Our twins were born 4 MONTHS APART

Rohan Silva and his wife Kate experienced years of infertility before two miracles came in quick succession

- ROHAN SILVA DAILY MAIL

Our GP gave his colleagues a brain-teaser the other day, and none of them could figure out the answer.

A couple have a son and daughter born within four months of one another, with both children fully genetically related to both parents. How on earth did that happen? The short answer is that my wife Kate gave birth to a beautiful baby last July, and a heroic surrogate named Ava delivered our other darling bub a short while later.

Back in March 2022, we were blessed with our second child, an exquisite baby girl we named Zola. When Zola was born via emergency caesarean, her health quickly deteriorated - and just five hours after she'd arrived in this world, she was gone, her tiny body overwhelmed by a bacterial infection.

Losing Zola was a living nightmare. Kate had been through a hellish 72-hour labour with our first child, too, and that had also ended in an emergency caesarean. What's more, by the time we lost Zola she'd been through 10 years of invasive, painful IVF, as well as multiple miscarriages. The thought of going through all that again was too horrible to bear. Doctors made clear that the medical risks of Kate attempting another pregnancy and birth were high. So in desperation we turned to surrogacy in the US.

Stateside hopes

In the UK, it's illegal to pay a surrogate, so you have to rely on volunteers, who are hard to come by. Which means surrogacy is rare here - and the legal framework is much less developed than in America.

It's also the case in the UK that if someone volunteers to carry an embryo for you, you have to apply to adopt the child, which creates a terrible psychological uncertainty about what might happen if the volunteer changes her mind and wants to keep the baby.