A Village, A Gift, A Beginning: Four Pointers Who Are Chosen Family
By Kim Westerman

For four UWSP alumni, the phrase “Pointers for life” turned out to be less a slogan than a lived experience — one that would eventually shape families, friendships, and the arrival of a child whose story began years before she was born.

Pointers Find Each Other

David Specht-Boardman and Maggie Lofgren met as students during their first week on campus in 2010, and little did they know this was the beginning of a story that would bring in others and evolve in ways they couldn’t have imagined. During their junior year, Maggie and several friends shared a house, and one of her roommates, Ryan (Specht-Boardman), would turn out to be the person her friend David would later marry. Meanwhile, Maggie was beginning to date Ben (Lofgren). There were others in this tight-knit social orbit, but these four are our protagonists for what ensues. And while this is a pair of college love stories, it is also much more.

Friendship After Graduation — and a Village Re-Forms

After graduating in 2014, lives unfolded in different directions, but the bonds held. Maggie and Ben got married and started a family together. They moved to Oregon, Wisconsin (just outside Madison), where they live with their two children, while Ryan and David moved to the  Madison area and began their careers after completing graduate school.  Over time, all four alumni found their way to settling within minutes of each other. “The bonds you make with others at Point are strong enough to last no matter the distance,” David says. “You don’t just meet classmates — you build real relationships.”

Over these intervening years, careers took shape, and there were dinner parties and hangouts on the regular. At some point after the birth of her second daughter, Maggie realized a clear desire: She wanted to carry a pregnancy for someone else. While most people who want to start a family with the help of a gestational carrier seek someone to work with on the process, the trajectory of these two families was in reverse order.

An Idea Takes Shape

Maggie says, “I remember thinking very clearly, I can do this. Not in an abstract way — in a grounded, ready way.” But it was just an intuition, a desire without a plan. She often thought of Ryan and David and wondered if they might want to start a family, but she needed to discuss all this with Ben first. When Maggie proposed to Ben that they offer to help David and Ryan, Ben was all in. As a hypothetical, it hadn’t appealed to him, but he says, “Once we knew who it would be for, it felt like a responsibility we were ready to take on.”

Two Conversations Become One

Lo and behold, and unbeknownst to Maggie and Ben, David and Ryan were having their own conversations about parenthood. “We wanted to be parents, but we faced a number of practical challenges,” David says. When Maggie approached David and Ryan about this idea, it was December of 2022. And just as Maggie and Ben had to be sure about what they wanted to offer, David and Ryan had to be equally sure they were all in. They researched, they asked lots of questions, and they looked inward. A few months later, they were ready to start the process.  “We talked a lot about how it felt like the path was laid in front of us, and we need only to trust walking down it,” Ryan recalls. 

Walking the Path Together

The process required elaborate medical screening, psychological counseling for all parties involved, legal counsel, and, of course, deep trust throughout. “There were so many moments where things could have gone wrong,” Ben says. “So, I decided to be recklessly optimistic.” It turns out that the role can’t be underestimated: Ben’s certainty that everything would go just as planned kept them all afloat in uncertain moments.

David and Ryan chose an egg donor and went through the IVF process to create embryos and prepare them for transfer, and Ben gave Maggie nightly progesterone injections every night to prepare for the IVF embryo transfer.  And in recklessly optimistic fashion, the first embryo they transferred successfully implanted in March of 2024. “We were thrilled when we received the pregnancy test result,” Ryan says of learning the news. 

A Birth Marked by Gratitude

The pregnancy was just as Maggie imagined it would be: magical. And the birth, she said, “was a dream.”  “Watching David and Ryan become parents in that moment was incredibly powerful,” she adds. “It felt complete.” David says he felt deeply thankful “for the journey, for the trust, and for each other.” David and Ryan’s daughter arrived in November 2024 with a village already in place. And in the wake of their beautiful experience that continues on, they all agree that their story is not about biology, technology, perseverance, or even timing — it’s about showing up for people you love.