Business Insider: A Cancer Survivor’s Path to Parenthood

The Kindness of Strangers: Helping Tamika Felder on Her Path to Motherhood

At 25 years old, Tamika Felder was building a career in television and imagined motherhood as part of her future. Then she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

As Business Insider reported, Tamika needed a radical hysterectomy within weeks of her diagnosis. She explored preserving her fertility before treatment, but insurance would not cover the cost, leaving her without the opportunity to freeze eggs or create embryos before undergoing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

The treatment saved her life, but it also changed the future she had envisioned for herself.

Turning Her Experience Into Advocacy

In the years that followed, Tamika transformed her experience with cervical cancer into a mission to help others. She founded Cervivor, a nonprofit dedicated to cervical cancer education, advocacy, and supporting those affected by the disease.

Through that work, Tamika met fellow cervical cancer survivor Ginny Marable.

Ginny’s experience with fertility preservation had been different. Before undergoing a hysterectomy, she and her then-boyfriend, Sean, were able to create and freeze embryos. The couple later welcomed identical twins with the help of a gestational surrogate.

After completing their family, Ginny and Sean had remaining embryos and made an extraordinary decision: they offered them to Tamika and her husband, Rocky.

For Tamika, a possibility she had buried years earlier suddenly existed again.

An Extraordinary Gift, and Another Challenge

Receiving donated embryos gave Tamika and Rocky a path to having a child, but they still needed a gestational surrogate and the resources required to move forward.

That was when Family Match Consulting founder Stephanie Levich learned about Tamika’s story.

Moved by what Tamika had experienced and the incredible gift Ginny and Sean had already given her, Stephanie reached out to colleagues throughout the fertility and surrogacy community to see how they could help.

Family Match Consulting and other professionals involved in the process donated their services, helping Tamika and Rocky move forward with a gestational surrogate.

By the time Business Insider shared their story in May 2022, their surrogate was three months pregnant and Tamika was preparing for something she had once believed cancer had taken away from her: becoming a mother.

More Than One Act of Generosity

What makes Tamika’s story so powerful is that there wasn’t one person who made it possible.

There was a fellow cancer survivor willing to donate her remaining embryos, giving another woman a chance to experience motherhood. There was a surrogate willing to carry their child. And there were professionals throughout the fertility and surrogacy community willing to contribute their time and services to help remove barriers along the way.

For Tamika, a devastating diagnosis at 25 changed the path she expected her life to take. More than two decades later, that path was leading somewhere she once thought was impossible.

Her story is also a reminder of something we see often in this work: there is no single way to build a family. Sometimes the path changes completely. Sometimes it requires the help of people you never expected to meet. And sometimes, as Tamika described it to Business Insider, it comes down to the “kindness of strangers.”