Following years of infertility issues, a 50-year-old woman offered to be a surrogate for her daughter’s daughter and gave birth to her daughter’s daughter.
After carrying her own grandchild to full term, Chalise Smith received her 25-year-old daughter Kaitlyn Munoz’s baby girl, Alayna Kait-Chalise Munoz, on May 17.
The mother of eight, from Utah, had embryos implanted through in vitro fertilization, but the child is Kaitlyn’s and Miguel Munoz’s.
Chalise said on Good Morning America that she was thinking about it every day. It crossed her mind. She prayed about it, just thinking and asking if this was the right road for her, and she kept these feelings to herself before telling Kaitlyn and Miguel or her husband.
Kaitlyn, a resident of El Paso, Texas, suffers from endometriosis, a disorder in which tissue that is comparable to the lining of the womb begins to grow in other areas, such as the ovaries and fallopian tubes. Kaitlyn struggled to conceive because of it.
So, in 2019, Kaitlyn and Miguel decided to attempt IVF, which resulted in four embryos and Kaitlyn becoming pregnant with Callahan. Although the baby boy was born safely, the pregnancy was difficult.
Kaitlyn was diagnosed with Sjogren’s syndrome at 30 weeks into her pregnancy, an autoimmune illness in which the immune system targets the glands that produce tears and saliva.
Dry eyes and mouth, weariness, and joint paint are all symptoms of the chronic illness. It also has the potential to harm the lungs, kidneys, and nervous system.
Kaitlyn was told in January 2021 that her kidneys had been destroyed by the autoimmune disorder, and she wouldn’t be capable of carrying another pregnancy.
Kaitlyn said, ‘I was crushed. It’s always been my dream to have a big family. It’s been my dream to be a mother with lots of kids ever since I was a young girl’.
Chalise was heartbroken, and after much contemplation, she volunteered to be her surrogate. At the age of 49, Chalise was medically cleared to carry her ninth pregnancy.
‘It went really well. With the IVF cycle, I had the shots for the first 10 weeks of the pregnancy. My husband became a great nurse administering those shots. We told our extended family 15 weeks after I passed some of those markers in that first trimester and from there on, it was great,’ she told GMA
The healthy baby girl weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces and was christened Alayna Kait-Chalise, a combination of the names of her mother and grandmother.
Kaitlyn shared the news on Instagram by writing: ‘What an amazing experience the last 24 hours have been. I am at a loss of words. My mom is a living angel and brought us another blessing earth side and we are in LOVE’.
‘When my mom offered to be our surrogate it just felt so right. My mom did so amazing through out the pregnancy and we had an amazing delivery experience. Grateful for my mom and her selflessness in this journey,’ she added.
Alayna is ‘just the sweetest little thing,’ the mother-of-two told GMA, adding that her two-year-old son, Callahan, ‘adores her and wants to hold her all the time’.
Kaitlyn and her husband are content with their current family of four, but she stated that they would consider having more children in the future.
She said, ‘I’m grateful for my son and my daughter now and I’m glad that I have one of each, and maybe down the road, we’ll decide that we want to move forward with adoption’.