Category Archives: Ask the Surrogacy Experts…

UDPATED: I strongly urge all couples to get health insurance for their surrogate. In most cases it’s a legal requirement. In many other cases it’s a personal requirement of the surrogate herself. She will definitely need to know you will take generous care of all the prenatal requirements, and she won’t get stuck with any of the medical bills.

Permanent residency abroad does not bypass the ban on surrogacy under Islamic law. Living abroad will allow the baby return home without a visa, but that’s only one hurdle. Parents still need citizenship and a passport, and that’s unlikely to be approved by the embassy of an Islamic country.

There are excellent IVF clinics in many countries overseas – and many are much more affordable than a typical US clinic. So it’s tempting to perform your IVF overseas and then bring your embryos to the US for the surrogacy part of the journey. But wait! It’s not that easy.

First, to be clear: I don’t recommend traditional surrogacy — it comes with a host of legal and ethical issues. It’s hard to argue in any court how your surrogate could be denied full parental rights if she were dispute the surrogacy agreement.

If you have a properly executed Surrogacy Contract in a country with a supportive legal framework then the simple answer is NO, the surrogate cannot keep your baby. Unfortunately too many couples decide to skip the legal safeguards and open themselves up to all sorts of risks – including that the surrogate may have a legal claim to parental rights.

It’s inspiring that women of all ages can be so generous. If you doubt, just search on Google for news reports of women delivering their own grandchildren… it’s truly amazing.

So many couples struggle with infertility. I work with couples every day who are ready to mortgage their entire lives to have ANY child at all. I’ll never understand how someone can prefer NO child rather than a child that doesn’t look “quite like the person they had in mind”.

Transferring two embryos does not drastically increase the likelihood of a pregnancy, but it does drastically increase the likelihood of a twins pregnancy. If you want to avoid the risks and expense of a twins pregnancy, then you should transfer one embryo at at time.

Every client secretly hopes for a boy or a girl — even if they pretend otherwise. There are various techniques to select the gender of your baby. PGS is now the standard technique in the United States. But an old technique called sperm microsorting (which was banned by the FDA) is having a renaissance.

“Collapsed Embryos” is certainly an unfortunate term that can drive fear into Parents, but it’s really not as terrible as it sounds. Blastocysts in-vitro typically undergo repeated collapse and expansion before they arrive at the point where they are ready to “attach” and latch onto the uterus wall. This is a normal part of the embryo’s growth cycle.