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.
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.
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.
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.
Source Daily Mail
A woman who started going through menopause at the age of 23 has explained that without the help of her sister she wouldn’t have had the chance to become a mum.
Amber Spears, from Melbourne, had been trying to fall pregnant in 2014 when her body suddenly – and without warning – went into menopause.
Speaking on Today, Ms Spears said she started having up to 20 hot flushes a day, a situation she described as ‘horrendous’.
‘I went to a doctor and had some tests and it came back I was going through early menopause
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’.
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.
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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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.
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.
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
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.
Source The Press and Journal
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.
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.
Source The Telegraph
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.
Source The Standard
Olympic swimmer Tom Daley has confirmed that neither himself nor his husband Dustin Lance Black know which of them is the biological father of their unborn child.
The couple were able to conceive the baby boy, who Daley revealed is due in June, through “an egg donor” and surrogate mother.
“We found an egg donor and we are the sperm donors, we have fertilised half the eggs each,” Daley said in an interview with The Times. “We put in a boy embryo and a girl embryo and we don’t know whose is whose.”
Source Raconteur
Access to NHS fertility services can be a postcode lottery, resulting in couples travelling abroad for treatment
The UK may have been the birthplace of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), but cuts to NHS fertility services have led some people to consider travelling across the globe for fertility treatment.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends three cycles of IVF for those who are eligible, but whether you get anything approaching this depends entirely on where you live.
A survey carried out by Fertility Network UK and Fertility Clinics Abroad found that patchy NHS provision and the high cost of private IVF were the main drivers for people travelling overseas. Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Eastern Europe are all popular, along with destinations further afield such as the Caribbean.
Source: The Sun
Hayley Gumble, 25, was diagnosed with a rare condition which causes a woman’s ovaries not to work properly and often results in infertility, two years ago.
The nursery nurse, who grew up in a foster family and has always dreamed of being a mum, was left devastated by the news after suffering two miscarriages.
Doctors said her condition – premature ovarian failure (POF) – meant she only had a five per cent chance of conceiving.
But determined not to take the news lying down, Hayley decided to try a course of IVF on the NHS.
Hayley, of Stevenage, Herts, said: “I am so desperate to be a mother and have a child with my husband.”
Source Above The Law
The UK — not the US, sorry — has a very thoughtful and vocal stance on surrogacy.
Last month, the government issued thoughtful guidance on best practices for citizens considering entering into a surrogacy arrangement. Our government? No, no, sorry for any confusion. I am talking about the United Kingdom. The United States continues to maintain a patchwork of (mostly positive) surrogacy laws, or in many cases, no law at all. But the UK’s government, and more specifically, the Department of Health and Social Care, recently issued official guidance for intended parents and surrogates entering into surrogacy arrangements in England and Wales.
