Cnbc Reporter Shares Her 8-year Struggle With Infertility — and How She Managed to Keep 2 Surrogacies and 7 Ivf Transfers Private
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- UPDATED DECEMBER 20, 2024
by Tasha Mayberry
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Courtney Reagan Baker, along with her husband Jared Baker, welcomed their son Jack, 4, and daughter Reagan, 2, through surrogacy, and their daughter Ella, 7 months, via IVF.
Courtney Reagan Baker feels “complete” as a mother to her son Jack, 4, and daughters Reagan, 2, and Ella, 7 months. However, the journey to building her family wasn’t easy — it took nearly 10 years.
“I’m kind of nervous,” Baker admits, opening up to PEOPLE about her complex infertility experience. “I’m on TV every day, but that’s not about the most personal thing in my life.”
At 32, Courtney and her husband, Jared Baker, decided it was time to start a family.
“We tried the old-fashioned way for a while,” she recalls, “and after about a year, we sought professional help.”
During her early visits to the fertility clinic, Courtney explains that doctors initially believed her uterus might be misshapen. “It took three different medical tests to figure that out, because one said yes, and one said no.”
After receiving two conflicting answers, she underwent a final “tie-breaker” test, which confirmed that “I do, indeed, have a full uterus.”
The couple next attempted “four cycles” of Intrauterine Insemination (IUI). While Courtney became pregnant twice during the process, both pregnancies ended in early miscarriages. “So then we moved to IVF, and it became pretty clear what the doctors were focusing on,” she explains.
Courtney shares with PEOPLE, “I’ve learned that every month your brain sends two signals: ‘Okay, release an egg,’ and at the same time, ‘thicken your lining.'”
Although Courtney’s brain successfully released “good quality” eggs, she says, “that uterine lining never thickened.”
“The doctor started to suspect that, for some reason, it just wasn’t a cushy enough environment for the embryo to settle in for the long haul. Unfortunately, my body couldn’t carry it,” she reveals.
Courtney explains that this issue is “one of the less common causes of infertility,” and she tried “everything” to resolve it over the years.
“I was taking up to 14 supplements a day, doing acupuncture twice a week, monitoring every cycle — I mean, you name it, I tracked it. My heart rate, I’d exercise more, I’d exercise less. I tried going gluten-free for a while, dairy-free for a while. They scanned my brain to make sure it didn’t have a tumor. I took Tamoxifen, which is often used for breast cancer.”
And despite all of these efforts, she says, “We could not figure it out.”
Meanwhile, Courtney and Jared continued with IVF, but the process was particularly difficult for the couple due to the need to ensure her uterine lining was thick enough to support an embryo before transferring.
“We had to keep canceling cycles,” she says, adding that “I’ve lost track” of how many cycles they prepared for. “I know in the end we ended up doing seven transfers on my body.”
Eventually, the couple reached a point where it became clear: “We have these embryos. If my body can’t do this, there are two more logical ways to have children: You can adopt, or you can use someone else’s uterus.”
At that stage, Courtney and Jared were “halfway” through the surrogacy process, as they already had several embryos ready to use.
The financial burden of both adoption and surrogacy was significant, and Courtney explains, “We had already paid for the treatments to get those embryos. So, we were also halfway there in a financial sense, which unfortunately did come into play. After doing this month after month, year after year, we were just spending so much money.”
At this point, Courtney shared that she and Jared had been handling everything privately.
“By the way, I should mention, no one knew any of this. Not our parents, not our best friends,” she tells PEOPLE. “We kept this all completely quiet. It was just the two of us.”
That is, until “my husband’s sister [Karen] kind of sussed us out a little bit. She’s like, ‘What’s going on? Something’s going on with you.’ And Jared finally just broke down and told her.”
Revealing their secret turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “She’s a NICU nurse and she’s a mom. She’s in this community, and she was like, ‘I can find you a surrogate.’”
A few months later, Jared’s childhood friend Stephanie agreed to become the couple’s gestational carrier. Still, Courtney says, “No one knows. Karen knew we had talked to Stephanie, but she didn’t know we had agreed to go ahead with her. She knew nothing.”
Courtney explains, “You just get so scared that you’ll say something and jinx it.”
By March 2020, Stephanie was finishing her first trimester while living in Illinois, and Courtney and Jared were in New York. The pandemic hit, making an already challenging situation even more difficult. “It’s hard enough that she’s so far away. Now we don’t even have access to these appointments.”
At 28 weeks, Stephanie developed “severe preeclampsia,” and “things got a little scary.” She was airlifted in a helicopter to a new hospital, as doctors feared the only cure for preeclampsia was delivery. “We needed to make sure she was at a hospital equipped to save her and the baby. Again, we still had no access. Even if we drove there, they wouldn’t let us in the hospital.”
Stephanie’s medical issues were brought under control, and she was sent home, but Courtney and Jared drove to Illinois just in case.
“At 32 weeks, again, her blood pressure spiked,” Courtney recalls. “We both looked at each other, and it was like we just knew it.”
They airlifted Stephanie back to the hospital, and four days later, “Her husband calls me and says, ‘Are you ready to be a mom?'”
Courtney and Jared were able to get into the hospital, where Stephanie “labored for about 24 hours” after induction.
“When she was finally ready to push, she literally looked over at me and said, ‘Are you ready?'”
The couple welcomed baby Jack in July 2020. “We had a long stay in the NICU, but he’s okay. And now he is an awesome, rocking 4-year-old.”
A year and a half later, Courtney and Jared decided to start the entire process over again, this time keeping it a secret. They found another gestational carrier in Courtney’s hometown in Ohio and moved to her mom’s house six weeks before the birth, just 12 minutes away from the hospital.
Everything was going smoothly until the day Reagan was born.
“All of a sudden, [the carrier] woke up with very intense contractions and decided she didn’t want an epidural,” Courtney recalls. “The nurse was brand new, in her orientation, it turns out. So the nurse said, ‘Okay, well, why don’t you go to the bathroom before?’ which is something you never do.”
“Yeah, so Reagan was born on the bathroom floor,” Courtney says with a laugh. Despite being so close, she didn’t make it to the hospital in time for the birth.
While connecting with her second surrogate, Courtney’s fertility doctor told her about a new treatment called Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP). “I was like, ‘Why not?’” she recalls. In between Jack and Reagan, one PRP cycle worked. Her uterine lining thickened, and she heard the baby’s heartbeat twice, but ultimately miscarried in the first trimester. Still, she didn’t give up.
After welcoming Reagan, Courtney decided to try one more embryo transfer — the very last one. “This is the last time I’m going to do this because emotionally I just can’t keep losing pregnancies,” she remembers thinking at the time.
In September 2023, seven years after she began trying for a baby, Courtney found out she was pregnant. She cried as she recalled telling her friends and family that she was carrying a baby.
“It was so cool to get to be pregnant and feel my baby kick,” she says, wiping away tears. “My belly would grow, and I’d be like, ‘Look, how cool is this?’”
Nine months later, “ironically, I developed severe preeclampsia,” Courtney shares. “I knew what had happened with Stephanie, and so when the machine went off, I was like, oh s—.”
In June 2024, Ella was welcomed via C-section, and as a newly minted family of five, Courtney tells PEOPLE, “Now we’re complete.”
Looking back on the past eight years — during which she “did not take a month off” from trying to get pregnant — Courtney says the “journey” was “the craziest, hardest thing I’ve ever done in so many different ways, but particularly emotionally.”
She adds, “I’ve given myself injections in airplane bathrooms, bar bathrooms, Broadway show bathrooms, my high school football game bathroom, funerals, weddings, you name it.”
What kept her going was a little voice in her head saying, “I’m going to be a mom.” And with that, she hopes anyone else struggling with infertility knows, “As cheesy as it sounds, I think if you have a desire to become a parent, you can do it.”