How does surrogacy work step by step?
It’s important to understand what surrogacy is. Surrogacy is when a woman agrees to carry and give birth to someone else’s baby. How this works is that the surrogate, also known as a gestational carrier, becomes pregnant with the help of fertility treatments. This means that the embryo actually belongs to the future parents, we call them “intended parents”. Therefore, after birth the intended parents get to raise their baby. So it’s kind of like extreme babysitting because the surrogate is giving the baby back to his or her parents. Now that we’ve covered this bit, let’s dive into how surrogacy works step by step.
What is the first step for surrogacy?
Surrogacy is a beautiful way to build or grow a family. Especially if you’ve been waiting for your turn for a long time or have a history of fertility challenges, surrogacy may finally bring your baby home.
But there are a lot of steps and moving parts to make it work. While you may think that IVF is complex, surrogacy adds other layers that all have to work together. It’s kind of like a handmade layered cake. This is because you will need teammates like agencies, attorneys, psychologists, escrow managers, and social workers. With all of these layers it can be tough to know where to start, or in other words, how to put this cake together. We were certainly overwhelmed with everything we needed to learn for our own surrogacy journey especially since we were doing it without an agency.
Therefore let’s break down the 10 steps in the surrogacy process and make a simple outline of what happens in a journey from beginning to end. Certain steps can be done at the same time and sometimes in a different order. In general, this is how surrogacy works step by step:
Step 1: Meet with your doctor and choose a fertility office
Your first step in the surrogacy process is to pick a fertility doctor, also known as an REI, and set up an appointment. If you are already working with an REI, they may have already suggested that you use a gestational carrier. But perhaps you will be the first one to bring it up. Either way, it is an important conversation to have. Next, you’ll want to ask your doctor some key questions about surrogacy since it’s different from a usual IVF experience. It’s important to find out how surrogacy works at their office and if they even help with surrogacy since every office is different. After meeting with you, your fertility doctor will outline the options for making embryos based on your medical history.
Step 2: Make and freeze embryos
Now that you’ve met with your doctor and made a fertility plan, it’s time to make embryos. Your fertility center will walk you through the process. Depending on your situation you may need a sperm or an egg donor. In fact, adopting embryos that were made by someone else is a possibility as well. Once your embryos are made they will be frozen until you are ready to use them in a later step. It’s important to have embryos already made when you start looking for a surrogate. That’s because many are eager to get started right away and sometimes it can take longer than expected to make embryos.
Step 3: Select, screen, and match with a surrogate
This is where you select the women who will carry your pregnancy. You can find a surrogate by signing up with a surrogacy agency or networking through your friends and family or even in online communities designed to match intended parents and surrogates. Next, your planned surrogate will have medical and psychological screenings as well as background checks to make sure she is a great candidate.
Step 4: Find attorneys and negotiate contracts
Once you’ve matched with your surrogate and she has passed all the screening steps it’s time to make the relationship official. In other words, it’s time to negotiate and sign contracts. These contracts are sometimes called “surrogacy agreements”. Importantly, the contracts spell out what everyone has agreed to in a legal way. Usually 2 lawyers are used, one for the intended parents and one for the surrogate. Make sure to ask your lawyer the right questions about working with a surrogate so you can have a safe and legal journey. As with most things, surrogacy laws vary from state to state. It’s actually a good idea to speak with an attorney before even matching to find out how surrogacy works in a potential surrogates state. This is because some states are quite supportive of same-sex parents or using donor ege/sperm, while other states are challenging.
Step 5: Choose a method for payments
You will have to agree on the best way to send payments to your surrogate and this is because there will be items to pay for throughout the journey. These will be reimbursement for expenses that she pays out of pocket, compensation for her efforts, and for any fees that you’ve agreed to during contracts. In order to keep up with these payments, many people use an escrow company to handle sending money to their surrogate according to the contract. Meanwhile other intended parents will choose to handle this on their own and mail checks or send with online services (such as Zelle or Paypal).
Step 6: Set up insurance policies
Before your surrogate becomes pregnant it’s a good idea to set up insurance. This includes medical insurance to cover her prenatal care and delivery. You may also decide to have short term disability and a life insurance policy. While we don’t like to think about things going wrong during a surrogate pregnancy, it’s best to have these backups in place.
Step 7: Transfer embryo to your surrogate
Once everything is in place with screenings, contracts, insurance, and payment method, it’s time to get down to baby making. Now your fertility doctor will outline a protocol, basically a schedule of medications, that your surrogate will be taking. Protocols vary from doctor to doctor and each person’s needs. When the time is right they will place your little frozen embryo into your surrogate – the embryo transfer!
Step 8: Check for pregnancy and graduate
Around 10-14 days after the embryo transfer fertility doctors will finally check for pregnancy with a blood test. This is known as the nail biting two week wait to find out if the embryo transfer took. If it doesn’t work out, you will regroup with your surrogate and circle back with the fertility doctor to figure out next steps. If it does work out, near the end of the first trimester your surrogate will graduate from the fertility office and move on to her OBGYN.
Step 9: File for legal parentage
This is one of the most important steps in surrogacy because you want to be recognized as the legal parent of your little baby. Therefore, it’s time to circle back with your attorney to file the needed paperwork, amend birth certificates, attend hearings or whatever else is needed based on your state and situation. Your state, for example, will dictate if this step is to be done before embryo transfer, before birth, or after birth. Your attorney will know the local laws and guide you, so in short, it’s time to contact your attorney.
Step 10: Enjoy pregnancy and delivery
Your surrogate will be cared for by her OBGYN or midwife during pregnancy. If your surrogate isn’t local you your next steps will also include planning and traveling to her hometown for delivery. Whether or not you have to travel, you can make a birth plan with your surrogate for how you would like things during and after delivery. Stay flexible because labor and delivery can be unpredictable and babies have their own plans. After the big birth party you get to travel home with your new bundle of joy!
How long does the surrogacy process take?
Now that we’ve seen step by step how surrogacy works there’s probably another question in your mind. You can probably picture yourself holding your new baby in your arms and rocking her gently as she coos. This is the goal of a surrogacy journey and why you are going to trudge through the 10 steps of the surrogacy process. So how long will it take? Surprisingly it takes a while, at least 14-18 months to go through all the steps. And this is if everything goes according to plan and works out on the first try. This means that the surrogate you match with in the first place passes screening with flying colors. Not only that, but your first embryo transfer works and becomes your baby.
But there are things that can really stretch your timeline, like if it takes a long time to find a good surrogate match, or if you need to screen a second potential gestational carrier, or if you have to do a second or third embryo transfer. You may have to work through step by step of the surrogacy process again. Therefore it’s important to be patient and accept that surrogacy is a marathon, not a sprint.
How surrogacy works – timeline
Step 1: Meet with your doctor and choose a fertility office
Step 2: Make and freeze embryos – 3 months
Step 3: Select, screen, and match with a surrogate – 3+ months
Step 4-6: Complete contracts, find insurance and choose payment method – 1 month
Step 7: Transfer embryo to your surrogate – 1 month
Step 8: Check for pregnancy and graduate to OB – 2 months
Step 9: File for legal parentage – 0 months (happens during or shortly after pregnancy)
Step 10: Enjoy pregnancy and delivery – 7 months
We’ve broken down how surrogacy works step by step. Each of these steps also has finer details and other items to complete. Overall this list gives a great overview of what a surrogacy journey looks like from beginning to end. Are you looking to dive deeper into a surrogacy journey and you want tools to really get started on your journey? Sign up for the Surrogacy 101 Course. It’s free and will break down the steps, building, a team, the cost, and so much more. See you there!
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Points to Ponder
“It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.”












