Surrogacy is a remarkable option to help someone else build a family of their own. If you haven’t experienced surrogacy yourself or have known someone who personally has gone through the process, it can feel like a foreign possibility that only celebrities use. But that’s just not the case. The truth is many families now turn to surrogacy as a way to have genetic children of their own. Surrogacy is an attainable possibility for anyone.
Understanding the major steps in surrogacy can help women dabbling with the idea of becoming a surrogate feel more confident in their decision to move forward and help another family out. If you’ve been curious about the surrogacy process, we’ve broken it down into manageable steps so you can get a clearer picture of what it entails—and you can determine if surrogacy sounds like something you might want to pursue.
Step 1: Deciding if Surrogacy Is Right For You
When considering the possibility of becoming a surrogate, assessing a couple of different factors is important. A journey requires commitment and dedication once you start the process, so you must be sure of your decision before jumping all in. There will always be families to help through surrogacy, so it’s always best to make sure the timing in your life feels right for a journey. You’ll want to check in personally about your:
- Emotional Readiness: Since surrogacy involves carrying a child for someone else, you want to make sure you’re in the right mindset to go through pregnancy and birth a child for someone else. Your heart should feel capable and even excited to do that.
- Physical Health: Surrogates must meet specific health criteria and have a history of uncomplicated pregnancies or deliveries. Feeling in good health is essential to starting the process.
- Family Completeness: You’ll want to ask yourself if you’re satisfied with the size of your family. It’s not required that surrogates be done having their own children before starting surrogacy, but it is highly encouraged. Sometimes complications can happen during a surrogacy pregnancy, and if the possibility would break your heart of not being able to add to your family later, it’s best to wait until your family does feel complete.
- Support System: While you’ll be doing a lot of the heavy lifting within the surrogacy journey, having supportive friends and family you can lean on throughout is key. Having people who can help with your kiddos while you go to appointments and take over some of your household tasks will make your journey so much easier.
- Lifestyle Stability: Since surrogacy can be such a big part of your life, you should anticipate whether or not any significant lifestyle changes are on your horizon. These could include a cross-country move, a job change, or a divorce. If you know something big is coming up, we always recommend not trying to juggle too much and revisiting surrogacy once your situation feels more stable.
Once you’ve weighed in on all of these factors and decided you want to move forward with surrogacy, you’re ready for the next step: finding the surrogacy professionals you can rely on throughout everything.
Step 2: Finding Your Surrogacy Agency
Most surrogates, especially first-time surrogates, will opt to work with a surrogacy agency for their journey. Working with a surrogacy agency can provide an extra level of peace of mind that everything within your journey is handled ethically and legally.
Agencies are there to:
- Organize All the Important Details: They will help collect the medical records and help you manage all the necessary appointments during the screening process. They’ll also help connect you with experienced legal teams, escrow companies, and industry professionals to ensure everything is handled precisely how it should be.
- Provide Educational Resources: Some teams will provide guides or materials to help you feel more informed about what to expect from each stage of the process.
- Help You Find the Right Intended Parents: When you work with an agency, you can be confident that they will help you find the perfect parent(s) to accompany you on the journey. Our agency performs background checks on all intended parents, just like we do surrogates, to ensure that every IP (intended parent) is safe and ready for the journey.
- Create a Supportive Community: Many agencies have developed a community of surrogates to cheer each other on and offer one another tips throughout the surrogacy process.
- Offer a Benefits Package: One of the most appealing aspects of working with an agency is its benefits package. Specific allowances, like housekeeping, prenatal massages, and mental health support, can be monumental for a surrogate. Establishing and developing these things through the agency is nice, so you never feel guilty asking for them.
When choosing an agency, it’s crucial that the team feels like the right fit for you. Do you feel like you can easily talk to them and ask questions? Do you feel like they care about you and they’re not just trying to push you through their checklist? Trust your gut feeling after your interactions with an agency because you deserve your dream surrogacy journey. Working with the right surrogacy agency will help tremendously.
Step 3: Matching with Your Perfect Intended Parent(s)
After you’ve found your perfect agency, it’s on to the next exciting step: meeting some incredible intended parents.
While in matching, you will:
- Create Your Profile: This is a bio about yourself that shares why you decided to become a surrogate, what you hope to achieve in your journey (e.g., the relationship you want with your IPs, and any medical preferences you may have), plus a brief overview of your family and hobbies. This profile will be the first introduction to your future IPs.
- Review IP Profiles: After you have created your profile, it will be shared with intended parents at the agency. If they like your profile, their profile will be shared with you (after their fertility clinic has reviewed your medical records and has given the okay). Our agency likes to do this because, a lot of times, intended parents have already been through so much before they’ve even reached the matching stage, and we don’t want to get the surrogate or the intended parents’ hopes up when their clinic may not approve her. After you review an intended parents’ profile, you still get to decide if you’d like to set up a match call.
If all parties agree to a match call, someone from the agency will set up a video conference call and help facilitate the conversation. During the call, the surrogate and IPs will chat about themselves and their hopes for their journey and get to know each other. After the call, each side will have 24 hours to decide if matching feels right. If someone passes, the matching process starts over. If everyone likes each other, it’s an official match, and together, everyone moves on to the next part.
Step 4: Medical Clearance & Legal Agreements
After a match has been solidified, as the surrogate, you will travel to your intended parents’ fertility clinic for an in-person medical screening. This is very much like a physical and will include a saline ultrasound and some blood tests to evaluate your health for a potential pregnancy. Once you have medically been cleared, the process to establish a surrogacy contract will start.
The surrogate and intended parent should have separate legal representation and will work on creating an agreement that both sides will feel comfortable with. The legal agreement will include the nitty-gritty details over the following:
- Parental Rights and Responsibilities: The contract will outline how the rightful parents are the intended parents and the legal processes that will be taken to make sure they are deemed the parents of the future surro-baby.
- Compensation and Payment Schedules: The surrogate’s base compensation and allowances will be stated in the agreement, as well as the plan for payments and how they will be distributed.
- Plans for What-If Scenarios: The agreement will also go over all the what-if possibilities and the legal plans if these things happen. For example, who will take over parental rights if something happens to the intended parents?
After both sides have signed the agreement and it has been finalized, the next big thing is preparing for the embryo transfer!
Step 5: The IVF Process
In this step, as the surrogate, you’ll work with your intended parents’ fertility clinic to prepare your body for the embryo transfer. The fertility clinic will create a medical calendar that outlines different medications you will need to take before transfer and how long you should expect to be on them.
These medications could include:
- Suppositories
- Hormonal Patches
- Shots
- Pills
Each medical calendar depends on each unique surrogate and the clinic’s protocol. During the IVF process, you will have monitoring appointments to ensure your body responds to the medication as the doctors hope it will. When your body is in optimal condition for a transfer, you will travel to the intended parents’ clinic and undergo a procedure similar to a regular pelvic exam. Weeks after the transfer, blood tests will determine if the transfer was successful, if everything goes smoothly, the little embryo will continue to grow and grow!
Step 6: Pregnancy
Once a pregnancy has been confirmed, you’ll continue to be monitored by the clinic until you graduate to your regular OB or Midwife (usually around 8-10 weeks). From then on out, it’s pregnancy as usual. You’ll want to maintain a healthy lifestyle and attend routine checkups—all while keeping your intended parents up to date on their growing baby.
Many surrogates enjoy this stage because they get to share and be a part of all the most exciting milestones, like ultrasounds, first kicks, and cravings.
Step 7: Postpartum
One of the best parts comes at the end of the pregnancy: DELIVERY DAY! This is when you, as a surrogate, get to give birth to this incredible gift and hand it over to eager and adoring parents.
After the birth, the baby is officially in the care of the intended parents, and you, as the surrogate, get to focus on recovery. That means sleeping, eating, and relaxing on your schedule—a dream, right? Some surrogates may even decide to pump milk for their surrogate baby (while being compensated for the hard work, of course).
Most surrogates and intended parents form such a special bond throughout their journey that they continue to stay in each other’s lives and the surrogate gets to watch the surro-baby grow from afar.
In Conclusion…
Becoming a surrogate is a selfless and life-changing experience. While the process requires commitment, it also brings immense joy as you help build a family. And you get to experience the benefits the surrogacy compensation can bring to your own family. By partnering with a reputable agency like Surrogacy Is and staying informed, you can confidently embark on a fulfilling surrogacy journey.
If you’re ready to take the first step, let’s connect! See if you qualify by taking our short quiz at: surrogacy.is/life-changing-quiz
After you complete the quiz, our surrogacy advisor team will reach out to help you answer any questions and share our FREE surrogacy guide with you.
