Big Brother Australia star Ebony Vandermont has made her love of the United States clear, but now she has revealed the heartbreaking reason why.
From the moment she entered the house, she raised eyebrows with her passion for the nation, even having a pink American flag with her face on it, and a FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) singlet.
However, the 23-year-old said she doesn’t want to leave Australia behind, but thinks she needs to have biological children.
Because her uterus was removed when she had a hysterectomy at 20, she can’t conceive naturally and will need to use a surrogate.
“I can’t have kids here. The surrogacy laws are “s**t. So I’ll have to send my eggs off to the US,” she explained to the other housemates.
In Australia, commercial surrogacy, where the surrogate can gain additional profits on top of the reasonable pregnancy costs, is illegal.
While surrogacy laws vary in Australia by state or territory, she worries that she won’t be protected here as a biological mother.
In an Australian surrogacy arrangement, the surrogate and sometimes her partner are considered the legal parents at birth, and parentage must be transferred to the intended parents by a court order.
“Even just thinking about it, I’m just emotionally drained,” Ebony said in the diary room.
“It is exhausting and the only thing I think about these days because I want it so badly.
“It’ll be worth it, but the fact that I have to leave Australia to be able to have children, and be legally protected and to be able to pay a surrogate is just shocking to me. It is actually appalling; I’m devastated.”
“I love Australia, we have such a beautiful country, such beautiful people, such a mixed, diverse culture here, and the fact that I’m not gonna be able to fulfil my dreams here is just heartbreaking.”
“That’s why I love America,” she continued through tears. “That’s why my face is on the flag; I’m just manifesting my future, cause it’s not gonna be here.”
During her time in the Big Brother house, the 23-year-old entrepreneur has been candid about her health struggles.
Having lived with endometriosis and adenomyosis, she had to drop out of school due to the debilitating pain.
She’s also had her uterus and fallopian tubes removed, and has gone through several egg retrievals.
The business owner has also been going through menopause, and explained to her housemates that she’ll never experience her period again, but will still go through Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS).
“So when I get that, my migraines grow from terrible to horrendous, like, you would just want to blow your own head off,” she said.
“The only way I’m going to ever know is if I stop the hormones, and the only way to do that is to go into menopause. So I was in menopause this year, it was medically induced menopause. So I had an injection in the stomach.”
She has undergone this as part of a six-month trial to see if her migraines improve.
“They left the ovaries, and they implant that into you, and that turns your ovaries off, and that stops the hormones from flaring and fluctuating, and you’re literally in menopause,” she added about her “insane” health journey.
