San Anselmo Business Owner Serves as Surrogate for Sister

Whenever a woman has a baby there’s family pressures and expectations that comes with the pregnancy. But, when you’re pregnant with your sister’s kid, the whole family flies out for the delivery.

Alaina Yoakum, a San Rafael resident, who co-owns Marin Running Company in San Anselmo with her husband, will be delivering her sister’s baby tomorrow via C-section – with her husband, her kids, her sister, her sister’s husband, and her parents in tow.

“I don’t feel comfortable until the baby’s out and they count all five fingers,” she said.

Yoakum is serving as a surrogate for her sister, Heidi Sanders, after Sanders was forced to have a hysterectomy to combat cervical cancer. Sanders, who is ten years younger than Yoakum, was diagnosed with cervical cancer nearly three years ago. The cancer was more aggressive than initially thought and she had to have a hysterectomy.

Sanders and her then-boyfriend, now her husband, decided to harvest her eggs, fertilize some of them, and hoped to find a surrogate after getting through the hysterectomy and chemotherapy. But, it only took two weeks for Yoakum to know that she was going to offer to be their surrogate.

“I didn’t really think about it,” she said.

She said she woke up one morning and thought ‘I’d better tell Charles [her husband].’

“I certainly supported her doing it. After all, for a year's worth of work, which is the total commitment that we were looking at here, it was giving the gift of life,” said Charles.

Shortly after Sanders, who has had clean cancer scans for two years, got married, they began the surrogate process. What they found was it’s a lot more complicated to have your sibling’s kid than it looked on Friends.

For a month before the implanting, Yoakum had shots in her stomach every day. The egg was implanted, but because they could only implant one at a time – because of Yoakum’s age and her risk of early labor – there was only a 40 percent chance that it would take.

Luckily, since every IVF implantation effort costs around $8,000, the first try got Yoakum pregnant.

Then, she just had to take 140 progesterone shots through the first and last trimester, have her blood drawn every few weeks, go through a psychological screening with both Sanders and her husband and with Charles, and file $5,000 worth of legal paperwork that technically had Sanders suing Yoakum for custody.

“I had no idea the process it would entail,” said Yoakum.

Yoakum even found out that Sanders would be able to breast-feed the baby girl, after spending the last few months working with a lactation consultant.

The experience was educational for everyone. Connie Rodgers, president of the e, for whom Yoakum does marketing work, said many in the business community have been following the process for the last nine months.

“As small business owners in San Anselmo, the mother of two young girls, working part-time, it is a tremendous labor of love,” said Rodgers.

(Yoakum also for Patch, covering business issues in town.)

That labor of love has involved everyone in the family. Charles has been incredibly supportive, said Yoakum. “He’s had to bear the brunt of this pregnancy.” And her kids, Olivia and Sophie, “have been my servants, my slaves,” she joked.

Once her niece is born, there is one last unanswered question: what happens now?

It’s likely, Yoakum said, that she’ll be close to the baby girl she gives birth to, even after she travels back to New York with Sanders.

“Hopefully, I won’t be annoyingly invested,” said Yoakum.