Reply to I used a surrogate

Forum Index » Infertility Support and Discussion

Reply to "I used a surrogate - AMA"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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? [/quote]

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.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics