A Search for a Surrogate Leads to India

On their third trip to India, Rhonda and Gerry Wile finally heard a sound they thought they might never hear: the heartbeat of their unborn child.

Four nerve-racking months after that joyful ultrasound moment, their son arrived on Aug. 26 at 10:22 p.m. weighing 2.7 kilograms and sporting wisps of dark hair. They named him Blaze Xennon Wile, the middle name chosen from a book of baby names that gave its meaning as "from a foreign or faraway land."

"It seems unreal. We hold him and kiss him a thousand times a day," Mr. Wile says. "It's so lucky that it worked out for us."

For the Wiles, a married couple who live in Arizona, the birth was the culmination of four years of trying to conceive. Theirs was a path marked by wrenching disappointment, a failed pregnancy, many hours on the Internet -- and long airplane trips. The determination to produce a child that is at least partly their genetic offspring led them finally on a high-tech passage to India, where they hired a surrogate to bear their baby...