The coronavirus pandemic has provided another bump in the road on Lance Bass’ journey to fatherhood. The *NSYNC singer and his husband, Michael Turchin, “just lost our surrogate that we’ve had for over two years,” and are trying to find a replacement.
“We’re two and a half years in and we keep running into a lot of different hiccups,” Bass said in an interview with TooFab on Friday. “We have not been — we haven’t been pregnant since last year, you know, when we lost them last year. But now, we found a new donor and we love the donor, so we have our embryos ready to go right now.”
“Unfortunately, we just lost our surrogate that we’ve had for over two years,” he added. “And so now — now begins the process of finding a replacement surrogate which is hard during COVID because a lot of surrogates really don’t want to get pregnant during a time like this.”
Bass revealed to 360aproko in March that his surrogate had been eight weeks pregnant with a baby boy last fall, but tragically lost the pregnancy to miscarriage. It was his and Turchin’s ninth round of IVF.
“We unfortunately lost him after eight weeks, which happens to pretty much everyone when you’re going through IVF,” he said. “I didn’t even know that as we were going through this, but we’ve met so many great couples who have the same story. So, you do feel a lot of support knowing other people have gone through it.”
Bass, who has been open about his and Turchin’s years-long journey to become parents, said that attempt was the first time a surrogate had successfully become pregnant, so he started to imagine a future with his son.
“You try to trick yourself into not getting excited because you know anything can happen at any time, especially in those first few weeks when there’s a huge possibility that the [embryos] won’t stick,” he explained. “You keep telling yourself that and trying not to get your hopes up, but you’re always going to have those thoughts in the back of your brain where you’re already planning out their lives. Especially once you know the sex — you can’t help but fast-forward over their entire lives and imagine who they’re going to be like, who they might marry and all kinds of stuff.”
“That’s the thing that sucks — you can’t help yourself from thinking those thoughts and having this perfect world scenario in your mind,” he continued. “Getting over that has been hard. It’s like all these hopes and dreams I had won’t be happening this time. But everything happens for a reason and when it needs to happen, it’ll have to happen.”
Though there had been “way more downs than ups” in the process, Bass was trying to remain optimistic.
“Nine did not work, so now we’re onto 10 and hopefully the next time will work,” he said. “I’m trying not to worry about it. Of course, in a perfect world I would love to have my own kids. But if it’s not meant in the cards, then it’s not meant in the cards and there are plenty of kids who need adopting. So, I’m not opposed to going right ahead and adopting if this fails next time.”
