Category: UK

sister surrogate mother, UK

UK – Woman whose SISTER offered to carry her baby finally realises her dream of becoming a mother – after being warned falling pregnant could KILL her

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Lauren Hooper, 31, and her husband Michael, 36, of Okehampton, Devon, met their little girl Rae when she was born last month on July 24, after nine months inside Lauren’s sister Ebony Hutt’s womb.

In 2014 Lauren was devastated to be told that, because she’d been born with a hole in her heart, a malformation of the pulmonary artery and collateral arteries to the lungs, carrying a child could prove fatal – to both her and a baby.

As she was about to give up hope of starting a family, Lauren’s sister, Ebony, 35, herself a mother of two, offered to act as the couple’s surrogate.   

After three failed implantation attempts, Ebony fell pregnant at the end of 2017, and, last month, gave birth to her niece, Rae Ebony Ann Hooper.

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Fertility Jargon, UK

Confusing fertility jargon explained

Intended Parents

Source Harper’s Bazaar

According to the latest NHS statistics, around one in seven couples in the UK will have difficulty conceiving. Thankfully, there is a wealth of information and advice available for those who find themselves in this situation and wishing to start a family – however, the language and terminology used can be complicated, often making the process confusing and overwhelming.

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Egg Donor, UK

UK – Teacher, 32, who spent four YEARS trying to conceive reveals how her ‘selfless’ best friend donated her eggs – and now she’s the proud mother of the daughter she always dreamed of  By Latoya Gayle For Mailonline

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

A married couple who spent seven years trying to conceive have revealed how they finally realised their dream of starting a family – after a close friend donated her eggs.

Chelsea Judd, 32, and her husband Steve, 34, from Santa Clara, Utah, began trying for a baby in 2011, but didn’t fall pregnant.

During the couple’s first IVF attempt doctors discovered Chelsea suffered from low quality eggs and urged her to seek either egg donation or adoption.

The ‘devastated’ couple began to fear they would never have the children they craved, until Chelsea’s best friend Tia Stokes, 32, offered to help.

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Surrogacy, UK

UK – Surrogacy orders rise five-fold

Intended Parents

Source The Times

Surrogacy is booming, with the number of orders that transfer legal parenthood from the surrogate to intended parents up nearly five-fold in ten years, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

The figures were released yesterday as an order was laid before parliament to allow single people who use a surrogate to become legal parents via a parental order. The aim is to create equality for single parents as well as people in a relationship where their partner does not want to become a legal parent.

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother, UK

UK – Surrogate who has gifted six babies to women struggling with fertility reveals she’s planning to do it for a SEVENTH time – and she keeps in touch with ALL the families after giving birth

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Amy Trelease, 42, a management analyst, from Carson City, Nevada, said she was determined to help women struggling to conceive after learning about egg donation and surrogacy in college.
She gave the gift of a newborn for the first time at the age of 26, having donated her eggs twice before in her early 20s.

After having her third child Dillon, now 13, she went on to have five more babies in seven years, gifting them to women who were dealing with infertility.

She has scheduled an IVF transfer for next month, which will be her first step to carrying a baby for someone else for the seventh time. 

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Surrogacy, UK

UK – How the law is catching up with surrogacy

Intended Parents

Source The Times

Advances in medical science and shifts in attitudes to the meaning of family have led to a growth in non-traditional methods of procreation, including surrogacy.

Ministry of Justice figures show that in the ten years to 2016, the number of parental order applications — the process by which legal parenthood is transferred from a surrogate to the intended parents — rose from 55 to 316.

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Surrogacy, UK

UK – Surrogacy and me: the choosing process is over, we have a donor

Intended Parents

Source The Times

I realise some of the terms I use in this column may be a little confusing to the uninitiated, so I thought this week I would do some untangling. There are a few types of surrogacy, but the first distinction is between gestational and traditional. In gestational surrogacy, either the intended mother’s eggs (my ideal option, although sadly not possible for me because I don’t have any), or a donor’s eggs are used. In traditional surrogacy, a surrogate’s eggs are used, making her the biological mother of the child. The latter is rare because of all the next-level emotional and moral issues this understandably adds.

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Egg Donor, UK

UK – Why I donated my eggs at 21

Intended Parents

Source The Times

What do you say to a child, born with your DNA, who you’ll probably never meet? This was the question I found myself trying to answer five years ago as I filled in a form after agreeing to donate my eggs to a fertility clinic. “Leave a goodwill message for children born from your donation,” read the instruction at the top of a blank sheet of paper. “Be happy” was the only thing I could bring myself to write.

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Egg Donor, UK

UK – Selfless generosity or naive mistake? Kerri, 30, endures daily injections and painful operations to donate her eggs to women she doesn’t know – but doesn’t want children of her own

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

For someone who says she doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body, Kerri Middleton will happily admit she was thrilled when she discovered a baby was on the way.

‘I was absolutely over the moon — so much so that I had a little cry,’ she says. ‘It was exactly what I had hoped for.’

Would it look like her? Would it inherit her colouring and her single-minded personality? All were questions that flitted through her mind — but they are ones she will likely never be able to answer.

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Egg Donor Selection, UK

UK – Infertile women can use facial recognition software to find lookalike egg donors

Intended Parents

Source The Sun

Selfie service computers use facial recognition software to study 100 points on each face to ensure a close likeness and increase chance of the child looking like the egg-recipient mum.

INFERTILE women can now use facial recognition software to find lookalike egg donors.

The selfie service increases the chance of the child looking like the recipient mum.

Spanish firm Ovobank, which has eggs from more than 4,000 donors, says its computers examine 100 points on each face to ensure a close likeness.

Alberto Lale, from the company, said: “Most people, when they choose egg donation for their treatment, would like their children to resemble them as much as possible.

“It’s better to do it through an objective process, a mathematical algorithm, rather than a human.

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Surrogacy Costs, UK

UK – The ‘commercialisation of reproduction’: Desperate infertile couples are paying up to £60,000 to have babies through surrogate mothers in the UK

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Desperate couples are spending up to £60,000 to have babies through surrogate mothers giving birth in the UK, a conference was told.

The huge sums – more than double the average full-time salary of £28,000 – come despite a ban on commercial surrogacy.

Surrogate mothers in the UK are legally allowed to receive ‘reasonable expenses’ for carrying a pregnancy and giving birth.

Courts judge what ‘reasonable expenses’ are when transferring the parenting rights from the surrogate mother to the intended parents.

But courts can, and do, allow bigger sums if it is considered in the best interests of the child.

Critics yesterday hit out at the potential cost of having a baby through a surrogate and said it shows the ‘commercialisation of reproduction’.

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Surrogacy Costs, UK

UK – SURROGACY FEE FEAR  Up to £60k is being paid by some desperate Brit couples who choose to have a baby by surrogacy

Intended Parents

Source The Sun

DESPERATE couples are spending up to £60,000 to have a baby using British surrogate mums, a conference has heard.

The huge sum is more than double the average UK salary of £25,000 and five to ten times what experts say it should cost.

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Parental rights, UK

UK – Rights for Surrogate Parents

Intended Parents

Source Working Families

Surrogacy is when another woman carries and gives birth to a baby for the couple who want to have a child. One or both of the couple may provide the genetic material for the child. You should seek legal advice before entering into a surrogacy arrangement.

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Fertility over 40, UK

UK – As Brigitte Nielsen announces she’s pregnant at 54, an expert warns that celebrities who are not open about using donor eggs to conceive are giving women ‘false hope’

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Last week, actress Brigitte Nielsen shocked fans by revealing she’s pregnant with her fifth child at 54, joining a long list of celebrities who have conceived in their 40s and 50s, such as Rachel Weiss, 48.

As fertility starts to decline after the age of 35, many women who fall pregnant in later life do so by using a donor egg.

Other famous women who have conceived in later life include Janet Jackson who got pregnant at 50 and Halle Berry who had her second child at 47, although it can’t be said for certain that any of these famous women did use donor eggs
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Egg Donor, UK

UK – What it’s really like to donate your eggs to a stranger

Intended Parents

Source Cosmopolitan

30-year-old Kerri shared every aspect of the process with us – from why she did it to how it affected her, the health risks and the pay she didn’t know you got.

GETTY IMAGESCOSMOPOLITAN UK

Most women have probably never even considered donating their eggs – and neither had Kerri, 30, until she saw an advert for it on a London tube.

“To be honest, I didn’t even know that you could donate eggs,” she told Cosmopolitan UK. But the curiosity got the better of her and, after weeks of playing on her mind, she googled the London clinic advertised on the underground, eager to know more.

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IVF, UK

UK – TERRIFIC TWOSOME  Single mum’s IVF quest for kids led to twins — born THREE YEARS apart

Intended Parents

Source The Sun

Samantha spent £12,000 on fertility treatments, with her five-year-old, Grace and 21-month-old Rory, conceived at the same time with her egg and donor sperm.

They were both born from the same embryos.

Grace came from the first batch implanted through IVF and Rory from the second, which was frozen for three years before being implanted.

Samantha, 46, says that despite their age gap, the bond between Grace and Rory is as strong as i

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Mother in law as surrogate mother, UK

UK – My mother-in-law gave birth to my son as I had no womb or cervix after tumour hell

Intended Parents

Source The Sun

Patty and I had always got on well but when she offered to be our surrogate, I was overwhelmed.

By carrying our precious baby Kross, she’s made all my dreams come true.
My problems started when I was just 17 after I had problems with irregular and painful periods.

Doctors examined me and found a large benign tumour growing inside my womb.
Within just a few weeks, I had an operation to remove my womb and my cervix.

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IVF, UK

Scotland – With IVF rates rising, we found out more about Scotland’s stretched facility services

Intended Parents

Source The Press and Journal

Donor co-ordinator Hazel McBain taking blood from a patient

As the NHS approaches its 70th anniversary, this year marks the milestone of another significant UK medical achievement: the 40th birthday of the world’s first IVF baby.

Born in Manchester in 1978, Louise Brown was the first ever “test-tube baby” whose very existence made headlines around the world.

Four decades later and today IVF is much more common.

In the UK alone, most recent statistics show that more than 68,000 such treatments were provided in 2016, and the picture that emerges is a largely positive one.

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sister surrogate mother, UK

UK – SISTER ACT  Selfless mum-of-two carries surrogate baby for her sister whose heart defect means pregnancy would kill her

Intended Parents

Source The Sun
EBONY Hutt is carrying her young sister Lauren’s baby after a rare heart condition would make pregnancy fatal for both her and her unborn child.

TAKING sisterly love and devotion to an entirely new level, one mother-of-two is currently six months pregnant… with her younger sister’s baby.

The baby’s biological mother Lauren Hooper, 31, received the heart-breaking news that her rare heart condition would make her too weak to survive a pregnancy after she married husband Michael in 2014.

Born with a hole in her heart, a malformation of the pulmonary artery and collateral arteries to the lungs, Lauren was never expected to survive beyond her first birthday.

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Parental rights, UK

UK – Surrogacy reform could remove automatic rights from birth parents

Intended Parents

Source The Telegraph

The current law means intended parents must apply for a court order to gain legal rights over the child. CREDIT: DOMINIC LIPINSKI /PA

Surrogacy laws could be reformed to remove automatic rights from birth parents, under plans being examined by the Government.

Law Commission recommendations to reform surrogacy law have received Government backing and will be developed to make the rules “fit for the modern world”.

A three-year project will examine the current rules which give a woman and her husband automatic parentage over any child she gives birth to, even if the child is not biologically theirs.

It will “consider the legal parentage of children born via surrogacy, and the regulation of surrogacy more widely,” the Law Commission said.

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