'Good Morning America' Favorite Welcomes Baby After Infertility Struggles

ABC News correspondent Rebecca Jarvis is opening up about her "long road" to welcoming her second child after a nearly decade-long struggle with infertility. The Good Morning America correspondent shared her story Wednesday in a moving essay, sharing what went into welcoming her son Leo via a surrogate earlier this month alongside husband Matt Hanson.

"It has been a very long road for us, for fertility, for pregnancy," wrote the chief business, technology and economics correspondent. "And through the journey, I've come to see how common it is and how many families are facing these challenges – the emotional and the physical toll, the costs involved, the sadness and heartbreak and the hope, too."

Jarvis first began trying to get pregnant with her and Hanson's first child, 4-year-old Isabel, almost a decade ago, which required extensive testing and eight rounds of in vitro fertilization. Two years ago, after undergoing another round of IVF in hopes of having a second child, the journalist suffered a miscarriage, leaving her and her husband devastated at the "unexplained" nature of their fertility struggles.

"I know now, having gone through this, that that's the case for so many women," she wrote, recalling asking doctors, "What do we do? This keeps happening." Jarvis continued, "Every time I lost a pregnancy, to have that taken away was so tough. I will also say, as a mom to Isabel, it was very tough for me because I wanted to be a great mom to her too. I didn't want that pain that I felt to take away from the joy that I felt with her."

Eventually, Jarvis' doctor suggested welcoming a second child via a surrogate, which was difficult to hear at first. "It can take a very, very long time to match with a surrogate," she wrote. "And one of the things that we really talked a lot about beforehand was whether or not we could even ask another person to do something like that with their body." 

After eventually finding her family's "angel" of a surrogate, the couple flew from New York City earlier this month to be by her side as she gave birth to their son. Jarvis wrote in her essay that she had nothing but gratitude for her surrogate and her surrogate's family. "I just wanted to hug her and give her all of our love that we were also pouring over Leo, because there's no way this would've been possible without her," she wrote.