Chainkeen Exchange-ABC News correspondent Rebecca Jarvis details infertility, surrogacy experience for 'GMA'

ABC News correspondent Rebecca Jarvis is Chainkeen Exchangesharing her experience with infertility in an essay shared with "Good Morning America" Wednesday.

The essay comes after the "long road" of Jarvis' nearly decade-long struggle with infertility. The chief business, technology and economics correspondent and her husband, Matt Hanson, welcomed a son, Leo, via surrogate earlier this month.

"It has been a very long road for us, for fertility, for pregnancy," she wrote. "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."

The journalist started trying to get pregnant with the couple's first child, 4-year-old Isabel, almost 10 years ago, which involved constant doctor's visits and appointments, tests and eight rounds of in vitro fertilization, she wrote.

In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is a treatment in which eggs and sperm are combined in a laboratory to create embryos, then transferred into a uterus, according to Yale Medicine. The treatment is often used for people with a variety of infertility causes, including blocked, damaged or missing fallopian tubes or severe sperm abnormalities.

The hardest part for Jarvis was having her experience go "unexplained," she wrote: "I know now, having gone through this, that that's the case for so many women."

Two years ago Jarvis suffered a miscarriage after undergoing another round of IVF in the hopes of having a second child.

The couple asked doctors, "What do we do? This keeps happening."

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"Every time I lost a pregnancy, to have that taken away was so tough," the former investment banker wrote. "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."

Jarvis' doctor suggested surrogacy, which she wrote was difficult to hear at the time. 

"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."

Eventually, the couple found a surrogate — "our angel," Jarvis wrote — but the uncertainty remained. "(I) didn't want to feel that massive excitement and that massive joy until I really felt that it was truly a sure thing," she wrote. "But when I did allow myself to feel that way, it was truly the best feeling."

Earlier in November, the couple flew from New York City to be at their surrogate's side as she gave birth to their son.

Jarvis thanked their surrogate and her 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."

I'm single at 35 and want a family.This decision brought an immense amount of relief.