‘It took us to hell and back – but was worth it’: Ben and Georgie Ainslie on their surrogacy journey

Ben and Georgie Ainslie are sitting in the kitchen of their Wimbledon home trying to coax their three-year-old son, Fox, to eat the rest of his lunch. Fox is more interested in going outside to try out a new leaf-blower, which has just arrived at Ainslie Towers. “No pudding unless you eat up all your cucumber!” says Georgie, the former Sky Sports presenter turned podcast host, rolling her eyes and laughing.

It is a scene of domestic normality which could be taking place in any home up or down the country. But it is not one they take for granted. When Ben made history at the 37th America’s Cup in Barcelona last month, leading a British team to the final of sailing’s oldest, most prestigious competition for the first time in 60 years, he described it as the culmination of a “10-year journey”; building a team from scratch, finding investment, improving across three campaigns, countless highs and lows on the water. What he did not say was that Barcelona also marked the culmination of a 10-year journey off the water, building a family.

Waiting to hug him when he stepped ashore for the last time, his team ultimately having gone down 7-2 to defenders New Zealand in the final (Ben has already vowed to keep going, insisting he will not rest until he “brings the Cup home”) were Georgie, eight-year-old daughter Bellatrix, and Fox. Only their closest friends and family would have understood just how much those embraces meant. Bellatrix was born via IVF in 2016; Fox via surrogacy in 2021.

“It was a journey which nearly broke us,” Georgie admits. “It took us to hell and back. But it’s definitely made us stronger.”

A few weeks earlier, sitting on a sofa in their smart, loft-style apartment in Barcelona’s old town, a stone’s throw from his team’s base in Port Vell, Ben and Georgie are taking me through that journey step by step.

They have decided to speak publicly about it now for a variety of reasons. Primarily, they want to help rid some of the stigma surrounding surrogacy, and to educate others in a similar situation.

“You hear the word ‘surrogacy’ used a lot in a negative context these days,” Georgie says. “People feel like it’s something celebrities do because they can afford to, like it’s some sort of trolley-dash, buying a baby off the shelf. But it’s just so wrong. When we started out on this journey, the last thing we were thinking was ‘Let’s have a baby via surrogacy’. And I’m so grateful that we had the resources to do it, but it’s brutal. Absolutely brutal. You only ever contemplate it when absolutely everything else has failed and there’s no other outcome that’s positive.”

They also want to talk about their experience for their children’s sake. “Ultimately, I guess, we feel very proud of the journey we’ve gone on together,” Georgie adds. “That’s important for both Bellatrix and Fox in the future to know that we have always been honest about it, and that it was always our approach from the outset. It tells them something, too, about how grateful we are to have the family we have because it was against the odds.”

‘Like everyone, you think it will be easy’

Ben and Georgie met at a corporate event in 2011. She was a Sky Sports presenter back then, covering Formula One predominantly. He was preparing for London 2012 (where he won his fourth and final Olympic gold medal). They got together a couple of years later, by which time he was living in San Francisco competing for Oracle Team USA in the 34th America’s Cup and she had started a job in New York working for Fox Sports. Georgie was already 37 by the time they married in December 2014. “Like everyone, you think ‘Oh, it will be easy to go from doing whatever you were doing in your working life to, you know, making a family work’,” Georgie says of their initial attempts at starting a family. “But pretty soon we were like, ‘Actually, this is proving to be harder than we realised’. That was when we went on our first IVF journey with Bellatrix.”

The roller coaster of emotions – hope, heartache, crushing disappointment, financial stress – that followed will be familiar to the many thousands of couples who have gone through IVF. “We were lucky that from the 30-or-so eggs we initially harvested we had one single embryo that turned into our bright spark, Bellatrix,” Georgie says. But perhaps that success gave them a false sense of optimism. By the time they returned from the 35th America’s Cup in Bermuda in 2017 – with baby Bellatrix in tow – Georgie was 39. And there were no eggs left from that initial batch. “I think we thought we were invincible? ‘We can do this again.’ And then, of course, you discover that actually the law of averages is not as favourable as all that.”

Seven rounds of IVF and three miscarriages

In total, Ben and Georgie went through seven further rounds of IVF, six of them using Georgie’s eggs, the final round using a donor egg. None proved successful. “It was an incredibly difficult period,” Ben says. “We had three miscarriages during that time – at eight weeks, 12 weeks and 14 weeks.”

“I put something like 500 needles in myself over the course of those years,” Georgie adds. “I mean, when you actually stop to think about it, it’s like some sort of madness takes hold of you… what the hell are you doing? But I think the problem is there’s always that hope.We’re both completely and utterly stubborn. So we just kept on going.”

The last attempt, the one using a donor egg, involved travelling to Washington DC. Sadly, it too ended in tragedy when the baby developed hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS). “I’ll never forget it,” Ben shudders. “We were in a clinic in Harley Street, and obviously it goes wrong, and of course poor Georgie is absolutely devastated, so she runs out. And I’ve got this lady technician going: ‘You need to settle this bill.’ I was just like: ‘I need to follow my wife…’ For f---’s sake.”

Ben shakes his head. “The worst thing is seeing your partner just so broken, physically, but more so emotionally, psychologically. In the end it was me who said: ‘We cannot do this again.’”

Georgie smiles at her husband. “You were as ruined by that process as I was,” she says, choking back tears. “Sorry,” she adds after a while. “I don’t mind talking about it. It’s just bringing back lots of memories.”

Never one to sit still – she now hosts a successful podcast with Ben called Performance People which has attracted guests from Jeremy Clarkson to Toto Wolff to Alastair Campbell – and through Ainslie + Ainslie, the company she and Ben have set up, she has developed a night powder, dissolvable in water. Developed with the help of sports scientists who worked in Ben’s sailing teams, the powder (which features cherry extract and manganese), is designed to reduce stress, aid sleep and boost cellular recovery.

“I looked at Ben, seemingly getting better with age,” Georgie says, about where the idea came from. “Whereas here I was at 42, I had gone through a ton of stuff physically and mentally with all the IVF and I was completely broken. I’m a very tough, strong, robust individual who can cope with most things that are thrown at her, but there was a moment where I was like: ‘S---, I actually don’t know my own mind or body any more.’ And so I looked for solutions. We’ve got a day powder coming out soon as well.”

The mood is lifted by a video call from Fox and Bellatrix, who are not currently in Spain, as Ben and Georgie took the decision to keep them in school so as not to disrupt their lives too much. They have been travelling out between rounds with “Supernanny” Kirsty and will arrive on Saturday ahead of the final. Fox, who has taken to wearing a T-shirt saying “Future Skipper” on it, seeks assurances that they will not race without him. “Don’t worry, buddy!” Ben says. “We won’t race until you get here.”

The reason for going into such detail on the IVF, and just how grim that was, is because it informed their decision on surrogacy. Both of them admit that if it was up to Ben, they might have stopped after the last miscarriage. He was by that stage genuinely worried about Georgie’s physical and mental health. But she still had two donor eggs left which were viable and she was determined to keep on trying. “I persisted and eventually we did get there,” she says. “I’m so glad you did,” he replies.

Surrogacy – the practice of carrying a baby for someone else, usually due to fertility issues or because they are men in a same-sex relationship – was not something either of them had considered before. Georgie admits they would probably never have done so had a family friend not used a surrogate in the United States and had such a successful experience herself.

It is illegal in some countries including Italy, Spain, France and Germany, and considered unethical by many, exploitative of the surrogate and potentially cruel to a newborn baby.

Ben and Georgie admit that they spent a long time making the decision, a period made even longer by Covid, which shut down IVF clinics for a time. They considered adoption but wanted a biological link to the baby. Ultimately, however, they felt comfortable with surrogacy “as long as everyone involved had a choice. Donors, surrogates, intended parents”. “I think women have the right to determine what they do with their bodies,” Georgie says.

‘Surrogacy should be professionalised as much as possible’

They settled on the United States because surrogacy is “so well-regulated there”. It remains to be seen what impact a second Trump administration might have on those regulations. The president-elect, who has famously flip-flopped on IVF and abortion, has already threatened to revoke US citizenship by birthright. Ostensibly this is to discourage illegal immigration by denying automatic citizenship for the children of those in the country illegally. But it could affect children born to surrogates in the US. Fox has a US passport, for instance.

As it stands, though, surrogacy law in the US is clear. It states the surrogate must sign over parental guardianship to the intended parents at six months during the pregnancy. In the UK, by contrast, where it is illegal to pay for surrogacy, the surrogate will be registered on the birth certificate until parenthood is transferred via a parental order, which cannot always be enforced in the event that the surrogate changes her mind.

In Ben and Georgie’s view, the American system is far more robust. “Surrogacy should be professionalised as much as possible,” Ben insists. “And the outcome [in the US] is clear that six months into the carrying process, the surrogate signs over parental rights to the parents. That stops everything from being contentious.”

The costs, they accept, are prohibitive – tens of thousands of pounds. But then, with IVF at £10,000 a pop in the UK if you cannot do it on the NHS, the fertility game as a whole is prohibitive. “Sadly, right now, it is, yes,” Georgie says. “And I absolutely accept we were in an extremely privileged position where we were able to do this. But I don’t think it has to be like that forever. It’s the same with IVF, how can we make that more fair?”

‘Bellatrix knows that Fox had a Tummy Mummy’

As for other ethical concerns, it was only a small leap in their minds from using a donor egg in Georgie’s womb to using a surrogate. “We had already tried using Ben’s sperm, a donor egg and my womb, so this felt like the last step in our IVF journey. Ben’s sperm, a donor egg and a surrogate carrier. And once we had decided, we didn’t waver.”

Having already selected their egg donor prior to Georgie’s final round of IVF – a completely anonymous process which involves scrolling through thousands of profiles – they found a surrogate in California via an agency, and two eggs were implanted. This was just before the 2021 America’s Cup in New Zealand.

“It was a crazy time,” Georgie recalls. “Really intense. We were all living out there, in Covid, knowing our Fox was growing on the other side of the world. Bellatrix was four at the time and at a nursery in Auckland. I remember picking her up from school one day and the teacher said: “Can I have a word? Bellatrix has been wonderful today, but she said, ‘After this, you and Daddy and her are going to America, because you’ve got to collect her baby brother’.”

Georgie says she and Ben decided to tell Bellatrix about Fox early on because Georgie was not pregnant and because she felt it would be even more confusing to try to explain everything at once. “I learnt this from my friend who had been through the process. You don’t want any shocks or surprises. It’s better to drip-feed information. It was the same with Bellatrix’s IVF. Many of her friends were conceived the same way. So she knows that Fox had a ‘Tummy Mummy’. We’re very open.”

‘The surrogate was amazing – she was clear she was very good at pregnancy’

The birth itself was another emotional roller coaster. When they went to the States in the summer of 2021, they all went together. Ben skipped a couple of SailGP races for what was described at the time as “personal reasons” and they made it into a family road trip. It was then that they were most thankful that they had gone with the States, due to the professionalism of the process, the hospital staff who were sensitive to all parties, and the surrogate, who had six of her own children and had already carried two babies for others. “She was absolutely amazing,” Ben says. “Not being funny but that was part of it. She was clear she was very good at pregnancy. And she was.”

The birth was the first time they had ever actually met their surrogate in person, although Georgie says they knew from initial conversations via Zoom, that they “fitted well”. She says she would have no problem contacting her now, or Fox meeting her later in life if that was what he wished to do. Or his biological mother for that matter, if her anonymity was ever lifted. “That is his prerogative,” she says. “But yes, the surrogate was incredible. And the birth itself was just incredibly emotional. There was this magical moment where everything came together. Our lovely surrogate was going through the delivery, and it was a really important thing for us, because we had this bond during that time, which was quite unique.”

Ben in particular recalls her sensitivity afterwards. “Obviously you go through all the checks and everything. She wanted to share that moment with us. And we wanted her to share that moment. But then very quickly she said, ‘Right, I need to leave, this is your moment’. But it was all on her terms. We were obviously very mindful of the fact that this was a huge undertaking for her.”

Back in London, builders tramp up and down the stairs, as renovations are underway. And Ben and Georgie are about to leave to visit a potential school for Fox. He will start in reception in less than a year. They have no regrets. “Never in a million years could we regret anything because it’s been the most positive outcome you could ever possibly have,” Georgie says. “It’s almost like Fox knows exactly what went on and how hard it was to get him here, and therefore he’s just forever grateful to be in this world.”

They accept not everyone will agree with what they did, although they insist they have had nothing but support from friends and family. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and that’s absolutely fine,” Georgie says. “But if even one or two people happen to connect with our story and say ‘Well, OK, I feel empowered enough to explore it…’

Ben nods. “It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” he says. “But in the end it was one of the most rewarding. When I look back at the last 10 years, the America’s Cup journey, it’s like: ‘My God, whatever’s going on out there on the water isn’t anywhere near as hard as what’s happening behind closed doors.’ All of that, the successes, the failures, it pales into insignificance compared to what really matters, which is family.”