As we enter a new year, taking stock of the past year’s ups and downs and preparing for a fresh start, some couples and individuals may be thinking of growing their family through third-party reproductive services — whether through egg donation, embryo donation, surrogacy, or sperm donation.
If you’re considering becoming a surrogate to help hopeful parents grow their families, you probably have a lot of questions about how to get started—and whether you’re a good candidate for surrogacy in the first place.
There have been improvements in conversations about infertility, egg donation, and surrogacy, but we still have a long way to go. In an ideal world, people working through fertility issues or choosing egg donation and/or surrogacy would be able to do so free from the stress of being judged or from ignorance.
Unless you and your partner are LGBT, it is unlikely that you expected to need third-party reproduction in order to build your family. The idea of needing an egg donor, a sperm donor, or a gestational surrogate can be difficult to adjust to initially—it’s not normally what people imagine when they think of having a…
In the infamous case of Baby M in 1985, a traditional surrogate (not a gestational surrogate) answered an intended parent couple’s newspaper ad, delivered the couple’s baby, and then changed her mind, deciding she wanted to keep the child and forgo compensation.
If you’re considering becoming a surrogate to help hopeful parents build their families, you likely have a lot of questions about the process—what exactly it entails, how you’ll be compensated, and what you’ll be required to do. To help you get a better understanding of surrogacy, we’ll dive into seven common questions below.
