This surrogate mother has given away EIGHT babies yet has never had a proper relationship. Supremely selfless, or recklessly addicted to being pregnant?



Prolific: Jill Hawkins from Brighton has helped eight childless couples

After spending almost the entirety of her last pregnancy off work due to crippling headaches and nausea, you could certainly understand if Jill Hawkins said ‘no more babies’. Eight weeks after giving birth to Oliver, she is only just feeling ‘relatively normal’ — and, at 46, she’s certainly at the upper end of the scale for motherhood.

As Jill puts it: ‘I was very surprised by how tough this pregnancy was. I think my body was saying enough’s enough.’

Who can blame it? For Oliver is Jill’s eighth baby. More pertinently, he is the eighth she has given away. It’s a tally that has earned her the title of Britain’s most prolific surrogate mother as, over the course of 19 years, Jill has brought joy to eight childless couples — who had thought their dream of having a family of their own would remain just that.

Entirely laudable, whatever your feelings about the complex business of surrogacy. Yet there is a more worrying element to Jill’s choices, too. By her own admission she is addicted to being pregnant, not because of the physical state itself, but due to the feeling of purpose it gives her. She feels this so strongly that, despite vowing straight after Oliver’s birth that she had ‘reached her limit’, she is already considering a U-turn on her stance.

‘I can’t say for definite I won’t have another baby,’ she admits. ‘I’ve got a long-planned holiday in Canada next June, so I won’t do anything before that, but Oliver’s parents and I have agreed that we’ll have another discussion then as to whether I can try to have another baby for them. We’ll see.

‘I know people are going to think I’m a sad person who just can’t live without the attention. But that’s not true. Yes, I get huge personal satisfaction from it — but I’m not doing anyone any harm and I’m going to bring huge happiness to a young couple. I wish people could try to understand that.’

There is certainly a pattern here. Two years ago, after giving birth to her seventh surrogate and failing to fall pregnant again to provide a longed-for sibling for her, Jill declared she was ready to draw a line. Her declining egg quality and advancing years meant she was apparently unable to conceive naturally. She had no truck, she said, with undergoing medical intervention in the form of IVF.

This stance didn’t last long. Just six months after making that ‘final’ decision early last year, Jill once more decided to offer her services to the voluntary organisation Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy (Cots), this time as a ‘host womb’ meaning that, for the first time, she would have no biological link to the child.







After being put in touch with a professional couple in their 30s from London, who provided the egg and sperm, Jill was pregnant again within weeks. ‘I honestly did think I was going to stop when I said so last time, but the urge overtook me,’ she says.

‘The thing is that some people are born to be Olympic athletes, other people have amazing mathematical brains. My body is just very good at being pregnant.’

This time round though, Jill’s body was not quite so good at being pregnant. She was crippled by headaches from the start, and by February, only weeks in, she was signed off from her job as a legal secretary for the duration of her pregnancy.

She spent days confined to her bed. ‘It was hard physically, and also emotionally, because I felt I was letting people down — such as my boss and colleagues,’ she says.

‘Usually, the pregnancies fit in with my life, not the other way round — but even though I took care with my health, I was still unlucky. It did frighten me this time as I felt so ill.’

This, of course, makes the fact that Jill has still not ruled out another baby all the more incomprehensible. ‘Physically, I would hope to be in better shape next year, baby weight gone and fitness back up to what it should be,’ she says.

That’s not all. By her own admission, Jill’s never really had a relationship of her own, has never had children of her own and lives alone in her two-bedroom flat in Brighton.

Nor does her personal history make her an obvious candidate for surrogate motherhood: much of her life has been spent in a battle with low self-esteem and depression so severe that four years ago, after the birth of her sixth surrogate, Alexandra, Jill tried to take her own life.

Today though, Jill insists that not only has surrogacy saved her in the past, but that she’s a changed woman. ‘I’ve been depression-free for five years.’ she says. ‘Any problems I had were nothing to do with surrogacy. People find this hard to understand, but it was quite the opposite.

‘Surrogacy actually filled a gap in my life, made me feel wanted and useful. But, for the first time, I am happy in my own skin. I don’t need it to save me any more.’



For all her protests, Jill feels a certain sheepishness about reneging on her word: she chose not to tell her parents, who have retired to Spain, about her latest pregnancy — meaning they read about it in a newspaper.

‘They were worried when they found out. They were concerned with my welfare — I’m no spring chicken and they wanted me to get on with my life. I pointed out to them that this was my life — and something I wanted to do.’

The eldest of three, born to Brenda, now 64, an auxiliary nurse, and Brian, 69, a businessman, Jill was raised in Brighton in a close-knit and loving middle-class family to parents who might, in the usual order of things, have expected to be grandparents in the traditional sense by now.

It was not to be. Painfully shy, Jill’s weight problems started when she was a teenager, when she sought comfort in cycles of binge-eating.

One childhood memory was to prove formative. ‘I remember a pregnant friend of my mum’s came to the house with this amazing bump. I touched it and felt this urge to experience something like that for myself. When I got to 26, the desire was so strong that when I read about surrogacy I was convinced that this was the way forward for me.’

It seems drastic, and certainly, surrogacy organisations usually only take on women who have completed their own families or had at least one child of their own.

But, after contacting Cots, Jill proved so persuasive that they took her on, a gamble which paid off. Her first child, Lucy, now seventeen, was born in 1992, followed by Bertie, 15, Jamie, twelve, David, eight, Sam, seven, Alexandra, five, and three-year-old Isobel. All of the children were conceived using Jill’s own eggs.

After Isobel’s birth, Jill initially felt she would have to draw a line under her surrogate ‘career’, particularly after failing to fall pregnant again with a sibling. One pregnancy ended in miscarriage at six weeks, and she then failed to conceive again.

By the end of 2008, she’d had enough. ‘We’d been trying for months and the process of trying to get pregnant was dominating my life,’ she recalls. ‘I felt there was no room for me to be myself, so there was a sense of relief that it would be over — although at the same time I was upset. It was the end of an era, and on a personal level I wanted to give Isobel a sibling — I knew how much it meant to her parents.’

' I never have any regrets afterwards. While I love babies, they don’t stay that way for very long and the growing up part is the bit I don’t want’

And after that decision Jill insists she happily settled down to a post-surrogacy life, with plans to undertake a writing course and even tentatively explore the world of internet dating. ‘I wasn’t lonely. I’ve got a lot of friends, so I wasn’t particularly driven by the idea of meeting someone,’ she says, ‘But I thought I might give it a try to see if I struck a chord with anyone.’

Before she had taken the plunge, however, a visit to see Isobel and her parents last year changed her perspective.

‘They told me they had taken on another surrogate and it’s hard to admit it, but my initial feeling was jealousy,’ she recalls. ‘I felt that my role had been taken and I should be the one providing them with a sibling to Isobel. Obviously, I knew we had tried everything we could, but it was still a blow.

‘I had honestly been fine until that point, but then it set off something deep inside.’ It might, you think, have been sensible to acknowledge those feelings for what they were: the profound sense of loss and regret that many women feel when confronted with the fact that their child-bearing years have come to an end.

Yet Jill’s almost obsessive addiction of carrying babies would not let up. ‘The moment I got home, I started thinking about being a host surrogate — where you are providing a womb for s­omeone else’s embryo. That way, your own fertility isn’t an issue,’ explains Jill.

By the beginning of November, she was registered with Cots once more — this time as a host — and had been matched with a couple who were unable to have their own child. Implanted with one of their embryos at the start of December, a pregnancy test taken on the 28th confirmed she was expecting.

‘I was just so thrilled for them. I phoned the couple immediately and said to the wife “you’re going to be a mum”. She was hyperventilating on the phone she was so happy.’

Oliver’s birth was, at least, more straightforward than Jill’s pregnancy. Her labour lasted just over an hour. Jill says: ‘He was given straight to his dad. To see their faces was amazing. Without sounding horrible, it was easier this time round because there was no biological link. He was nothing to do with me — he didn’t even look anything like me.’

Unbelievably, some might think, Jill insists there has never been angst about her other babies. ‘I usually cry when I give the baby away, but that’s only natural. I have loved and cared for it during pregnancy and, of course, there are huge hormones involved as well.

‘But I never have any regrets afterwards,’ she says. ‘While I love babies, they don’t stay that way for very long and the growing up part is the bit I don’t want.’

Today, Jill remains in contact with all her donor families, seeing them all at least once a year. ‘Whenever I see them, I don’t think of them as my children. I just think “what fantastic kids”. People seem surprised that I have a relationship with the parents but for all of us it was a huge decision and you have to like and respect each other — so that doesn’t just disappear.’