Kaila Jorgensen didn’t know if she’d be able to have kids anytime soon after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Danielle Rants gave her sister the gift of a lifetime when she offered to be her surrogate.
Kaila Jorgensen, who lives in Olympia, Washington, didn’t know if she’d be able to have kids in the near future after she was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago. But Rants took that burden off her shoulders by offering to carry her fraternal twin sister’s child.
“Luckily, it worked on the first try and there wasn’t a lot of failed attempts,” Rants told InsideEdition.com about becoming pregnant. “It was kind of nerve-wracking and I didn’t know what to expect, but I have been getting through [pregnancy] OK and I’ve had no complications or anything so far.”
Jorgensen and her husband had always known they wanted children, but when doctors found out she had breast cancer and was a carrier of the BRCA gene, they suggested she freeze her eggs before starting chemotherapy. Once she started hormone therapy to do so, however, her cancer began metastasizing and she had to stop the process.
“We had no idea what we were going to do. We kept pushing my oncologist at our monthly visits, saying, ‘You know we are getting married soon, we want to have kids. What is that going to look like? Are we going to have to wait five years?’” Jorgenson said.
Doctors couldn’t answer that question for the couple. They'd have to wait and see.
When Rants saw what her sister was going through, she began researching surrogacy. She visited her own doctor and eventually made the decision to help her sister. Rants, who is single and doesn’t want any children of her own, decided she wanted to carry her sister’s baby.
“Being her twin sister I just decided it just kind of felt natural to offer myself to do it for her,” Rants said. “I don’t want kids of my own but I have a healthy body, so yeah, it just felt right.”
Jorgensen said she was totally shocked by the offer.
“I had no idea that she was even thinking about it,” Jorgenson said. “It totally blew me away.”
The Jorgensens decided to use Rants' egg for the baby so that the child wouldn’t carry the BRCA gene.
Jorgensen's cancer has since progressed and she is back in chemotherapy but still excited about the arrival of her baby boy, who is due in June.
“It’s not anything I would have expected. Going into this process we thought that’d I’d just be on medication and be OK, but a few months into the pregnancy things changed,” Jorgensen said.
The experience has brought the sisters closer, they said.
"My sister is giving us a gift bigger than we could have ever expected or imagined," Jorgensen said. "We can’t even begin to thank her enough, but we owe her everything."
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