If you’re considering becoming a surrogate to help hopeful parents grow their families, you probably have a lot of questions about how to get started—and whether you’re a good candidate for surrogacy in the first place.
There have been improvements in conversations about infertility, egg donation, and surrogacy, but we still have a long way to go. In an ideal world, people working through fertility issues or choosing egg donation and/or surrogacy would be able to do so free from the stress of being judged or from ignorance.
Unless you and your partner are LGBT, it is unlikely that you expected to need third-party reproduction in order to build your family. The idea of needing an egg donor, a sperm donor, or a gestational surrogate can be difficult to adjust to initially—it’s not normally what people imagine when they think of having a…
In the infamous case of Baby M in 1985, a traditional surrogate (not a gestational surrogate) answered an intended parent couple’s newspaper ad, delivered the couple’s baby, and then changed her mind, deciding she wanted to keep the child and forgo compensation.
We know that it takes a very special person to become a gestational surrogate or an egg donor for a family in need. There are many reasons couples and individuals turn to third-party reproduction, but infertility struggles, single parenthood and LGBTQ family building are at the top.
In part thanks to celebrities, our general consensus leans toward the notion that women can get pregnant well into their 40s, maybe even their early 50s, without any kind of assisted reproductive care.
