After years of trying unsuccessfully to have a baby, Caprice Bourret successfully turned to surrogacy to start her family. Just a month later, she found out she was unexpectedly pregnant.
Bourret and Ty Comfort welcomed sons Jax and Jett last year. “Sometimes I just sit and stare at them and think how blessed we are,” Bourret said on TODAY Monday.
“For me, they're both biologically mine, just one of them had a baby sitter,” she added. “The boys will probably call her Auntie. I send her pictures all the time.”
Bourret, an American model and actress who launched a lingerie company, found herself in her 40s and busy with her career. She turned to in vitro fertilization; however, she was later told she would not be able to carry a child.
Still hoping to have a family, Bourret, who lives in London, found a surrogate in the United States. “We were really lucky our embryo took in our gestational carrier,” Bourret said.
And a month later, nature prevailed and Bourret learned she was pregnant herself. “I went to the doctor and he said, ‘You know what Cap? In my 25 years, this has never happened,’” she recalled.
At the time, Bourret was working on an upcoming Bravo series, “Ladies of London,” and her surprise pregnancy became part of the story.
“It was a bit daunting for me because it was such a private, private time, but then again I’m glad I shared it with people,” she said. “To tell women, ‘Listen, you can get help and you can get pregnant.'”
Could Bourret have become pregnant once she had found a surrogate, and the pressure to conceive was off?
“That's what people say, and it happens,” Bourret said. “But you, know my doctor said, ‘Cap, it was just a miracle.’”
Bourret was present when her gestational carrier gave birth.
“I was eight months pregnant and I was watching my son being delivered while my other son was in me,” she recalled. “Everyone in the room was crying.”
Now a mom of two, Bourret won’t say which son arrived first. “When they do get older I will tell them,” she says.
The use of gestational carriers is becoming more common in the U.S. as a way to help others have a child. The carriers become pregnant through IVF; their eggs are not used in the embroys implanted in them, so they have no genetic link to the babies they deliver.
The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, which represents the majority of clinics that handle gestational surrogate cases, says its members reported a rise in babies born to carriers from 738 in 2004 to 1,898 in 2012.
Lisa A. Flam is a news and lifestyles reporter in New York. Follow her on Twitter.