My Experience Becoming a Parent Via Surrogacy

My daughter, an 11 year old New York City kid, is very proud of her origin story.  She understands that we spent 4.5 years moving mountains to bring her into this world via gestational surrogacy.  She is shocked when she has to explain surrogacy to someone and her basic conclusion is that science is cool.  She was also quick to bring up in 5th grade health class that there are other “less gross” and highly accurate answers to how babies are made.

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When intended parents first start exploring surrogacy, they often feel overwhelmed.  The costs are undoubtedly high, there is nothing quick about it, and a little luck is required to get all of the puzzle pieces locked into place in order to bring a baby home.  As an Assisted Reproductive Technology lawyer licensed in New York and a surrogacy professional at Nodal, my main advice to intended parents is that finding the right gestational carrier is the most important puzzle piece of the journey.  At a basic level, intended parent(s) need to have a good gut feeling about the candidate, while aligning on non-negotiables, and their REI must approve of the candidate from a medical perspective.

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Many intended parents begin by trying to figure out what parts of this process they can control and default to a lengthy list of non-negotiables.  In my opinion, creating such a long list is not advisable because that simply limits the pool of available candidates.  For example, my gem of a gestational carrier had a home-birth with her second child and was only looking to deliver drug-free at home again or in a birthing center tub with a doula.  As a lawyer, I am unsurprisingly interested in managing risk and only wanted a hospital delivery with a highly rated NICU.  Fortunately, our surrogate lived by a birthing center attached to a fantastic hospital with a rent-a-medical-grade-waterbirth-tub option and all parties were happy; being open-minded paid off!

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When it came time for delivery, there was a surprising extra benefit to picking a less antiseptic birthing location.  Our lawyer had contacted the social worker at the birthing center/hospital complex in North Carolina prior to the big day to make sure that the social worker knew about the pre-birth order from the North Carolina judge declaring my husband and I the legal parents of the baby-to-be.  We were greeted with open arms by the medical staff, doula and administrative team at the complex.  After our daughter was born, our gestational carrier was able to meet the baby and then recover privately.  In this suburban location, where space was not at a premium, our daughter was given her own private room and my husband and I were able to sleep in there with her as her “guests.”  The birthing center/hospital complex staff also made sure our last name was the one associated with the baby and that we were treated as the only parents from the first moment while also providing fantastic medical care to our gestational carrier.

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Having been in this industry for more than a decade, I can say that we were lucky to experience such sensitivity at the time of our daughter’s birth.  I have heard less positive experiences including hospital staff misunderstanding the role of the intended parents and/or using insensitive language.  Sometimes when the hospital is tight for space there is no option for the intended parent(s) to have a private room with the baby and sometimes hospital policy dictates that the gestational carrier’s last name should be on the baby’s identifying bracelet and bassinet.  Of course, intended parents have usually been through a lot by the time they make it to the birth of their child via surrogacy and, if required, they can and will jump through some additional insensitive administrative hoops as needed; however, it would be nice if at the finish line no additional hoop jumping was necessary.

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