Tag: surrogate mother

India, Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

India – Health Matters: Dashing Hopes of Parenthood, New Surrogacy Policy Likely to Create Illicit Baby Market

Intended Parents

Source News 18

Surrogacy was back in the news after celebrity Priyanka Chopra announced the birth of her daughter via a surrogate mother. The concept of having a baby through surrogacy is usually linked to celebrities.

A person who hasn’t yet faced an incurable infertility issue may not know that thousands of Indian couples from humble backgrounds resort to the option of having their own biological child via a surrogate mother every year.

For couples who were planning to opt for it, the New Year started on a dismal note, as India banned commercial surrogacy, apart from introducing several other regulations.

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother, Ukraine, War

Ukraine war: Couple’s bid to make safe home for surrogate mother

Intended Parents

Source BBC

Heather Easton (right) has built a close friendship with Vita Lysenko

A couple are trying to give the Ukrainian surrogate mother of their baby a safe home in the UK.

Heather and Mark Easton, from Rugby, Warwickshire, returned from Kyiv with baby Sophie two weeks before Russia invaded the country.

They have found a sponsor for Vita Lysenko and her family who fled to Belgium last week.

But the family do not have passports and have found getting visas “extremely difficult”, Mrs Easton said.

After having a hysterectomy Mrs Easton decided to use a surrogate to have a child.

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Scotland, Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

Scotland – ‘Change the law and smooth the path to surrogacy’

Intended Parents

Source STV News

Claire Kelly knows more than most about surrogacy – she has carried three babies for two different couples.

She was inspired to join Surrogacy UK after watching a documentary while she was pregnant with her own second child.

“I started attending surrogacy socials and I met loads of people – both couples and surrogates – and I’ve been part of it ever since,” she says in Thursday’s episode of Scotland Tonight.

“The couple I met at a social – at the time I was pregnant with my second son – they thought I was carrying for another couple…

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intended parents, New Zealand, Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

New Zealand – Make sure new law doesn’t make surrogates ‘useful wombs’

Intended Parents

Source Newsroom

The Law Commission estimates that around 50 children are born through surrogacy each year, including through international commercial surrogacies. Photo: Flickr/Sergio Santos

Anne Else looks at the Law Commission’s proposals for new surrogacy law, and the key legal issue: how the intending parents become the legal parents

Agreeing to be a birth mother in a surrogacy arrangement is a precious gift to people wanting a child. But if it’s poorly regulated, it can lead to women being seen as just useful wombs.

No one knows exactly how many surrogacy arrangements have been made or how many children have been born this way to New Zealanders since the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (HART) Act was passed in 2004, because no comprehensive records are kept. But surrogacy makes up less than 1 percent of fertility clinic treatment cycles here. There’s no guarantee of a live birth.

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Egg Donation, New Zealand, Surrogacy

New Zealand – ACT backing Tamati Coffey’s surrogacy bill

Intended Parents

Source 1 News

Labour MP Tamati Coffey’s surrogacy bill has today got backing from the ACT party. 

Coffey’s bill covers many areas, including identifying on the birth certificate who donated an embryo or cells, as well as the surrogate.

It also calls for a register listing potential surrogates and, crucially, the ability to create a legally-binding surrogacy order ahead of the child’s birth.

“So that the time that baby’s born, the intending parents become the parents. We’ve heard a few heartache stories along the way about that gap and what happens in there,” Coffey said

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother, UK

UK – ‘It’s been the greatest honor of my life’: Selfless mom becomes a surrogate for strangers MONTHS after giving birth to her own twins – having seen a friend go through a devastating miscarriage

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

A selfless mother decided to become a surrogate after she witnessed the pain of her friend’s miscarriage whilst she was expecting twins herself so she can enable couples the ultimate joy of becoming parents – something she calls the ‘greatest honor’ of her life.

Tierra Nelson, 23, from Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and fiance, Marty, always knew that they wanted to be parents when the time was right and after six months of trying to conceive were delighted to find out they were expecting twins, Isabella and Claire, who were born in October 2016, weighing 6lb 11oz and 6lb 12oz at 37 weeks.

Soon after discovering she was pregnant, Tierra found out that one of her closest friends was also expecting and they were both delighted. But this delight soon turned into heartbreak as Tierra’s friend sadly suffered a miscarriage. 

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother, UK

UK – Most surrogates want to give up their parental rights from BIRTH, reveals survey

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Surrogates remain the baby’s legal mother until a parental order is granted, which can take months.

But a survey has now revealed 69 per cent of surrogate mothers feel the law – which has existed since 1990 – should be changed.

Surrogacy UK, a support network, has described the law as being ‘outdated and in dire need of reform’.

The current laws are under review by the Law Commission, which is to publish its updated proposals in the coming weeks.

The survey by Surrogacy UK was conducted on 102 surrogate mothers, The Times reports.   

Only two of the women who were polled revealed they thought they should be the legal parents at birth. 

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

Surrogate mother who refused abortion launches effort to change laws

Intended Parents

Source KHOU

Stephanie Levesque was at the center of a surrogacy story that made national headlines one year ago. This is the first time she’s speaking publicly.

DALLAS — Stephanie Levesque is an ardent supporter of surrogacy because the process brought her and so many other families immense joy.
She is finally ready to talk about the pain she endured over the last year. “There’s been a lot of mourning. There’s been a lot of heartache,” she said.
On December 21, 2017, Stephanie gave birth at Medical City Dallas.
Sixteen weeks into an otherwise normal pregnancy, doctors had discovered a serious heart defect in the baby.

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Surrogate Mother, UK

UK – Surrogate mothers could be allowed to charge cash

Intended Parents

Source The Times

Legal reformers are looking at whether to change the law so that surrogates can profit from having babies for others.

The Law Commission is consulting on the subject and is to publish proposals in the new year. Sir Nicholas Green, chairman of the independent body, said that the existing laws, which were drawn up more than 30 years ago, were not fit for purpose.

Surrogacy, he said, had increased ten fold in ten years. The main problem was that the law was “quite cumbersome” and often required people to go abroad.

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Surrogate Mother

Surrogate mother, 26, who advertised her ‘womb for rent’ announces her pregnancy for a couple struggling to conceive

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

A surrogate mother who playfully advertised her ‘womb for rent’ has fallen pregnant after she made the gracious decision to help a couple struggling to conceive.

Michelle Griffin, from Perth, turned to social media to find the perfect couple who were desperate to fulfil their dream of being a family.

The 26-year-old professional birthing coach already has two children – four-year-old daughter Leilani and son Issac, aged three.

But the doting mother-of-two said she enjoyed pregnancy so much, she wanted the childless couple to experience the joys of parenthood.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Michelle – who’s currently 15 weeks pregnant – opened up about her selfless decision to help those struggling with fertility.

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Surrogate Mother

New Mom Sobs as Her Best Friend and Surrogate Delivers Her First Child

Intended Parents

Source Pop Sugar

Erin Boelhower has had a difficult journey to achieving her dream of becoming a mother. After six years of infertility, IVF, and losses, the mom welcomed her rainbow baby girl thanks to her best friend of 10 years, Rachel Checolinski, who offered to be her surrogate. Following a 12-hour labor, Rachel finally delivered baby Scottie, and Erin sobbed through the whole thing.

However, they weren’t all exactly happy tears — some were out of Erin’s concern for her friend. “How could I do this to somebody?” Erin said to Inside Edition of her thoughts during Rachel’s labor. “She just looked miserable, and I know she wanted to do it and would do it again, but it was really hard seeing someone you love doing this for you in that kind of pain.”

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

NZ – Surrogacy: A roller coaster ride to parenthood 

Intended Parents

Source NZ Herald

Sometimes when Amira Mikhail is caught up in the chaos of everyday life, getting her two young sons ready and out the door, she has to pause and remind herself what it took to be where she is today.
For while Mikhail always longed to have a family, her body was never on-board with the plan.

Becoming a mother has involved years of medical procedures, setbacks and heartache and, through it all, she held on to her dream, fiercely determined to see it realised.

“Honestly I didn’t have a plan B,” admits the Christchurch vet. “I just could not imagine not having kids. There was nowhere in my mind where I grew old and had no children.”

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

How to Find a Surrogate Mother

Intended Parents

Source Fatherly.com

A surrogate mother is a woman who carries and delivers a baby on behalf of a couple. That makes surrogacy a multifaceted arrangement with a number of medical and legal implications, both for the surrogate mother and the parents. And those implications don’t even include the tricky task of finding a surrogate mother to carry the baby.

“The surrogate can be a person that the couple knows and they recruited themselves, like a sister, or somebody from the family, or a childhood friend,” explains Elena Trukhacheva, MD, MSCI, who is the medical director of Reproductive Medicine Institute in Chicago. “Most of the time, a surrogate is recruited by the surrogacy agency. And the couple uses the surrogacy agency kind of as a middleman, to navigate the process and protect them, to some extent.”

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Australia, Surrogate Mother

Australia – Meet the Aussie mum who’s ‘renting’ out her womb

Intended Parents

Source Lifestyle Yahoo

An Aussie mum who advertised her womb for ‘rent’ is now expecting for the first time as a surrogate, telling her kids the baby “is not ours to keep”.

Michelle Griffin, 26, shares Leilani, four, and Isaac, three, with her hubby Trent, but is now 13 weeks along with a bub for a couple who have struggled with fertility problems.

The professional birthing coach from Perth told Yahoo Lifestyle she has always been ‘honest’ with her kids, who are just as excited as she is about helping another family.

Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

IVF Was the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done, and I Want to Do It Again

Intended Parents

Source PopSugar

Nothing could have prepared me for how hard the IVF process is. No amount of chats with my doctor or time spent online reading other women’s stories were enough to truly help me understand what it would be like. Kind of like how I couldn’t really know what parenthood involved just because my coworker had a baby. Nope, it wasn’t until I went through IVF that I learned just how much the experience would test me physically and emotionally. From that first blood test that measured my hormone levels to the day I got my pregnancy test results, I would be pushed to the brink of what my mind and body could handle. And yet, knowing what I know now, I would still do it again. In fact, I want to do it again.

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Gay Parenting, Surrogate Mother

They were gay and wanted a baby. She loved being pregnant. They made a deal.

Intended Parents

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.

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Postpartum depression, Surrogate Mother

When You’re A Surrogate, The Postpartum Recovery Looks A Little Different

Intended Parents

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.

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Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

My Pregnancy Struggle Came to an End When My Cousin Agreed to Be My Gestational Carrier

Intended Parents

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.

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