Anyone who has completed the surrogacy process can tell you that it’s an emotional journey that has some ups and downs. While it’s all worth it in the end, it’s important to be prepared for the challenges and rewards ahead of you.

Here are some of the joys and struggles that intended parents often experience in surrogacy:

4 of the Best Parts of Surrogacy for Intended Parents

Surrogacy is an incredible experience that most intended parents would do all over again, when possible. Here are some of the best parts of that journey:

1. Having another Chance at a Genetic Connection

For intended parents who dream of a child with their spouse’s smile, surrogacy is a path that can allow this to happen, where adoption cannot. Not all intended parents are going to be able to have a genetic connection to their child through surrogacy, but for those who can, surrogacy is the only way many parents will be able to experience having a biologically-related child.

2. Embracing the Feeling that it “Takes a Village”

At first, it can be disconcerting to have so many people involved in what’s usually such an intimate and personal process. But once intended parents let go of any preconceived ideas of how having a baby usually goes, most people find comfort and community in the number of people who are fully dedicated to helping them have their child.

Everyone at American Surrogacy, your gestational surrogate, attorney, fertility clinic staff, doctors — they’re all rooting for you and here to help bring your family together! Surrogacy has an amazing way of uniting people for a common good.

3. Making a Genuine Connection with Your Surrogate

When you’re first matched with your gestational surrogate, it can feel a little odd. You might have some initial hang-ups about someone else carrying your baby and involving a near-stranger in such a life-changing event.

However, as you come to know each other more and you experience this emotional journey together as a team, most intended parents are thrilled to walk away from their surrogacy experience with a lifelong friend. The bond between surrogates and intended parents is unique — so enjoy it!

4. Finally Meeting Your Baby

This could go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway: The arrival of your baby is the best part of the surrogacy process, for everyone involved. Your surrogate gets to see you all together — her hard work paid off. You’re finally united with your child, and you have the family you’ve been dreaming of. That moment makes all the highs and lows of the surrogacy process worth it.

4 of the Worst Parts of Surrogacy for Intended Parents

As amazing as surrogacy is in the bigger picture, intended parents have to deal with some difficult experiences along the way:

1. Loss of Control

All alternative family-building methods involve a loss of control for the parents. With surrogacy, intended parents are unable to carry their own baby and, therefore, aren’t able to personally control their child’s developing in utero.

You’re also not able to control certain factors such as when you’ll be matched with a surrogate, when (or even if) IVF will work, and more. The need to control is something that intended parents have to let go, because surrogacy is a complicated process with a fair amount of unknowns.

2. Grief for What You Had to Give Up

Surrogacy isn’t often an intended parent’s first or even second choice. Intended parents have to give up a variety of things. Some have to give up the dream of having a biological child. All intended parents have to give up control and some involvement in the pregnancy experience, including the ability to carry and deliver their child.

These are all types of losses and sacrifices that you have to grieve in order to embrace a new and different dream. If you have experienced infertility or pregnancy loss, these are additional losses you’ll have to grieve. Even though you’ll ultimately welcome the child you’ve been waiting for, it often happens after some painful experiences.

3. Uncertainty

Nothing is truly certain in surrogacy. You never know exactly when you might be matched with a gestational surrogate, you don’t know when (or if) embryo transfers will work, you don’t know the exact amount that surrogacy will cost you because of all the variables involved, among other uncertainties. Surrogacy professionals like American Surrogacy will prepare for every possible event, but there’s always going to be an unavoidable amount of uncertainty for both the surrogate and the intended parents.

4. Waiting

Intended parents often spend some amount of time waiting to have a child even before they begin their surrogacy journey. Perhaps you underwent fertility treatments for months, or even years. Then, once the surrogacy process is officially underway, it typically takes at least a year for waiting parents to have a child.

The most frustrating part of all this for intended parents is that there’s often very little that they can do while they wait, because there’s not much that’s within their control. There is a lot of paperwork to wait on, coordination between multiple professionals, waiting for the surrogate’s cycle to synch up for transfer, and much more. There’s no way to fast-track surrogacy, even if you begin the process shortly after deciding you’re ready to become a parent.

Surrogacy is Worth It — Highs and Lows and All

No matter how your family came together, if you’ve been fortunate enough to experience parenthood, you know that it makes all the ups and downs worthwhile. If you are a hopeful parent, take comfort knowing that when you finally meet your child, the difficulties you’ve faced will have been worth it.

Ready to start your surrogacy journey? Contact American Surrogacy at 1-800-875-BABY(2229) to begin.

Follow us on Instagram to hear from intended parents and surrogates about their journey and how surrogacy changed their lives.

Secondary infertility is more common than you think. If you’re pursuing gestational surrogacy after having a biological child naturally, you have a lot to think about.

One of the questions you may be asking yourself: “How do I explain this to my child?”

It’s likely that your child has grown up only knowing about the traditional way to bring a child into the world. Explaining gestational surrogacy may seem impossible. But, it’s not — and many parents have successful done it.

Here at American Surrogacy, we are dedicated to proper education about the surrogacy process and to helping intended parents however we can. You can always speak to your specialist at 1-800-875-2229(BABY) as you prepare for this important conversation.

We’ve also gathered a helpful list of tips and advice below:

Explaining Surrogacy to the Child You Birthed Yourself

When many would-be adoptive and intended parents explain nontraditional family-building to their older children, they try to keep it age-appropriate. Rather than go into the details of how reproduction works, they say that “Mommy’s tummy is broken,” so another woman (whether a birth mother or a gestational carrier) will carry their sibling, instead.

Often, this is a great way to introduce infertility. But, if an intended mother carried her first biological child, this explanation may be followed up with a bigger question from their child: “Did I break Mommy’s tummy?”

Children are smarter than many people give them credit for and, while they may accept the idea of surrogacy easily, they may also make leaps of comprehension you don’t anticipate. So, when explaining that you are pursuing the surrogacy process, emphasize that your older child was not the one who “broke” your tummy. Sometimes, these things happen, and it’s nobody’s fault. Remind them that you were so happy to carry them in your stomach, and you wouldn’t change anything about it.

If you’re having trouble with this conversation, there are a few books that you can use to introduce the topic of gestational surrogacy:

• The Kangaroo Pouch: A Story about Surrogacy for Young Children by Sarah Phillips Pellet
• Sophia’s Broken Crayons: A Story of Surrogacy from a Young Child’s Perspective by Crystal A. Falk
• Sacha, the Little Bright Shooting Star: The Story of Surrogacy by Sofia Prezani
• The Very Kind Koala: A Surrogacy Story for Children by Kimberly Kluger-Bell
• Hope & Will Have a Baby: The Gift of Surrogacy by Irene Celcer

Explaining Egg and Sperm Donors

Explaining gestational surrogacy can be hard enough — but how do you explain to your children that their younger sibling is going to be their biological half-sibling?

As you should with any nontraditional family-building method, you should always be open with your children (both older and younger) about their genetic relationships. It’s incredibly harmful for children to find out that their birth story and genetic relationship is a lie later on, so positive celebration of their unique story should start from the moment you bring them home.

If you are pursuing surrogacy with gamete donation, you may worry about what this will mean for your older child — and your child yet to be born. Will it cause resentment about genetic relationships?

Any adopted sibling will tell you that’s not the case. It’s love that makes a family, not blood. While you may have difficult conversations ahead of you in the future, your children will love each other no matter their genetic connection.

How you tackle this subject will depend upon your child’s understanding of the reproductive system. Here’s an example of how to explain a sperm or egg donor to younger children, provided by an intended mother herself:

“Mommy was able to grow you in my tummy but later after you were born, Mommy’s tummy stopped working for growing babies. Mommy was very, very sad because you are so special that Mommy and Daddy really wanted to have more children and you to be able to have a brother or sister. Then, we met some very loving, giving women/men who were willing to help us give you a brother or sister. Babies are made from a little bit of a man and a little bit of a woman. Since Mommy/Daddy didn’t have any little bits to give, another woman/man let our family have a special lit bit of themselves. Doctors took that and made your siblings, but babies need to grow in a woman’s stomach before they are big enough to come home. Another woman let your brother or sister grow in her tummy until she/he was big enough to come out and come home with us. So, you are so loved that four people came together to give you the chance to have a brother or sister that we wanted so much.”

Take this example, and tweak it to your situation. It’s a great place to start when introducing this topic.

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When it comes to explaining gestational surrogacy, it’s always good to use age-appropriate language — but don’t use that as an excuse to hide the facts from your child. More and more families are being created in nontraditional ways, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s something to be proud of! Your older child may soon be telling the world about their excitement for their new sibling, including the way in which he or she is coming into their life.

You can connect with surrogacy stories from families like yours on our Instagram to get started.

Still, this conversation can be tricky. And that’s why your surrogacy specialist is here to help. When you contact your specialist, she can give you tips and advice for explaining surrogacy to older children for as positive a conversation as possible.

Ready to share your news with your children? Talk to a surrogacy specialist today. 

It’s becoming more and more common for intended parents to use donated embryos as part of their gestational surrogacy. For many people, it makes sense: Embryo adoption is usually much cheaper than a fresh IVF cycle, and gestational surrogacy gives a degree of control over pregnancy that private domestic infant adoption cannot.

However, embryo adoption — increasingly called “snowflake adoption” — is not for everyone. In fact, if you’re a single or LGBT intended parent, embryo adoption could likely be much harder for you than it would be for a married, heterosexual couple.

Why? Keep reading below to learn more.

The Religious Overtones of Embryo Adoption

As more hopeful parents go through the in vitro fertilization process to become pregnant, there’s been an unanticipated result: a growing number of frozen embryos being stored indefinitely. For many intended parents, the idea of discarding embryos that they worked so hard to create is emotionally difficult. And, for a group of certain intended parents, discarding embryos would be akin to “killing” frozen children.

For many reasons, leftover embryos have been donated to organizations promising to give these “snowflake babies” a chance at life with someone else desperate to become a parent. In turn, the process is frequently called “embryo adoption” — invoking the same emotions as the adoption of a child already born.

As a New York Times piece reveals, embryo “snowflake” adoption is increasingly tied to organizations affiliated with anti-abortion rights or Christian organizations — many of which receive federal funding. Whether intentional or not, many of these organizations have closely affiliated themselves with the mindset of “pro-life” advocates. In their views, donated embryos are not just cells that can become a child; they already are a child.

An intended parent need only look at advertising materials from some of the biggest embryo adoption centers to see the evidence:

• From the National Embryo Donation Center: When couples decide that their family is complete but still have embryos remaining… they can thaw them out and let them die… Embryo adoption allows the genetic parents to give their embryos a chance for life.
• From Nightlight Christian Adoptions: Just as each snowflake is frozen, unique and a gift from heaven, so are each of our embryo adopted Snowflake Babies. We hope to help each donated embryo grow, develop and live a full life.

For these professionals, an embryo is more than just a collection of cells; they are children waiting to be born. This viewpoint overlooks the fact that, for many intended parents, a created embryo may or may not grow into a fetus for many reasons — quality of embryo, likelihood of implantation and more.

What This Means for LGBT and Single Parents

Putting aside the never-ending controversy of that position, what does this ethical viewpoint mean for intended parents wishing to use a donated embryo in their gestational surrogacy?

Here’s the quandary: Organizations that have this view of life at conception often have specific ideas of who should be a parent — specifically, that only heterosexual couples should pursue embryo adoption.

Both the National Embryo Donation Center and Nightlight Christian Adoptions have specific requirements for hopeful adoptive parents. In the case of NEDC, only a couple of a “genetic” male and female who are married can adopt, and embryos cannot be adopted to be used in a gestational surrogacy. Similarly, Nightlight’s initial application requires a mother and father to fill out their information, and the agency’s overarching requirements necessitate that an adoptive couple have a “spiritual home environment,” among other things.

Clearly, those who don’t fit the heteronormative expectations of these adoption agencies don’t have this option with those agencies — no matter how well-prepared they are to become parents.

If you’re a single intended parent or a member of an LGBT couple, embryo adoption may not be possible for your gestational surrogacy. That’s why it’s so important to seek out LGBT-friendly adoption agencies and donor centers. Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of prejudice out there for nontraditional families, and the steps it takes to bring your new addition home may be a bit more complicated than for a heterosexual married couple.

For a more comprehensive look at requirements of embryo adoption agencies, check out the Embryo Adoption Awareness Center’s list. It’s always a good idea to speak with a professional in person to determine whether you are eligible for their embryo adoption program.

Even if embryo adoption is not a possibility for your family, there are many other paths you can take to achieve your gestational surrogacy. To learn more about them, give our surrogacy specialists a call at 1-800-875-2229(BABY). Our agency happily works with all intended parents — regardless of marital status or sexual orientation — and we’d be honored to help you bring a child into your life.

You can also follow us on Instagram to hear directly from intended parents and surrogates about their surrogacy experience.

You probably know that some gestational surrogates can experience postpartum depression. The bombardment of hormones rushing through her body (coupled with the potential emotional stressors such as not returning home with a baby) can cause this condition, which usually goes beyond mild “baby blues.”

But did you know that the new parents of a surrogacy-born child can also experience a kind of postpartum depression that’s often just as severe, even though they didn’t give birth?

All New Parents Can Experience Forms of Postpartum Depression

Even though they’re not subjected to the hormonally-triggered changes that gestational surrogates are, new parents who have welcomed a child via surrogacy can just as easily suffer from post-surrogacy depression. This is an experience that’s commonly shared by new parents who have welcomed a child via adoption, too. Many of these parents are surprised to find that they’re experiencing a form of postpartum depression — without ever having given birth to their child.

You may find yourself in a similar situation — one in which you’re surprised or are even briefly in denial that you could be experiencing postpartum depression without giving birth. However, this is not uncommon for any new parent, regardless of how your family came to be.

That’s because many of the causes of postpartum/post-surrogacy/post-adoption depression seem to be non-biological. Instead, they are a result of other common stressors.

Follow us on Instagram to hear from other intended parents and their surrogacy journey.

Why You?

Experiencing post-surrogacy depression can be uniquely affecting for new parents who have welcomed a child via surrogacy. You’ve likely had to work harder than most to have this child. You’ve probably been waiting for this moment for a long time, so the fact that you don’t feel like you’re “supposed to” can be even more devastating, because you’ve had to fight especially hard to become a parent.

You may be experiencing some difficulties bonding with your child. While this isn’t exclusively experienced by parents to surrogacy-born children, it’s not an uncommon obstacle in early days, and it can feed into a cycle of depression for you.

Many new parents, regardless of how they have a child, struggle with their new reality and this new person in their life. Parents are exhausted, overworked and emotionally fragile with worry for their young child.

Parents who had their child via surrogacy (or adoption) in particular have recently experienced a long and grueling emotional journey. Now that it’s over, some parents are surprised to find that it’s hard to return to normalcy after these emotional rollercoasters.

Ultimately, you need to be gentle and forgiving toward yourself for experiencing post-surrogacy depression. You’re certainly not alone, and there’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

What Are the Symptoms?

People experience depression in different ways, but some of the most common symptoms of postpartum depression for new parents include:

• Depression and mood swings
• Excessive crying
• Insomnia or sleeping too much
• Loss of appetite or eating too much
• Intense irritability and/or anxiety
• Difficulty bonding with the baby
• Avoidance of the baby
• Obsessive worrying about the baby or fixations on small anxieties
• Withdrawal from family and friends
• Thoughts of harming yourself or your baby

Sometimes, the person experiencing the postpartum depression isn’t the one who first notices the changes in themselves. A friend or family member is often the first person to spot changes in mood or behavior.

If someone you love has suggested that you might be experiencing post-surrogacy depression, listen to what they have to say. If you feel that someone you know might be suffering from post-surrogacy depression, gently reach out and ask how they’re feeling.

Not sure what a normal post-surrogacy recovery should be like? Contact a surrogacy specialist at American Surrogacy.

Reading the stories of others who have battled postpartum depression, particularly those who have experienced it after going through IVF, surrogacy, or adoption, can sometimes bring comfort to new parents via surrogacy and also help them recognize symptoms in themselves.

What Can You Do to Treat Post-Surrogacy Depression?

You may need to try a few options to find what works best for you, but there are a number of ways to help ease the symptoms of post-surrogacy depression, including:

• Talking to your loved ones. Lean on them for emotional support, as well as practical support for things like taking care of the baby when you need a short break.
• Counseling or therapy. Reach out to your American Surrogacy licensed social worker or contact a therapist, preferably one who has experience with postpartum depression and surrogacy.
• Many people are hesitant to try medications like antidepressants or antianxiety medications, but for some, even a low dose can help get you back in balance. Talk to your doctor.
• Talking to people who have been in your shoes. Find support groups with parents to surro-born babies and ask them about their experiences with post-surrogacy depression. It can be helpful to talk with people who have had similar experiences.

Continuing to care for yourself physically, even when it feels difficult, will also do a lot to improve your mental and emotional state. Exercise regularly, stay hydrated, eat healthy and take moments to relax or meditate. These can seem low-priority as a new parent, but caring for yourself physically can help keep some of the minor symptoms of post-surrogacy depression at bay and help you to continue caring for your family.

If you ever experience suicidal thoughts, or thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, please call 1-800-273-8255 immediately.

Remember that any new parent can experience forms of postpartum depression, including parents via surrogacy. This is something that affects many people, and it’s not something you need to experience alone. Contact American Surrogacy at 1-800-875-BABY(2229) if you ever need to connect to more resources to help with post-surrogacy depression.