I used a surrogate - AMA

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've heard that lots of enlisted military wives are doing this to supplement their incomes, especially while husbands are gone on missions. It's quite hard for such military wives to develop careers as they move pretty often.

I am an retired enlisted wife and I have never heard of it. Tricare is very generous depending what but there are not lots of enlisted women doing it.

I'm the wife of a retired officer and I have known women (both wives of SNCOs) that have done it. In fact, both the women I know who did it, did it twice.

Personally, I don't think Tricare should allow coverage, unless of course the intended parents were also covered under Tricare.

What difference does it make to you? The purpose of insurance is to provide health care to a covered person and treatment for that person's body. So if the baby in the surrogate's stomach belongs to another couple, her husband or even a rapist, the insurance covers HER body - not the baby in her tummy. No sweat off your back.

But surrogacy is different in that the surrogate is paid. Arguably she should have to repay her insurance for what it paid toward maternity from what her earned as a surrogate. But as long as everything is represented accurately to the insurer and there is no fraud, it is up to the insurer to decide, I guess.

No, it does not matter why you need medical care unless the specific condition you present with is SPECIFICALLY excluded by your insurance company. A prostitute is also paid. Since a prostitute is paid, should her pregnancy not be covered by insurance? Since treatment for drug addiction be covered by those who are born addicts vs. those who become addicts later in life? All of these whys and how someone got to where they are irrelevant unless its specifically excluded by your insurance contract. No-one is getting over or defrauding anyone. And your insurance rates aren't going up because of surrogacy. Look elsewhere for that explanation.

[Anonymous]

Op - is the surrogate you matched with a typical surrogate? - in that, she already had a family and was done with having kids, hourly wage employee, you buiilt a friendly relationship/met with her & her entire family, etc?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Op - is the surrogate you matched with a typical surrogate? - in that, she already had a family and was done with having kids, hourly wage employee, you buiilt a friendly relationship/met with her & her entire family, etc?

Yes, our GC was very typical, although it appeared from my research that most places require GCs/surrogates to have already completed their own family. I was told this by an agency as well as SG and my own attorney.

I can't speak to the hourly wage, but prior to matching, I did ask our attorney about the profile of a typical GC. She said that she sees a lot of military wives and nurses. As for your last question about relationship. I think ours was unique. I don't know if that is the norm.

[Anonymous]

Did you pay all of your agency/attorney fees up front? Or do you pay when you match?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Did you pay all of your agency/attorney fees up front? Or do you pay when you match?

Not OP but we paid an agency retainer (around $3k) up front. Then at certain milestones we paid the agency - i.e., when we were matched, when the contract is signed and then there is another lumps sum due at the end. Our attorney fees were due after they performed the work - i.e., contract completed, pre-birth order filed.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, PP! At what point did the escrow have to be funded?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm interested in being a surrogate one day, simply because I love being pregnant and I want to help mothers. I did IVF for my own child so I know what the process is like and how gut wrenching the whole infertility and trying to have a kid thing can be so I want to help. Would potential Intentional Parents ever be interested in that or would they definitely prefer to go through agencies?

NP here. I think you have a very generous and big heart to even consider this. However I want to caution you. The best gestational carriers are women who have had no issues with either fertility or pregnancy. Unless there was a full medical analysis with an identified cause for either infertility or difficulty carrying, some REs will not work with a GC who has unexplained issues with fertility or pregnancy.

As a little background, we used a GC because my wife is a transplant patient. Her immuno-suppression barred her from carrying our children. Our journey was very long and very expensive. We had one GC who had three successful pregnancy and one unexplained miscarriage (between second and third children). Even though there was no analysis of why her third child had miscarried, the first RE thought that since she had had a successful pregnancy subsequent to the miscarriage that it was acceptable to use her. She was wonderful. We had seven blasts. The first (fresh) transfer, resulted in a pregnancy. All was going well with both embryos, but at 8 weeks, we lost the first fetus at 8 weeks and we lost the twin at 16 weeks. It was heartbreaking as after the 12 week ultrasound, we had decided to tell family and at 14 weeks we told friends. 2 weeks later we had to open up about our loss. We had a frozen transfer of two more embryos which looked like it took, but after 2 weeks of rising betas, the betas plateaued and then dropped. Embryos 5/6 resulted in another chemical pregnancy. At that point we had one remaining blast, but it was a day-7 embryos that the RE said was a long shot as it wasn't completely sure that the embryo would take. After some considerations, especially about the costs, we opted to switch facilities to another clinic. The new RE reviewed our case and interviewed our GC. He asked for information about her first miscarriage and tried to contact her OB, but could not get any information (it had been too long). He contacted our first clinic to get the autopsy results of the fetuses, but there had been no autopsy. Additionally the first clinic had performed no analyses of the failure of any of the transfers. The second RE told us that with no analysis of why the GC had suffered her own miscarriage or the miscarriage for us and the two chemical pregnancies, that it was a very big risk to continue using her. We ended up paying out a termination clause and finding a second GC who had a clean record (three successful pregnancies for herself, no issues, then one successful GC twin pregnancy for another couple). She ended up getting pregnant on the next fresh cycle and carried our twins to birth.

All told, we probably spent about $160-180K on our journey to twins. This included about $13K out of $140K of hospital charges to the hospital where the twins were born prematurely. The first GC was supposed to earn $26K and ended up earning about $12K before we terminated the contract. The second GC salary was $35K because she had already been a successful surrogate and was a "proven" entity.

[Anonymous]

PP, wow, thanks for sharing your story. Did you use the same agency to match with both GCs?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm interested in being a surrogate one day, simply because I love being pregnant and I want to help mothers. I did IVF for my own child so I know what the process is like and how gut wrenching the whole infertility and trying to have a kid thing can be so I want to help. Would potential Intentional Parents ever be interested in that or would they definitely prefer to go through agencies?

NP here. I think you have a very generous and big heart to even consider this. However I want to caution you. The best gestational carriers are women who have had no issues with either fertility or pregnancy. Unless there was a full medical analysis with an identified cause for either infertility or difficulty carrying, some REs will not work with a GC who has unexplained issues with fertility or pregnancy.

As a little background, we used a GC because my wife is a transplant patient. Her immuno-suppression barred her from carrying our children. Our journey was very long and very expensive. We had one GC who had three successful pregnancy and one unexplained miscarriage (between second and third children). Even though there was no analysis of why her third child had miscarried, the first RE thought that since she had had a successful pregnancy subsequent to the miscarriage that it was acceptable to use her. She was wonderful. We had seven blasts. The first (fresh) transfer, resulted in a pregnancy. All was going well with both embryos, but at 8 weeks, we lost the first fetus at 8 weeks and we lost the twin at 16 weeks. It was heartbreaking as after the 12 week ultrasound, we had decided to tell family and at 14 weeks we told friends. 2 weeks later we had to open up about our loss. We had a frozen transfer of two more embryos which looked like it took, but after 2 weeks of rising betas, the betas plateaued and then dropped. Embryos 5/6 resulted in another chemical pregnancy. At that point we had one remaining blast, but it was a day-7 embryos that the RE said was a long shot as it wasn't completely sure that the embryo would take. After some considerations, especially about the costs, we opted to switch facilities to another clinic. The new RE reviewed our case and interviewed our GC. He asked for information about her first miscarriage and tried to contact her OB, but could not get any information (it had been too long). He contacted our first clinic to get the autopsy results of the fetuses, but there had been no autopsy. Additionally the first clinic had performed no analyses of the failure of any of the transfers. The second RE told us that with no analysis of why the GC had suffered her own miscarriage or the miscarriage for us and the two chemical pregnancies, that it was a very big risk to continue using her. We ended up paying out a termination clause and finding a second GC who had a clean record (three successful pregnancies for herself, no issues, then one successful GC twin pregnancy for another couple). She ended up getting pregnant on the next fresh cycle and carried our twins to birth.

All told, we probably spent about $160-180K on our journey to twins. This included about $13K out of $140K of hospital charges to the hospital where the twins were born prematurely. The first GC was supposed to earn $26K and ended up earning about $12K before we terminated the contract. The second GC salary was $35K because she had already been a successful surrogate and was a "proven" entity.

Np - thank you for sharing your story PP. I am so glad that at the end of the harrowing journey you got twins. Were all your blasts PGS tested?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP, wow, thanks for sharing your story. Did you use the same agency to match with both GCs?

Yes, we used Diane Hinson at Creative Family Connections (CFC). They located all of the various candidates including the two actual matches. They handled all the legal paperwork (for our side, we had to hire a lawyer to represent each GC on the contract negotiations). They also handled all the paperwork to ensure that we were designated the legal parents and our names were on the birth certificates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Np - thank you for sharing your story PP. I am so glad that at the end of the harrowing journey you got twins. Were all your blasts PGS tested?

Yes all blasts were PGS tested.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've heard that lots of enlisted military wives are doing this to supplement their incomes, especially while husbands are gone on missions. It's quite hard for such military wives to develop careers as they move pretty often.

I am an retired enlisted wife and I have never heard of it. Tricare is very generous depending what but there are not lots of enlisted women doing it.

PP 22:59. Be careful with Tricare. We had one early potential match for GC. She was a former military herself and spouse to an active military. She had Tricare. Our lawyer and I looked over her insurance and there were several clauses in the Tricare policy that were rather nondescript about whether certain services associated with a gestational surrocacy would be covered. We did not want to risk it, so we priced out a supplemental policy for her. We ended up not matching, but had we signed a contract, I would have purchased the supplemental insurance policy rather than risk a long hard battle with Tricare over whether certain charges would be covered.

From my wife's notes at the time (this was 2010, so things may be different now):

July 2, 2010 wrote:Tricare:
Tricare says it has the right to place a lien on medical care expenses. Therefore, after Tricare has paid for expenses, they can come back and place a legal requirement for repayment of the expenses. This requires us to re-pay the expenses. The only way to limit the amount of this re-payment is to place a limit of our responsibility for medical expenses in the contract. This limit becomes the upper limit that Tricare can require us to pay back.

This happens only if Tricare pursues the issue.

Our adoption legal firm, CFC, told us that they had a surrogate in DE who actually had expenses refused retroactively by TriCare and that the surrogate was being told to reimburse the insurance company for inappropriate charges to their insurance based on her carrying a child via surrogacy, e.g. not her own child. Based on that, we priced insurance policies that we could take out that would cover the charges for pregnancy including surrogacy. We didn't end up needing to purchase and it was 7 years ago, so things may have changed, but if you have a surrogate who has Tricare, you really need to do some reading of the Tricare policy regarding pregnancy to ensure that your surrogate really is covered. If not, or if you are not sure, it will likely be significantly cheaper to pay insurance premiums for a surrogate than actual medical costs should they retroactively make you pay back insurance disbursements for medical care for the surrogate or your children while they are in utero.

[Anonymous]

I've heard that this is also true of Medicaid plans and that it is one of the reasons why a GC can't be on any form of government assistance.