Here's a brief introduction to how Gestational Surrogacy works, in easy to understand steps. Included are… • Conceiving your embryos
• Finding your surrogate mother
• Getting pregnant
• Prenatal care and delivery
• Protecting your parental rights
Your surrogacy journey may seem like a long complicated process, but in reality it’s easy to understand if you look at it as a simple series of steps. Today we’re going to look at the five basic steps of how your surrogacy journey works. Starting with the donation of your eggs and sperm, the combination of those through an In Vitro Fertilization process to conceive your embryos, and then the transfer of your embryos to your surrogate mother to create the pregnancy.
In addition to those steps you also have to go through the process of finding a qualified surrogate mother as well as establishing your own parental rights once the baby is born.
Step 1 is to conceive your embryos. Embryo conception starts with an in vitro fertilization process at your chosen IVF clinic. To start both the egg and sperm donor will travel to the clinic and donate. The sperm donation is easy and that takes really just a couple of hours, egg donation is more complicated. An egg donor typically requires two to three weeks of stimulation protocols which include daily hormone injections. What the hormone injections will do is they will mature multiple follicles in the ovaries and get them ready for a retrieval process.
Step 2. Finding your qualified surrogate mother. While your IVF cycle is underway at your chosen fertility clinic, your agent should be out recruiting a surrogate candidate for you. Typically agents work with a qualified professional surrogate recruiter whose job is solely to go out and find surrogate candidates and then shepherd them through their evaluation process. But there are options if you wanted to choose your own surrogate. The surrogate evaluation process includes a series of medical tests, including fertility evaluation, serology and scans for basic infections, but it also includes a full psychiatric evaluation, legal evaluation and background check, as well as other checks required by your specific agent.
Step 3 is getting pregnant. the result of your IVF cycles should be several good quality mature embryos, and those will be kept in storage at your IVF clinic until you are ready for an embryo transfer. Now, the embryo transfer process starts with the fertility treatments of your surrogate. Basically, she’ll receive a series of hormone injections over the course of two to two and a half weeks that are designed to thicken the endometrium layer of her uterus and basically make it more receptive to the embryo.
Now, the success of your embryo transfer is really going to depend on a couple of critical success factors, and the biggest one is how well your surrogate is prepared by your IVF clinic, and this is where IVF clinics really differentiate themselves. The other success factors are gonna be the quality and quantity of your embryos and also, a lot of good plain luck.
Step 4 is the pregnancy and prenatal care of your surrogate. In western countries like the US or western Europe when the surrogate becomes pregnant she is allowed to live at home with her family throughout the course of the pregnancy. During that time she’s not on her own, typically she receives ongoing oversight through your agency, that’s one of the primary functions of your agent. In Ukraine or Colombia, or in any country outside of the US, a social worker will go and visit the surrogate on a regular basis every week or two weeks, do a quick inspection of her home, make sure that she has everything that she needs and is doing well with the pregnancy. During that time, the surrogate will also be under the care of her own personal obstetrician who’ll be doing regular ultrasound exams and blood(?) and you’ll get copies of all of those tests so that you can follow along the pregnancy as well.
Step 5. Becoming the legal parent of your surrogacy baby. Now, somewhere around Week 30, 31, 32 of the pregnancy, the obstetrician overseeing the pregnancy will advise the parents of the estimated due date. The parents will be advised when they should travel to the hospital to attend the delivery. Once the baby is delivered, that is not the end of the story, because you still need to establish the legal parentage of the baby, and in most jurisdictions the surrogate mother is typically considered to be the baby’s legal mother until there’s some sort of legal process.
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