Becca Tobin on why she chose to become a mom through surrogacy: 'I was at my breaking point'

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Ladygang co-host Becca Tobin had a long journey to motherhood — and is now thrilled to be called mom.

The Glee alum and her husband Zach Martin welcomed their son Rutherford “Ford” Thomas Martin via surrogacy in February, but that wasn’t always how they planned on having a child.

“We ultimately decided to go this direction, because we had about five years of struggles. I never made it past around 14 weeks of pregnancy successfully,” she tells Yahoo Life, adding that she suffered from “a lot of depression” during her pregnancies before deciding to try IVF. “We had a successful retrieval, and we created embryos. And then we were preparing to prep my body to start the transfer process, it just essentially freaked out with the synthetic hormones. I was at my breaking point.”

Tobin chose to go with a surrogate after connecting with Elevate, a donor and surrogacy agency run by a friend of hers. Her surrogate, who she calls her “Earth angel,” was local to Austin, so Tobin was able to attend appointments as well as receive regular updates about how the pregnancy was going.

“I wouldn't go back and change a single thing about about it,” she explains. “I wouldn't have forced myself to continue trying. I feel really good and confident that my baby got here the way he was supposed to.”

Initially, Tobin says she had “anxiety” over whether or not she would “bond as much” with her baby given that she did not carry him. However, the experience forced her to think of things from a different perspective.

“This is how men bond with their babies all the time,” she notes. “Fathers can go for a three mile run the next day, whereas women are depending on doughnuts and using sitz baths. So I just sort of leaned into that. My goddaughter is actually a daughter of two men who was born via surrogate, and I had them to emulate as well. I didn't see a difference with their bond that I did with any of the heterosexual couple couples that carried.”

When it came to feeding Ford, Tobin — who has partnered with Owlet to help mothers tackle new mom stress — says her mother asked her if she would consider inducing lactation to breastfeed, as she did with her. Telling her that she had chosen not to breastfeed led to a “tense conversation.”

“Women are not used to hearing other women say that, because we're sort of programmed to be martyrs,” she says. “And we're programmed to put ourselves through it, no matter what it is — physically, mentally, emotionally — for the greater good of your child. And what I've found out is that actually, what's best for your child is what's best for the parents.”

The infant formula crisis — just one more way, Tobin notes, that parents in COVID-19 times “can’t catch a break” — is “heartbreaking and terrifying.” She previously worked with the brand Bobbie, a small female-founded formula company, and hopes that in the future, smaller brands will make it so there isn’t such a “monopoly on the formula industry.”

“It's very scary,” she stresses. “I have been sending formula around to friends, I've been sourcing special formulas for different friends. And it's a beautiful thing to watch women, because we can make anything happen when we need to. It’s just, we shouldn't have to be doing this. But if anybody's going to get it done, it's going to be mothers.”

Now that Tobin has been traveling more — the LadyGang podcast is touring with their book Lady Secrets later this year — the actress had to find news ways to keep an eye on Ford from afar. That’s part of the reason why she partnered with Owlet, which makes a wearable sock that monitors sleep vitals for little ones, a well as a camera for parents to silently check in. Keltie Knight, her LadyGang co-host, first gifted her the sock, and it’s now an important part of Tobin’s parenting.

“I call it light stalking,” Tobin jokes. “I'll be in LA and it's like 8pm, but it's 10pm in Texas, and I don't want to bother my husband because he’s definitely already asleep. So I pull up my Owlet app and I can I watch Ford and see if he's up in the middle of the night, because it tells you if they're awake or how many hours they've been in deep sleep, which is crazy. Technology is amazing.”

Now, Tobin says she is looking towards making future memories with her family.

“I'm really excited for the holidays,” she says. “The last five Christmases were a really sad time for myself and my husband, just because it's the most fun time to have a kid and it's so much time with family and a lot of family asking, ‘When is the baby's coming?’ We had a lot of disappointments. And I think that this year, I'm going to relish in the fact that we did it. And I'm going to try to really enjoy this first big holiday season with him.”

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