells reached out through their lawyer to the Savages, hoping to start a relationship. The Savages were uneasy.
The couples agreed to meet on April 27 in Ohio, two months into the pregnancy. As Shannon and Paul declared their utter thankfulness, Carolyn broke the news that “she hadn’t wanted this meeting. She would have been fine without ever meeting us,” Shannon writes.
But over time, the women warmed to each other, as Carolyn agreed to e-mail Shannon about the progress of the pregnancy and sent weekly ultrasound pictures of the baby that the Morells had dubbed “Peanut.” Carolyn even invited Shannon to an ultrasound in Ohio.
Carolyn admitted that it was difficult to carry a baby that was not hers. She told Shannon that it felt like she was “baby-sitting” the child.
Still, they bonded over a mutual love for family and deep religious beliefs. When Shannon discovered the sex of the boy, she decided on the name Logan and even ran the name by Carolyn to see if she liked it, too.
Shannon decided to give her boy the middle name Savage, after her own maiden name and his surrogate mother.
“There’s a connection with these people,” Shannon said in an interview with The Post. “He’s given that name so he’ll always remember what happened.”
THE GIFT
On Sept. 24, the Morells got the call — their baby was on its way. They quickly packed the car and headed to Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo. They were escorted by nurses to a private waiting area with a baby carriages, seats and a security guard, where Shannon anxiously watched the clock and sobbed. She would not be delivering her own baby.
“I wouldn’t say jealousy, but there was sadness that I couldn’t be there for my son and experience the first moments of his birth. And there was guilt that another woman was happy to go through a C-section for me,” Shannon said.
Moments later, Sean appeared in scrubs, walking with an incubator and several nurses.
Shannon jumped from her seat and threw her arms around Sean, the baby’s surrogate father, as she looked down at the healthy and happy baby boy. Shannon and Sean cried as Paul smiled at the swaddled baby.
“It was a miracle. It was better than winning the lottery,” Shannon said.
They allowed the Savages some time alone with the baby before they brought him to his new home.
As a parting gift, the Savages gave them goodies for the boy: a mini-basketball, a copy of “Good Night Moon,” a framed picture of Logan’s first time out of the womb, and a blanket inscribed with a private religious saying. They also handed off the videotapes of the birth — which Shannon has not watched to this day.
“I’m just not ready yet,” she said.
THE SAVAGES’ HOPE
Carolyn and Sean made it clear early on in the pregnancy that they did not expect to take part in the child’s life once he was born. They did not seek visitation rights — nor did they expect anything beyond a few updates and pictures.
“Of course, we will wonder about this child every day for the rest of our lives, and we have high hopes for him,” Carolyn said. “But they’re his parents, and we’ll defer to their judgment on when or if they tell him what happened and any contact that’s afforded us.”
After the baby was born, the families kept a respectful distance from each other. The Morells would send pictures and updates but left the decision to see Logan up to them. The Savages are currently working on their own book, tentatively titled “Nine Months to Give” out in February.
During Christmas break, the Morells made the trip to Ohio with Logan to introduce him to his surrogate parents. “It was warm and very nice, everyone got along very well,” said Shannon.
They keep in contact fairly frequently now through e-mail. Shannon says that the Savages will always play a role in Logan’s life — and that one day he will be told the complicated story of where he came from.
“I think for the rest of his life, he should always acknowledge [Carolyn], on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. He should always think of her because if she hadn’t done the right thing, he wouldn’t be on this earth,” Shannon said.
Shannon says she feels a “tremendous gratitude” and struggles with the guilt of how to repay such a selfless act. She gave Carolyn a diamond cross necklace, a small token of her gratitude.
She even offered to act as the Savage’s surrogate — the couple still has five frozen embryos — but they declined, saying that it would be “too freaky” and that Shannon had no prior experience.
But it looks like the Savages will finally be given a gift of their own.
“We have looked into using a gestational carrier for the rest of our embryos,” Carolyn said. “That kind of a number would afford us one chance at an additional pregnancy.”