Georgie Crawford tells how chance encounter with Rosanna Davison led her to exploring surrogacy

The Good Glow podcast host was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer at the age of 32 in 2017 – shortly after the birth of her first child Pia, who was seven months old at the time.

Speaking to the Insights with Sean O’Rourke podcast, the mother of two discussed her diagnosis, her journey with her wellness brand and podcast and her experience with surrogacy.

She completed a round of IVF before her chemotherapy treatment which was “really successful” in terms of retrieving a number of embryos, but the circumstances of her diagnosis and treatment meant she felt “scared” about getting pregnant again.

"I didn't know much about surrogacy until I heard Rosanna Davison’s story,” she said.

“I didn't know much about it, but I was getting my hair done one day and Rosanna Davison walked behind my chair. One of the girls said, ‘You know, Rosanna is doing the surrogacy journey?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it's amazing.’

“And she said, ‘She's doing it in Ukraine.’ And I said, ‘Oh, really? Ukraine?’ I didn't know anything about it.”

She started researching from there, finding a solicitor, Annette Hickey, who she described as “an incredible woman”.

"I needed to learn a lot about it before I made any decisions. But she was telling us, you know, there's a really safe ethical pathway to having a baby in Ukraine with a surrogate mother. And we decided that this was the right thing for us to do.”

Ms Crawford said the cost of the process were her “life savings”.

“Everything that I had worked for, for years, went into it. And my family helped us as well and Jamie's family. But really every penny that we made went into a savings account,” she added.

Asked whether the cost amounted to more than “six figures”, Ms Crawford said: “No, we're just touching on.

"We had a lot of legal costs because we kind of, ticked the box on everything so having an independent legal representative in the country, then our surrogate mother, she would have legal representation and then we would have legal representation.

“So, we kind of went above and beyond and then because our embryos were transferred out of Ukraine and into Georgia and we started the journey again, we lost some money.”

The escalation of the war in Ukraine came as Ms Crawford was about to begin the process, with the podcaster recalling how everyone had been “tippy-toeing” around her as they “knew how much I wanted a baby”.

She said it marked “the end of our journey in Ukraine” as she “prayed” that a “bomb hadn’t dropped” on the clinic where her embryos were stored in Kyiv and that they were safe.

“A couple of weeks later, somebody told me that the embryologist in the clinic put everyone’s embryos into the boot of his car and drove to Slovakia to save them.

"Tahlie, our second baby, was now in Slovakia, as an embryo.”

She said the process started all over again in Georgia, where they were “matched with an amazing Georgian lady”.

Her daughter, Tahlie, was born via surrogate in 2023.

On whether she had plans for the other embryos, she admitted she does not currently have plans but “unless I win the lotto, I think we’re done”.