The queen of domesticity, Martha Stewart, has added a new title to her resume. Grandma! Her daughter, Alexis Stewart, welcomed a daughter of her own, Jude, on March 8th. Jude was born via gestational surrogate.
“Getting Jude was lucky,” Alexis told People Magazine. “I’m happy, but this has been rough.”
Stewart, who didn’t decide she was ready for a child until her late 30s, has gone to great lengths to get her little girl. She’s forty five now, and she’s spent the last half a dozen years or so putting herself through IVF procedures and hormone treatments. At one point she says she was spending up to $27,000 every month on fertility treatments.
Dr. John Zhang, at Manhattan’s New Hope Fertility Center, helped Stewart take better control of the process, reducing her spending to $5,000 a month.
“This is my other job that I don’t talk about,” said Stewart, who hosts the Sirius radio show Whatever with Alexis & Jennifer. “But if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford it and you have time, what’s the downside?”
While its wonderful that Alexis Stewart is getting the chance to be a mom, one has to wonder whether this kind of extreme measures to produce a child that is biologically ones own is really the best way to approach later in life parenthood. There are still plenty of babies born every year in desperate need of good homes. If Stewart had started the adoption process after the first few years of unsuccessful treatments she could both be a mom by now several times over and have had an extra million or so dollars left over that could have been donated to help other kids in need have happy lives. Just because you can spend $27,000 a month on something doesn’t mean you should.
