Ava and Everly Pierce are newborn sisters whose story quickly went viral after they were welcomed home from the hospital to Kyle and Kelsie Pierce, two months apart.
Both babies were born on different days and in separate deliveries…but how you ask?!
Just weeks after Kelsi’s mother, Lisa Rutherford, had agreed to carry a child for the couple, Kelsi suddenly got pregnant herself after years of attempting to have a baby.
The two blew through their savings in an attempt to become parents — trying everything from invasive surgical procedures to in-vitro fertilization. But as time clicked on, the couple was starting to believe their dreams of becoming parents through natural childbirth would not happen.
She then underwent a round of IVF but was met with more heartbreaking news: her uterine lining was too thin to carry a pregnancy according to doctors said — which made it difficult to bring a child to term.
“[The doctor] told me that nothing was working and my body just wasn’t able to [carry a pregnancy],” Pierce recently told Good Morning America. “It was a very emotional conversation, of course, but I understood that we’d tried everything possible.”
The first option doctors offered up was adoption. The second, would be finding a gestational carrier.
And while the Pierces did have a viable embryo frozen after their IVF procedure, which could be implanted in a surrogate who might have a better shot at carrying the child to term, both options were out of their budget.
“We had already poured more than our savings and gone into debt incredibly just for what we had done before, so it wasn’t an option,” Pierce told Good Morning America. “It was a very depressing time.”
After hearing the news, Kelsi’s mom decided to go to her own doctor to see if she was physically able to be a gestational carrier. Amazingly, she was — and soon, Kelsi’s mom became a pregnant grandmother!
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“I woke up and there was a text on my phone and it was a picture of a positive pregnancy test and I just lost it,” she told Good Morning America. “It was hard for us to let her [be the gestational carrier] because of the risks with her age, but she really convinced us that she wanted to do this for us.”
At this time, Kelsi stopped taking her fertility medications and was no longer actively trying to get pregnant.
“I used to take pregnancy tests every month and it was just one of those things where, by habit, I took a pregnancy test,” she explained. “I glanced down at the test and I was going to throw it away like normal, and that was the first time I saw two lines.”
On October 1, the Pierces welcomed their first daughter, Everly, and on November 23, her “little” sister Ava was born.
“Every time something is hard or I’m tired, I remind myself that this is my dream finally coming true,” the new mother shared. “I appreciate it so much more because of how long it took and how much struggle it took.”
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