The courageous intimate story of America’s first surrogate mother…and a compelling account of a woman’s confrontation with a decision that changed forever the lives of the people she loved.

Elizabeth Kane, a thirty-seven-year-old Pekin, Illinois, housewife and mother of three was the first American woman legally to contact to bear a child for another couple and be paid for it.  Her contract required that she be artificially inseminated with the sperm of a man whose wife was infertile.  She was to carry the pregnancy to term, deliver the child, and give it over to the couple in exchange for a fee.  This she was to do although biologically the baby was half hers.

Birth Mother is the dramatic and moving story of Kane’s odyssey, which began with a firm resolve to assist infertile couples.  Unexpectedly, tragically, that voyage changed course.  As Baby Justin’s birth came and went and seven hard years passed, Elizabeth Kane found herself descending into an inferno of her own making.  On the fateful day that she responded to the brief advertisement in the Peoria Journal Star, she had no way of knowing that the surrogacy would lead her to heartbreak, her children to deep emotional distubances, and her marriage to the edge of breakdown.

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