Elisa had successfully provided eggs to two different couples by the time Beth and Bob found her profile on a website called Egg Donation Inc. "We knew people who'd tried to get pregnant, and it seemed like they were obsessed with having this perfect baby—the donor had to have gone to Harvard," says Beth. "Our approach was to look for a donor who would somehow resemble us physically, and who was someone we'd want to be friends with."

That someone was a young woman whose picture showed her smiling, sunny face tilted up at the sky. She described herself as the kind of person "who could fit in, in almost any setting." What really struck Beth, however, was her baby picture, which she'd posted on the site. "That picture kind of looked like me," says Beth. "She was the one."

A surrogate's hard choices

Not long after Beth and Bob had selected Elisa as an egg donor, the Center for Surrogate Parenting—based in California, where laws make surrogacy easy—forwarded them a letter from a potential surrogate named Sylvia Hernandez, from Visalia, California. Of her desire to carry a baby for another couple, Sylvia says, "I just wanted to do something good in the world—an act of kindness that went beyond volunteer work." She did have her concerns—what if she got too attached to the baby? Or what if her surrogate pregnancy upset her kids, Gabriel, 14, and Kiri, 17? "They're so used to having me all to themselves," she says. "But I became a mom at 18 and put my life on hold for them all these years. I wanted to do something gratifying for myself." She went through a lengthy screening process (35 percent of women are found to not have the temperament to handle the surrogacy) and was accepted.

Of the three profiles the Center had given Sylvia, Beth and Bob's moved her the most. "They'd done everything right—fell in love, got married, built these successful lives," says Sylvia. "And then when it came to this last step, starting a family, they couldn't do it! I read their letter, and I thought, I have to help them."

Once they got used to the idea, Sylvia's two children supported her decision. But her boyfriend of almost three years, a truck driver, did not. He was stunned; he'd hoped to have a child with Sylvia but she'd refused. If Sylvia didn't want to take on the work of raising another child, he told her, then she should at least have a child with him and let him raise it. Why deny him and help someone she'd never even met?

"It's different," she tried to explain. "This isn't my child, but one with you would be." Eventually, they broke up.

Now committed to the idea of carrying Beth and Bob's child, Sylvia agreed to meet them. Over lunch at a quiet restaurant, an anxious Beth and Bob—would Sylvia think they were worth carrying a baby for?—poured their hearts out about everything they'd been through in the past years. "We felt it was important for her to know how hard we'd tried to have a baby on our own," says Beth. Sylvia responded with tremendous empathy, and the couple left her feeling that they'd misunderstood surrogacy at the outset—that there was nothing impersonal about it at all.

The new "immaculate" conception

The week of the transfer, Bob and Beth flew to Los Angeles so that Bob could provide sperm for the embryos that would be implanted into Sylvia. Elisa arrived on another flight, having taken daily hormone shots for two weeks in order to stimulate numerous eggs. She would spend 15 minutes under general anesthesia to have those eggs removed, and they'd be mixed with Bob's sperm within hours. A few days later the doctor would implant the strongest-looking embryos in Sylvia's uterus.