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How much does it cost to create a Kardashian?
According to reports this week, around $45,000 — that’s the number allegedly paid by Kim Kardashian and husband Kanye West to the surrogate said to be carrying their third child..
TMZ claimed that the baby girl, due in late January, is being carried by an African-American woman who is married and has two young sons of her own.
One well-placed insider told The Post, “Oh, yeah, everybody knows the surrogacy to be true . . . Kim wants a really big family and she’s unable to get pregnant again for medical reasons.”
(Kardashian suffered from a condition called placenta accreta, which prevents the placenta from coming out naturally after birth, while pregnant with daughter North, now 4, and son Saint, who will turn 2 in December.) Another source reported seeing Kardashian and the woman believed to be her surrogate at a recent doctor’s appointment in Los Angeles.
The couple join an elite club — including Sarah Jessica Parker, Elizabeth Banks, Tyra Banks, Lucy Liu and Nicole Kidman — of celebs who have turned to gestational surrogates to carry their precious spawn. But Hollywood being Hollywood, things don’t typically work the way they do for the rest of us.
Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, who had two children of his own via two different surrogates, told The Post that most surrogacy agencies will speed up the process for famous people. “Most surrogates are already extremely well-vetted, but if you’re famous, your agency will give you the best of the best — and fast,” Hilton said.
He added that Kardashian, in particular, would get extra-special treatment.
“She’s different from other celebrities. Her demands, requirements and wants, when it comes to choosing the surrogate, aren’t like that of a normal celeb.
“For Kim Kardashian, an agency probably jumped through hoops to make sure she had the top surrogate possible. Like, all of their surrogates are already going to be great people and thoroughly screened. But instead of a loving, caring, stay-at-home mom like the rest of us got, Kim Kardashian will get the loving, caring, stay-at-home mom . . . who’s also a fitness expert.”
Sources say Kardashian and West had several huge fights about whether or not to implant more than one embryo in their surrogate — a gamble that ups your chances of pregnancy, but also runs the risks that come with twins, triplets and other multiples. “Kim and Kanye’s decision to use a surrogate has been ridden with hard, heavy decisions,” confirms one of Kardashian’s close friends.
Part of the stress comes from the actual choice of a surrogate.
According to a Hollywood insider, one A-list celebrity went through “a small bout of depression” once she accepted that using a surrogate “was the only option she had left. It was the only card she had left to play.” Of course, once the baby was born, “all those feelings vanished and what was left was pure joy and gratitude.”
Jane Groenendaal, surrogacy director for New Beginnings Surrogacy Services, previously told Page Six that stars often use only their first name in the early stages.
“They don’t want to get close and attached to their surrogate if she’s not going to get pregnant,” Groenendaal said. “Communication definitely starts off slow in the beginning until there’s a confirmed pregnancy.”
But once things are in the clear, all bets are off.
“I know of one famous woman who basically turned her surrogate into her little sister,” said a Hollywood socialite. “She pampered her the whole way though. She found a yoga guy and a chef — and doula, obviously — and gave the surrogate carte blanche access to them. This [surrogate] was delivering her a miracle and [the star] felt . . . extreme love for her.”
As due dates get closer, a few stars have been rumored to rent their surrogates homes nearby so that the future famous parents can be near her when she goes into labor.
“Nobody wants to be traveling with a 3-day-old baby on a plane,” Hilton said of bringing home a baby from another state. “If you can afford to be there the second your surrogate goes into labor, and the second your baby is born, you would do that.
“And if you’re Kim Kardashian, you’re going to pay for a bodyguard for the surrogate throughout the entire process too.”
Tallying up all the extras plus the base fee, the average Hollywood surrogacy price tag can top $100,000.
Of course, for high-profile celebrities — even those who typically court publicity and attention — privacy is of the utmost concern. To a point.
“Fashion Police” host Giuliana Rancic and her husband Bill blurred out their surrogate’s identity during her 2012 pregnancy, which was featured on their E! reality show “Giuliana and Bill,” just in case something went wrong. But after their son, Edward Duke, now 5, was born happy and healthy, they revealed the identity of Delphine, the French au pair who gave them the family they’d wanted for years.
Hilton, too, didn’t want to jinx anything, “I didn’t talk about it to anyone, not because I was concerned about my surrogate’s safety. I was more concerned with bad energy. I’m Cuban. We think about the evil eye.”
In 2009, Sarah Jessica Parker spoke out against the outing of her surrogate, who later gave birth to twins Tabitha and Marion, by the media.
“On a daily basis, on an hourly basis, I am greatly concerned for her health and safety and the safe delivery of our children,” Parker told Access Hollywood. “I am incredibly outraged by the sort of extraordinary and unprecedented invasion of her privacy . . . She’s quite far along in this pregnancy and she’s carrying two children . . . There’s simply no excuse for doing this to somebody.”
California Cryobank, a sperm bank that’s been operating in Los Angeles since the 1970s, has helped several celebrity couples get pregnant by providing the sperm part of the surrogacy equation — if the couple are lesbians or if the male is sterile. Scott Brown, director of client experience and communications for the cryobank, said that with the rich and famous, there’s an elevated level of intensity from the start..
“Some celebrities have their physicians order their specimens, so their names are never used. Others will have their [less famous] partner work directly with us, and some will use a pseudonym. Occasionally, we get requests to come in after hours or on weekends for private consultations.”
And then there’s a recurring concern, when sperm is involved, that there are potential half-siblings out there. “We’ve had celebrities buy out a donor just to avoid those future issues,” said Brown.
So what becomes of these celebrity surrogates once the miracle babies are born?
“That’s what people don’t understand,” said a close friend of a famous gay couple who used a surrogate. “You work hard to find a surrogate and get her pregnant and pray for her health and the baby’s health, most importantly, and it’s enough to make anyone crack, famous or not. And then she has the baby or babies and . . . you go right into superparenting mode. And your surrogate is your holy angel, and you hold her in your heart, or maybe you send her Christmas cards with photos, but it’s not really about her anymore. It’s not always easy, but it’s the deal you struck together.”
And for some stars, the very process of trying to secure a surrogate teaches them something about themselves.
One single actress, who never had kids and is now too old to have one with her own eggs, told a friend that the process was all too much for someone whose life was already too much.
“She said that getting everything together to use a surrogate — the agency, lawyer, finances — took so much time and energy that she ran out of steam,” said the pal.
“She figured, ‘If I don’t have the patience for all the paperwork, how could I ever have the patience for a child?’ ”
Source: www.pagesix.com
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