Source Bismarck Tribune
They were gay and wanted a baby. She loved being pregnant. They made a deal.
Source Washington Post
Christina Fenn and her husband, Brian, have driven an hour and a half to this quaint coffee shop in Monroe, Conn. Fenn sips her morning latte, skittishly glancing out the window at the parking lot. “I’m nervous,” she says, grabbing her husband’s arm. “Nervous-excited, though.” He smiles back.
She’s wearing green, her lucky color. Green shirt and green jacket, green bracelets, green socks. She feels as if she needs all the luck she can get today.
“They’re here,” her husband says, standing to greet two men walking toward them.
When You’re A Surrogate, The Postpartum Recovery Looks A Little Different
Source Romper.com
When a gestational surrogate delivers a baby after ten months or so of carrying another person’s child, their job, so to speak, is done. With the baby safely in the hands of its parents, the story seems to be over, but for surrogate moms, that couldn’t be further from the truth. For all information out there on gestational surrogacy, the postpartum period isn’t talked about much.
There are a lot of misconceptions around surrogacy; for starters, it’s important to understand the difference between traditional and gestational surrogacy. In traditional surrogacy, the surrogate uses her own eggs to create an embryo — she is genetically related to the baby, and this arrangement has become pretty rare in the U.S. for obvious legal reasons. In gestational surrogacy, there’s no genetic link — the intended parents are the ones to donate the egg and sperm in a process using in vitro fertilization.
This Company Is Working to Make IVF and Egg-Freezing Standard Employee Benefits
Source Brit + Co
For many of us, experiences with fertilitytreatment have been confined to Hollywood. We cheered on Mindy Kaling’s character from The Mindy Project as she opened her fertility clinic in downtown NYC. Then we devoured news articles about why Kim Kardashian and Kanye West chose to hire a gestational surrogate for their youngest child. There’s a reason for this distance: Fertility services are dang pricey. After Carrot co-founder and CEO Tammy Sun froze her eggs (and consequently spent half her savings) at the age of 34, she made it her life’s work to help transform fertility care into an accessible workplace benefit. Now hundreds of trendsetting companies across the US are offering fertility coverage to the millions (yes, millions!) of employees who need it. Fertility treatment is the future, at least according to Sun, so why not just figure it out now?
Read more
My Pregnancy Struggle Came to an End When My Cousin Agreed to Be My Gestational Carrier
Source People
I didn’t always know I wanted to have kids, or even get married. I’m an independent, free-spirited type — but something changed when I married Michael. He’s an amazing teacher and I loved seeing him with kids; the thought of starting a family together excited me. We first started “trying/not trying” soon after we got married at 31, but I told Michael we may have issues; at 14 years old I had been hospitalized with endometriosis. I thought getting pregnant might be a challenge and figured it could take a year or two to conceive. I never imagined it would take close to a decade, or that we wouldn’t use my body to carry the baby.
Battle over embryo highlights family law’s new fertility frontier
Source Financial Post
Family law is ever-changing. In one of the summer’s most interesting family law decisions, SH v. DH, Justice Robert Del Frate of the Ontario Superior Court was asked to decide the fate of an embryo which the husband and wife had purchased from a fertility centre in the state of Georgia. The parties signed a contract and bought donated eggs and sperm for US$11,500.
Fertility Doctor Surrenders License After DNA Sites Found He Inseminated Dozens Of Women With Own Sperm
Source IFL Science
The Indiana Medical Licensing Board voted last week to bar a 79-year-old retired doctor from ever practicing in the state again after genetics searches on ancestry sites found he had illegitimately fathered dozens of children whose mothers he had artificially inseminated with his own sperm. In each case, he reportedly told the couples he was using sperm from a suitable donor, the father, or a combination of the two.
UK – Treatment offers hope for women after IVF failures
Source The Times
A fertility treatment that focuses on correcting problems in the reproductive system has achieved success for older women, a study found.
An Irish fertility expert found that restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) helped women become pregnant even when IVF had failed for them.
The study said 74 out of 128 women who completed RRM at Neo Fertility, a treatment clinic based in Dublin, gave birth to full-term healthy babies after two or more failed IVF treatments.
UK – The Brexit crisis nobody is talking about? Our need for Danish sperm
Source Wired
The UK is heavily reliant on foreign sperm donors – and Denmark is responsible for more than its fair share. Then along came Brexit…
Brexit keeps surprising us. The latest industry that might be under threat if the UK leaves the EU without a deal is allegedly that of sperm donation.
Specifically, Danish sperm donation.
The Department of Health and Social Care revealed last week that 3,000 sperm samples were imported from Denmark to the UK in the last year, and nightmare scenarios were quick to flourish. The risk of Danish sperm being held up at British borders because of unclear custom arrangements seems to have never been so real.
UK – Do you know your zygote from your oligozoospermia? Expert decodes the most CONFUSING fertility jargon for prospective parents
Source Daily Mail
It’s 40 years since the first IVF baby was born, bringing joy to thousands of couples who might otherwise have been unable to conceive.
But while the NHS estimates that one in seven couples will still have difficulty conceiving, the fertility industry remains full of bamboozling jargon – from zygote to oligozoospermia.
Despite the wealth of information and advice now available, the language and terminology used can often be complicated, making the process confusing and overwhelming.
Here Dr Victoria Walker, leading fertility expert at Spain’s Institut Marques, has de-coded a list of the most confusing medical terms used in the fertility industry.
Fertilization: Who Should Go For Egg Freezing?
Source Leadership
The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (RCOG) recently draw the attention of In vitro fertilization (IVF) experts on a very salient observation that egg freezing had tripled in five years. RCOG also stated that a large number of those who go for egg freezing are over 37 years and these group of people have lower chances of success when they would need the eggs. This, researchers have linked to the fact that more women now postpone raising families due to many social factors including educational/career pursuits and the unavailability of the right partners.
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A Fertility Doctor Used His Sperm on Unwitting Women. Their Children Want Answers.
Source NY Times
To couples at the end of their ropes who wanted children but could not conceive them for medical reasons, Dr. Donald Cline was a savior of sorts, offering to match the women with sperm from anonymous men resembling their partners.
Many couples sought Dr. Cline out at his Indianapolis-area fertility clinic during the 1970s and ’80s. They had children, who grew up and had children of their own.
What the couples did not know was that on an untold number of occasions, Dr. Cline was not using the sperm of anonymous donors.
UK – ‘I’m 35, childless and I donated my eggs to strangers and here’s why’
Source INews
Becki Ellsmore has never cooed over babies in the way she’s seen her friends do. And while she says she’ll never say never to having a family, it’s not been a priority.
Yet the 35-year-old has not one, but two biological children – of around four and five – who she has never met. She was compensated £750 each time for donating her eggs, but with trips back and forth from her home town in Oxford to the clinic in London during the two-week process, the money is hardly a motivating factor.
Surrogate Motherhood Does Not Create Relationships, It Tears Them Apart
Source The Federalist
Karen, a friend who watches over the Facebook page for a film Jennifer Lahl and I made, “Anonymous Father’s Day,” recently posted a HuffPost Personal article titled, “I Chose To Be A Surrogate Mother. I Didn’t Know It Would Break My Heart.”
The author, Lindsay, became a surrogate mother in her early 20s, without ever having children of her own. Her first pregnancy was a surrogate pregnancy. It was a traditional rather than gestational surrogacy, meaning she used her own egg rather than a donor egg. She did another surrogate pregnancy, giving birth for the second time 15 months later, before having a child that she kept “as a single mom by choice.”
Spanish families stranded in Ukraine with their surrogate babies
Source EuroNews
Dozens of Spanish families who have had children via surrogate mothers in Ukraine are being blocked from returning home, with the Spanish government citing issues of medical malpractice and human trafficking in the industry.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Wednesday that it will deal with around 30 families affected on a case-by-case basis, noting that it has “an obligation to preserve and protect the rights” of the women who carried and gave birth to the children.
UK – Frozen embryo pregnancy boost
Source Express
A fertility clinic has become the first in the UK to routinely freeze embryos – to give women more than a 50 percent chance of falling pregnant. Scientists at Cambridge IVF found the technique allowed them to transfer the embryos at the best time for the patient.
It also eliminates some of the side effects of IVF drugs, including weight gain, abdominal pain, vomiting and shortness of breath.
The clinic, which works with Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, achieved a 61.8 per cent success rate for a group of 167 women between the age of 24 and 45 compared with 40.6 per cent when using fresh embryos.
The figure is nearly double the national average of 36 per cent for using fresh embryos, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
South Africa – Everything you need to know about surrogacy in SA
Source Destiny Connect
You may be considering a surrogate for different medical reasons, or it could be because you’ve been struggling to fall pregnant through assisted reproduction techniques like IVF.
Surrogacy gives people who might be ineligible to adopt a child because of their age or because they’re single and same-sex couples a shot at parenthood.
It might not be as prevalent as it is in the USA, but more South Africans are making enquiries and engaging with the practice more and more.
The legislation that governs surrogacy in the country, the Children’s Act, is, however, very strict and clear about what is permissible.
Read more
Understanding your fertility is a nightmare. Here’s a better way
Source Fast Company
Trying to get pregnant on your own feels a bit like being shot into space. You’re looking for anything familiar to grasp, but you’re surrounded by alien terminology–all while being poked and prodded by foreign objects and unfamiliar faces. It makes you feel vulnerable and out of your depth–especially when it comes to the mountains of personal data being captured and collected about you throughout the process.
Australia – ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Sperm donor discovers he’s fathered ELEVEN children – and now he’s tracking them all down
Source Daily Mail
An Australian man who discovered he was a father to 11 children he never knew he had is now on a mission to track them down.
Ken Allen donated sperm many years ago and didn’t look back.
He was shocked when he received a phone call telling him he had 11 kids living across Australia.
‘Eleven, eleven, eleven, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ Mr Allen told Channel 7’s Sunday Night program.
Why Canada court’s ruling on contested embryo is wrong – but also right
Source BioNews
Over the past couple of weeks, much ink has been spilled over the recent Ontario Superior Court decision, SH v DH (see BioNews 961). It is precedent-setting in Ontario and across Canada, being the first published decision determining who may use frozen embryos upon the dissolution of a marriage.
The Ontario court last month awarded the former couple’s frozen embryo to the wife, DH, who wants to use it to become pregnant. This ruling was reached by regarding the embryo – which is not genetically related to either spouse – as ‘property’. While I agree in principle with the result and would like to see DH use the embryo for reasons set out later, based on my interpretation of the Section 8 (Consent) Regulations to the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, I believe the decision may be incorrect.