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Nearly 20 years ago, long before she became B.C.’ s municipal affairs and housing minister, Selina Robinson offered to be a surrogate mother for a friend who had lost one baby and was left infertile after a second pregnancy.

The heartbroken friend, Terri Rypkema, and her husband were in their 40s and were deemed too old to adopt. So, they started to investigate the then-little-known field of gestational surrogacy — when her egg would be fertilized by his sperm and implanted in the womb of another woman.

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Both therapists at the same counselling clinic, Rypkema confided in Robinson in 1999 about considering surrogacy. The women laugh today at the blunt response from Robinson, then the mother of two school-age children.

“I said, ‘I could do that for you Terri.’ I said, ‘I love being pregnant,’” Robinson recalled last week. “Why wouldn’t I do it? That was the bigger question for me. They transfer embryos and then you deliver a baby, and from my perspective it wasn’t that hard.”