CNBC Reporter Reveals 8-Year Infertility Journey — and How She Kept 2 Surrogacies and 7 IVF Transfers a Secret (Exclusive)

Courtney Reagan Baker feels "complete" as a mother to son Jack, 4, and daughters Reagan, 2, and Ella, 7 months. However, starting a family for the CNBC Senior Retail Reporter was not easy — in fact, it took almost 10 years.

"I'm kinda nervous," Baker admits before opening up to PEOPLE about her complicated infertility journey. "I'm on TV every day, but that's not about the most personal thing in my life."

At 32, Courtney and her husband, Jared Baker, decided they were ready to start a family.

"We tried the old fashioned way for a while," she begins, "and I guess it was probably a year until we finally sought professional help."

In her first few trips to the fertility clinic, Courtney tells PEOPLE, "they thought my uterus was misshapen. It took three different types of medical tests to figure that out, because one said yes, and one said, no."

With two differing answers, she took one more "tie-breaker" test to determine that "I do, indeed, have a full uterus."

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Related: Celebrities Who've Opened Up About Their Emotional IVF Journeys

Next, the couple tried "four cycles" of Intrauterine insemination (IUI). While Courtney did get pregnant twice throughout the process, she miscarried "early on" both times. "So then we moved to IVF (in vitro fertilization), and it became fairly clear the different things that doctors were watching," she explains.

Courtney tells PEOPLE, "I've learned that every month your brain sends two signals: 'Okay, release an egg,' and, at the same time, 'thicken your lining.' "

While Courtney's brain would successfully release "good quality" eggs, she says, "but that uterine lining never thickened."

"What the doctor started to surmise was, for some reason, it just wasn't a cushy enough environment for the embryo to snuggle in there for the duration. And so unfortunately my body couldn't carry it," she shares.

Courtney says this is "one of the less common issues that happen in infertility," and she tried "everything" to resolve it "for years."

"I was taking up to 14 supplements a day, doing acupuncture twice a week, monitoring every cycle, I mean, you name it, I tracked it — my heart rate, I would exercise more, I'd exercise less. I tried to go gluten free for a while. I tried to go dairy free. They scanned my brain to make sure it didn't have a tumor. I took Tamoxifen, which is often used for breast cancer."

And despite everything, she says, "We could not figure it out."

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In the meantime, Courtney and Jared proceeded with IVF. The process was extra challenging for the couple, however, because they needed to ensure that her uterine lining was thick enough to hold an embryo before transferring.

"We had to keep canceling cycles," she says, noting that "I've lost track" of how many cycles they prepared for. "I know in the end we ended up doing seven transfers on my body."

"That got us to a point where it was like, we have these embryos. If my body can't do this, there are two more logical ways to have children: You can adopt or you can use someone else's uterus."

In a way, Courtney and Jared were "halfway" into the surrogacy process, because they already had several embryos ready to use."

Related: Erin Foster Opens Up About Undergoing IVF Over 20 Times: 'Nobody Wants to Be Doing' It (Exclusive)

It is financially extremely burdensome to do either an adoption or surrogacy, and so we had already paid for the treatments to get those embryos," Courtney says. "So we were also halfway there in a financial sense, which unfortunately did come into play. Because after doing this every month, year after year, I mean, we were just spending so much money."

It was then that Courtney revealed she and Jared had been handling this all on their own.

"By the way, I should mention, no one knew any of this. Not our parents, not our best friends," she tells PEOPLE. "We kept this all completely quiet. It was just the two of us."

That is, until "my husband's sister [Karen] kind of sussed us out a little bit. She's like, 'What's going on? Something's going on with you.' And Jared finally just broke down and told her."

Revealing their secret ended up a blessing in disguise, because "she's a NICU nurse and she's a mom. she's in this community and she was like, 'I can find you a surrogate.' "

A few months later, Jared's childhood friend Stephanie agreed to be the couple's gestational carrier. Still though, Courtney says, "no one knows. Karen knew that we had talked to Stephanie, but she didn't know that we had agreed to do it with her. She knew nothing."

She explains, "You just get so scared that you'll say something and you'll jinx it."

Next thing she knew, it was March 2020. Stephanie was just finishing her first trimester and living in Illinois, while Courtney and Jared were in New York. The pandemic hit, and "it's hard enough that she's so far away. Now we don't even have access to these appointments."

At 28 weeks along, Stephanie developed "severe preeclampsia" and "things got a little scary." She was airlifted in a helicopter to a new hospital, "because they were afraid the only cure for preeclampsia was delivery. We needed to make sure that we have a hospital equipped to basically save her and the baby. Again, we still have no access. Even if we drove there, they wouldn't let us in the hospital."

They were able to get Stephanie's medical issues under control and sent her home, but Courtney and Jared drove to Illinois just in case.

"At 32 weeks, again, her blood pressure spiked," she says. "We both looked at each other and it was like we just knew it."

They airlifted Stephanie back to the hospital, and four days later, "her husband calls me and he is like, 'Are you ready to be a mom?' "

Courtney and Jared were able to get into the hospital, where Stephanie "labored for about 24 hours" after induction.

"When she was finally ready to push, she literally looked over at me and was like, 'Are you ready?' "

The couple welcomed baby Jack in July 2020. "We had a long stay in the NICU, but he's okay. And now he is an awesome, rocking 4-year-old."

A year a half later, Courtney and Jared decided to start the whole process over again without telling a soul. They found another gestational carrier in Courtney's hometown in Ohio, and moved to her mom's house six weeks before the birth — just 12 minutes away from the hospital.

Everything was going smoothly until the day of Reagan's birth.

"All of a sudden, [the carrier] woke up with very intense contractions and decided she didn't want an epidural," Courtney recalls. "The nurse was brand new, in her orientation, it turns out. So the nurse was like, 'Okay, well why don't you go to the bathroom before,' which is like, you never do that."

"Yeah, so Reagan was born on the bathroom floor," Courtney says with a laugh, adding that despite being so close, she didn't make it to the hospital for the birth.

Related: Famous Families Who've Welcomed Children Through Surrogacy

While connecting with her second surrogate, Courtney's fertility doctor informed her of a new treatment called Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP), "and I was like, 'Why not?' " she recalls. In between Jack and Reagan, one PRP cycle worked. Her uterine lining thickened and she heard the baby's heartbeat twice, but ultimately miscarried in her first trimester. Still, she didn't give up.

After welcoming Reagan, Courtney tried one more embryo transfer — one from her very last batch. "This is the last time I'm going to do this because emotionally I just can't keep losing pregnancies," she recalls thinking at the time.

In September 2023, seven years after she began trying for a baby, Courtney found out she was pregnant. She began to cry as she remembered getting to tell her friends and family that she was carrying a baby.

"It was so cool to get to be pregnant and feel my baby kick," she says while wiping tears. "My belly would grow and I'd be like, 'Look, how cool is this?' "

Nine months later, "ironically, I developed severe preeclampsia," Courtney shares. "I knew what had happened with Stephanie, and so when the machine went off, I was like, oh s---."

In June 2024, Ella was welcomed via C-section, and as a newly-minted family of five, she tells PEOPLE, "now we're complete."

Looking back on the past eight years — in which Courtney "did not take a month off" from trying to get pregnant — she says the "journey" was "the craziest, hardest thing I've ever done in so many different ways, but particularly emotionally."

She adds, "I've given myself injections in airplane bathrooms, bar bathrooms, Broadway show bathrooms, my high school football game bathroom, funerals, weddings, you name it."

What kept her going was a little voice in her head saying, "I'm going to be a mom." And with that, she hopes anyone else struggling with infertility knows, '"as cheesy as it sounds, I think if you have a desire to become a parent, you can do it."

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