Influencer has a baby for strangers she met on Instagram

As a lifestyle influencer with more than 440,000 followers, Midwestern mom of two Samantha Mathews’ Instagram grid featured tasteful home renovations, potty-training tips and travel snaps of her adorable family.

But after a Manhattan couple direct-messaged her last year, she decided to add another descriptor to her social-media bio: “Surrogate babe.”

On July 27, the digital content creator found herself pushing out a baby for complete strangers whom she met on the app. 

“My husband and I are always up for an adventure,” Mathews, 31, told The Post with a laugh, just days after giving birth to a healthy boy. “And this was a rewarding one.”

As a first-time gestational surrogate — a woman who doesn’t supply the egg for fertilization, but carries and delivers the baby for a separate party — the Missouri native was paid approximately $40,000 by the couple.

She and her husband Dan, 34, documented every step of their unlikely journey along the way. One TikTok post, in which she explained why she decided to become a surrogate, fetched a staggering 6.5 million views. (“Because I love pregnancy and I oddly enough love labor, I decided, ‘Let’s do this for somebody else,’ ” she explained.)

About 750 babies are born via surrogacy every year. A-listers including Kim Kardashian, 41; her sister Khloé, 38; supermodel Naomi Campbell, 52; and Bravo’s Andy Cohen, 54, have successfully built broods via the costly arrangement. 

But for Mathews, being a surrogate offered little celeb-like glitz and glamour. 

Instead, she spent months tirelessly preparing to emotionally detach from the fetus that she nurtured for 39 weeks of pregnancy and ushered into the world after three hours of labor and two quick pushes. 

“Every step of the way I kept reminding myself, ‘This is not my baby, this is for [the couple]. They get to celebrate those milestones, and we’re celebrating baby’s life for them,’ ” said Mathews, a biological mom to son Canyon, 5, and daughter Ember, 4. 

In July 2021, the surrogate baby’s parents, who Mathews chose not to name for privacy reasons, contacted her to incubate their little one via in vitro fertilization transfer after several failed attempts at a natural pregnancy. 

The husband and wife sought out Mathews after they discovered her online testimonial about almost serving as a surrogate to another couple she met in October 2018 through the Facebook group Surrogates and Intended Parents Match and Chat. 

But after the couple learned they had conceived naturally, the deal amicably ended before the embryo was transferred into Mathews’ womb. They successfully welcomed a healthy baby girl the following September. 

In November 2021, Mathews and her husband traveled to NYC to meet the couple in person and have their embryo implanted. 

And, much to everyone’s surprise, a fertilized egg took root after one try. 

“That was truly a miracle,” said Mathews. “Sometimes it takes two to three [attempts] for the embryo to stick. It’s almost like the stars have to be aligned.”

Even though getting pregnant was a breeze, Mathews struggled with having to get poked by needles every day of her first trimester. 

“When you get pregnant naturally, your hormones prepare your body to begin growing a baby, and your estrogen and progesterone levels increase,” she explained. “But when you do an IVF transfer, you have to take estrogen pills and progesterone shots so that your body properly receives the embryo and doesn’t fight it off like a foreign object.”

Unfortunately for her, that meant having Dan administer progesterone shots to the top-right quadrant of her butt-cheek, nightly, for three months. 

“I do not like needles. I can push out babies with no problem, but I cannot handle needles,” said Mathews. 

“The shots, coupled with the emotional weight that you carry, hoping and praying that everything goes right during pregnancy for the sake of the couple, was a lot,” she confessed, noting her fear of having a miscarriage. 

“They’ve struggled, they’ve already had loss and you don’t want that to continue in their journey.”

Owing to distance and the ongoing threat of COVID-19, the parents would virtually accompany Mathews on doctor and ultrasound appointments via Zoom; however, for the birth, the couple was in the delivery room.

Immediately following the delivery, the bundle was placed directly in the arms of his biological mother to establish a skin-to-skin contact bond.

Throughout the process, Mathews relied heavily on her “super supportive” family and friends to look after her own little ones.    

She said they made it clear to their biological tots that “mommy is just helping [the couple] have a baby,” and never used terms like “little brother” or “little sister” when the kids would inquire about her growing belly.

And now that the baby boy, whose name Mathews chose not to disclose, is here, she and Dan plan to help their family readjust by taking a six-month road trip in an RV. 

“After the delivery, my kids were able to see the parents with the baby, and they both understand that this is their baby now,” said Mathews, who didn’t even hold the newborn until the day after it was born.

“Kids are resilient and redirection is a great tool,” Mathews added of her bunch. “So, we had little gifts for them after they met the baby. And now we’re just talking about traveling and adventuring.” 

Mathews, who’s pumping out her breast milk and selling it to a local family in her home state, hopes their mobile-home excursion will help keep her postpartum emotions at bay. 

“You kind of have to tell yourself, ‘I’m glad I don’t have a baby right now, because I need to recover, I need to get some sleep, I need to be with my kids and explore life with them,’ ” she said, adding that the parents have agreed to maintain a semi-open relationship with her and the family.

Amid her postnatal recovery, she’s not quite sure whether she’ll serve as a surrogate again.

“You just have to tell yourself all the good things,” said Mathews, “and know that baby is where baby is supposed to be.”