This week the series "Third Body" aired, describing the journey a couple goes through on their way to parenting through surrogacy.
And if we put aside for a moment the excellent Rotem Sela, Yehuda Levy and Gal Malka, she brings to mind an issue that has existed here for years, but mostly remains hidden and those involved are reluctant to reveal it.
Obviously, they don't need to hear calls that claim they bought the baby on Amazon.
A surrogacy procedure is not simple for either party.
The doubts, concerns and fears exist in everyone.
The woman who realizes that someone else will have the pregnancy she dreamed of.
The man who realizes that someone else, who is not his heart's choice, will give birth to his boy or girl.
And the surrogate, who goes through a long process of embryo retrieval and pregnancy and birth that ends in separation.
It is a mission procedure, the payment for which does not equal nine months of emotional and physical upheavals that continue long after the birth.
Promo of the series // Photo: Keshet 12
Over the years I have interviewed quite a few couples of parents who gave birth to children through surrogates.
No woman I knew chose this way to maintain her beautiful body or to sleep peacefully at night, on the contrary.
Most of them were after fertility treatments, hormonal injections, a roller coaster of hope and disappointment and a painful feeling of a female body not holding a pregnancy.
More than once they described a feeling of failure, of envying the surrogates, of "why do I have to pay for the thing that even 18-year-old girls manage to do" and my heart goes out to them.
And when science allows us to realize the dream of parenthood, and to use our genetics, the ability to help and help is not measured in money.
I have known mothers who, in order to give birth to their special child, underwent difficult and painful fertility treatments, injected themselves with hormones, underwent egg extractions, returns to the womb and one disappointment after another until one of the fertilized embryos, after endless interventions in the laboratory, took root in the womb.
They were happy with every pregnancy sickness, every little pain, every movement of the fetus, they became addicted to the noise of the heartbeat on the monitor, and then wrapped their love child in cotton wool and kisses.
And they wrapped him with the same amount of love even when he grew up in another's womb, because he is theirs for everything.
The question often arises as to whether in surrogacy it is a womb for rent.
This is a sad old discussion, coming from the wrong directions
I also knew bereaved mothers who, after their son or daughter was killed in tragic circumstances, looked for a reason to get up in the morning and found it in the children.
They remembered that once, when they underwent fertility treatments, one or two frozen embryos remained in the laboratory.
And even if they have grown up now and cannot carry the pregnancy on their own, thanks to a third person full of giving, they fulfilled the dream of another child.
And even if he grows up in another's womb, he is flesh from their flesh, blood from their blood, carrying the same genetics, facial features and character.
No replacement for the one who was killed.
Not in his place.
but a reason to live.
And rehabilitation of those who think that such a mother is shopping for babies.
It was an ultra-orthodox health minister who approved almost a decade ago the donation of eggs from an anonymous Israeli donor and made it easier for many women, who were forced to use donors from abroad whose Jewishness is questionable, if at all. Years before that, it was confirmed that Israeli women, who pass a committee and receive approval from the Ministry of Health, can serve as surrogates for other Israeli women One of the main things, by the way, that is examined by that committee, is that the surrogate does it on her own accord, of her own free will, and not because of economic hardship or social pressure.
And here comes an equally important point.
The question often arises as to whether in surrogacy it is a womb for rent.
This is a sad old discussion, coming from the wrong directions.
"I don't want them to think that I come from a sad place," quite a few Israeli surrogates told me, stressing that they did it out of a mission and a desire to help.
The partner of a married surrogate even said that he initially did not want to find out that his wife was pregnant with a surrogate, so that they would not think that they were in financial difficulties.
But the surrogates we talked to, those of today, come from a place of strength.
This is not the maternity leave without a baby that beckoned them, they repeat and say, this is the right to give an entire world for another.
Surrogates deserve every shekel and every gratitude.
You have to bow to them, understand the price they pay to give life to someone else.
It was not for nothing that they raised an outcry this week over the presentation of the surrogate in the first episode of the series as someone who comes from a disadvantaged place and needs financial assistance.
Today's surrogacy comes from a mission, and the payment for the process is nothing compared to the return, risk and impact it has.
Keshet did well to decide to deal with the conflicts involved in the procedure.
Maybe now people will look a little less critically at surrogate pregnancy and remember that in the end, everything is for the children.
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