How does surrogacy work?

Surrogacy involves carrying a child for a woman who cannot conceive, but there's a lot more to it than that. Tune in as Molly and Cristen explore the intricacies of surrogacy in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop Mom? Never told you?
From housetop works dot Com. Hey, thereon, Welcome to the podcast.
This is Kristin and this is Molly, So Molly. There

(00:20):
was some big celebrity baby news in the news. Uh.
Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex in the City and foot
Loose fame and her husband Ferris Bueller Matthew broder Matthew
Broderick just are are well are now the new parents
of twin curls Marian Loretta l Well and Tabitha Hodge right,

(00:42):
and sort of. The thing that these girls are getting
a lot of attention for is that they didn't come
to the world via traditional celebrity pregnancy. Yeah, there's no
no brad Lena style, no you know, tabloids watching fashion
choices and baby bumps. But rather, these twins are born
via surrogate surrogate mom who lives in Ohio, and now
the twin are at home with Matthew and Sarah Jessica

(01:02):
in New York. And to borrow a phrase from Sarah
Jessica Parker, we couldn't help but wonder how does surrogacy work.
How does surrogacy work? Yeah, we just had a lot
of it brings up a lot of questions of well
the birth mother ever, you know, see the twins again,
what kind of legal contracts are involved? Was there money involved?
It was their money involved? How did she even get

(01:25):
pregnant in the first place. So we just thought it'd
be interesting to take a look at at how this
whole process works. Because there are two main types of surrogacy.
There's traditional surrogacy, which is kind of you know biblical
times where let's say Abraham Sarah Haygar. I don't know
if you know this this biblical story, Molly Um. Basically,

(01:46):
Sarah was too old to have a child, and so
she let Abraham um copulate with the handmaiden. How biblical, yes,
and so they carry the child. So that would be
a traditional surguit. If if a woman uses her own egg,
if her own egg is involved in the process, and
then there's a gestational surrogacy, and that's the kind of

(02:07):
surrogacy that you'll see happening more often these days. And
that's when the woman would be inseminated with a donor egg,
so she does not have any real biological or genetic
I should say connection to the offspring, right, Basically, she
just gives it a place to grow, she gives birth
to it, and that's the only really connection she has

(02:29):
with the kid. And then within those two types of surgasy,
there are two arrangements you can kind of go with.
You can go with a commercial arrangement whereby you know,
you're paid to deliver the goods the babe um or
altruistic where you know, you see a lot of human
interest stories about you know, a grandmother who carries her
own grandchildren for an infertile daughter, or you know a

(02:50):
family friend who carries the baby, uh, you know more
just I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart.
You don't need to pay me. That's sort of had
the money part of the bricks down, right and um.
The commercial surrogacy is the type of surgacy that gets
a lot of attention because it's obviously pretty controversial. When
we were talking about egg donation in a former podcast,

(03:11):
where it's kind of a similar thing of paying for
you know, other other women's kind of reproductive assets. I guess,
especially at this point where you're you're basically paying for
a body. That's what has a lot of people riled
up is it's you know, if you want to be
kind of disgusting about it, it can be seen as
like a former prostitution, you're selling your body in this case,
not for sex, but to grow baby. Right, And those

(03:33):
are and those are not our those are not our words,
our opinions, Easer, this is what Molly and I have
gathered from our research cover that. So let's talk a
little bit more about the process of gestational commercial surrogacy.
When you know, a family find a couple finds out
that they can't conceive, or if there is a gay

(03:54):
couple who wants to have have a have a child
through a surrogate, what happens right, or you know, another
growing instance of surrogacy is that a woman or either
either one the man or the woman might have some
sort of genetic defect that they don't want to pass along.
So if you know you're a carrier for a certain disease,
you may say, you know, I don't want my egg
involved in this. I can't carry the kid for whatever reason.

(04:16):
Let's get a surge involved, right, So those couples are
going to go to an agency, you know, let's say
a reputable surrogacy agency, and they're gonna go through a
pretty intensive screening, right they get screened for all of
their health conditions with their psychological testing involved. And the
same type of thing is going on in the other
end with these potential surrogates, right in order to eventually

(04:39):
find a find a match. Right there looking for emotionally
stable people obviously, because it takes, you know, quite a
deal of fortitude to carry something for nine months and
then be able to give it away, So they're looking
for someone who's not going to backtrack on that or
and be healthy. Be healthy. Um. A lot of these women,
which I thought was interesting, are actually older than you
would see with just your run of the mill egg donors.

(05:02):
A lot of women who just donate eggs are usually
in their twenties, but a lot of times women who
are surrogates have to have already given birth at least
one other time, so a lot of times these women
are older and might be even up into their forties. Yeah,
I mean, they basically they're looking for women who have
finished their own family, because I guess that's one of
it's a pretty big prerequisite that you have a kid

(05:23):
in most states, which I guess is so that you
don't feel some emotional longing or emptiness after your pregnancy.
You go home to your own family. Right. According to
how Surrogacy Works on how stuff works dot com, about
of surrogates are already married and approximately one third are
employed full time. So, and actually we're reading a recent

(05:44):
Newsweek article it's about a year old. I guess they
said there's a growing number of surrogates who are military wives.
You know, they've got a husband who's deployed. They probably
already have their family, but it makes some extra money
they become surrogates. Right. They're kind of stuck on these
military basis. They can't really go anywhere, and they can't
really start a career because they might move around a

(06:05):
lot in general if they have, you know, military husband.
So what better way for them to kind of have
their own own career in and be able to stay
home and raise their own kids than being a surrogate.
And there's been a direct correlation between, like since the
war in Iraq began and the steady number of of
military wives who are acting as surrogates, and some clinics

(06:26):
will now actively target military bases and advertise there because
they know that a lot of these um that some
of these women are just you know, more willing to
do it. It's a good pool of women, right. Okay,
So the surrogate decides to do it, she goes through
all this screening and um also background check. They don't
want any criminals, bad drivers, sneaking through thanking irresponsible uh

(06:47):
in many cases professional women, right, I mean you can't
just walking off the street and sign up to be
a surrogate. I would say that the Baby Mama starring
the beloved Tina Fey might might not have been the
best was a cure it portrait might not have been
accurate surrogate. That's what you're saying. Poler's character might have
failed the surrogacy test. Get to know, I'm shocked to

(07:08):
find that movie was unrealistic in some way. It was
more like a documentary watching it really. So they go
to the clinic, um, and then we kind of go
into like a match process much much like rush. You know,
you say, you know, here's the here's the list of parents,
here's a list of surrogates, and they kind of find
each other and make kind of a mutual agreement, like hey,

(07:30):
I like your parents, and hey I like you surrogate,
Let's have a baby, right because you need to have
And it's not just it's not just personality wise logging
each other. It's being talking about really uncomfortable things such as,
if let's say later on they find out that the
baby has down syndrome, would the surrogate be okay with
having an abortion? Yeah, I mean, that's that's a It's

(07:52):
a pretty heavy issue that comes up, like what kind
of attachment issues might the surrogate feel like, in what
kind of post bird visitation rights what they want to have.
I mean, there's a whole host of things, especially legal issues,
that they have to get worked out before they can
make that match. Which is why it's it's really not
something you should try to do on your own. Uh
you know, it's not really something maybe you just arrange

(08:14):
with a buddy. It's it's probably best to go through, uh,
you know, a group that has experienced organizing these and
matching people. Right. There was one of the one of
the characters, one of the subjects in that Newsweek article
that we were talking about, was saying that, uh, she
was a surrogate and sort of a shadier type of
clinic and didn't receive any kind of psychological counseling at all,

(08:37):
and had a terrible time with attachment issues after she
had to, you know, give give the baby up, and
she said, it was just heart wrenching. Yeah, and you know,
maybe a bigger, better client might have given her a
little bit more direction on how to handle those types
of emotions. And so those bigger, better places are probably
gonna have a lot of lawyers on staff. Um, they're
going to kind of guide you through the process formulating

(08:59):
the Mary important surrogacy contract, right, and it's it's gonna
be like I think I read it's gonna be like,
And it's going to involve things like an escrow account,
which is where all the money will kind of be
funneled through from parent to surrogate. Um, and it's going
to have all sorts of stipulations. I mean, you know,
we think about these controlling parents who may only want

(09:20):
their unborn child to hear to eat organic foods, or
to listen to certain music in utero. I mean, basically,
if you have requests like that, it's kind of a
joke among surrogates. According to this Newspeek article. The stipulations
that intended parents will try to put on their surrogate,
and one reason only the parents these intended parents might
be able to demand so much is because they are

(09:41):
paying a lot of money. This is not a cheap
process to go through. A lot of times surrogates are
compensated outside of medical bills and all of the stuff.
The money that they actually receive for for carrying the
child is usually between what twenty and thirty dollars, and
then on top of that you have medical fees, um,

(10:01):
transportation fees, insurance which is huge. That's another reason why
military wives are often favored for surrogus because they have
fantastic insurance through the military. UH and a lot of
times the tab will end up running up to anywhere
from a hundred to a hundred and twenty dollars for
the entire process, because you've got lawyers involved, you've got
the IVF procedure to actually implant the woman with the

(10:25):
egg and the sperm, and then um, it's a it's
a lot of money, so about a hundred thousand dollars
and you know for twenty to thirty thousand dollars that
you're paying this woman, it is conceivable that you'd be like,
you know, no driving in the last three months or something.
You know, it seems kind of bizarre and crazy to
an outsider, right And speaking of money, um, there's been

(10:47):
there's a New York Times article that I ran across
talking about how India has become a new hot spot
for surrogacy because it's a lot cheaper to get it
done there. It's just new, booming um industry. People are
going going to India, and it costs a fraction of
what it would in the US to have a woman,

(11:08):
um carry your child there. And and even though it
costs less than it does in the United States, that
the amount of money that those women are getting paid
in India translates to an entirely changed lifestyle for them.
Although it's still obviously highly controversial that this is that's
going on, but it's a new thing. That's that's been
happening right outstarting happens all the time. But the reason

(11:29):
you would go to India is there's really not a
lot of places you can go for this. Actually America,
the United States is sort of a hot spot for
surgacy because it's banned and a lot of Europe, and
even amongst individual states, there are a lot of rules
and regulations. In some states, surgacy is just outright banned, um.
And so there's a lot of sticky legal issues we've

(11:50):
already alluded to around surgacy. One thing I found kind
of fascinating is even though we have sort of maybe
a I thought that this is a good option for
a couples, in many states, there's a requirement that the
couple that's receiving the baby be a male female married couple.
And speaking of all these all these laws surrounding surrogacy, um,

(12:12):
I think we can't talk about serci without mentioning Baby M.
Baby M is probably the most famous child conceived through
a surrogate um. This case happened in Nix and basically
Mary Beth Whitehead was the surrogate mother who was artificially
inseminated with the intended father's sperm. She had the child,

(12:35):
and she refused to get the child up. Yeah, and
they used her eyes. As we mentioned before, this is
this is why you don't do that anymore, right, That's why, Yeah,
the gestational surrogacy is common practice now. Because Mary Beth
white had the surrogate was you know, she's the biological mother,
she wanted to keep the child, that would be breaking
the contract um. And so the case went to court

(12:58):
and the court ended up ruling in favor of the father,
but they did grant the biological mother limited visitation rights.
This case highlighted all the controversial legal aspects surrounding surrogacy,
and I mean, how do you actually work through like
who is the rightful mother father and all that? So

(13:19):
that is why there's been this growth in gestational surrogacy.
I was reading one article, I think it was Newsweek
that was talking about how right after the baby m case,
women would come in wanting to be matched with the
surrogate and they'd be so concerned like what if Surga
doesn't want to give up the baby? But now with
you know, good agencies and strong contracts, it's really not
an issue anymore. Right. And there's also it seems like

(13:40):
there's a difference to and a woman carrying a child
when it's from a donor egg and donor Sperniam instead
of her own egg. They think that there's less of
a psychological burden, there's less psychological bonding with that child
because it's not part of that as much part of
it gemtically part of them, but it's you know, it's
just so ethically questionable. What does make a mother is

(14:03):
that the is that the genes, is that the carrying.
You know, that's sort of why surrogacy is so controversial.
But to get you know, the mother who did not
carry the baby legally placed as the mother requires a
little bit of wrangling, depending on where you live. Right
before the baby is even born, um, everyone has to
go to court and get what's called a pre birth

(14:25):
order to be filled out, and that allows the names
of the intended parents to be placed on the original
birth certificate upon birth. So when the baby is out
of the hospital, the names the surrogate's name is nowhere
on that birth certificate. Yeah, and but in some other
states you would essentially have to adopt your own child
because the surrogate mother's name is placed on the birth

(14:46):
certificate and you kind of go through a little mini
adoption process to get recognized on the birth certificate as
legal mother. Right. So I guess from all of this,
moming um, I I have learned that surrogacy is it's
not a simple process. It's not a ninety minute comedy
starring Tina fe No, it's not. It's not Phoebe on

(15:07):
Friends carrying her brother's triplets. No, there's a lot more.
There's a lot more to it to it than that,
And there's still obviously a lot of controversial issues that
are still out there with surrogacy. But but I can
tell you one thing, all right, it's gonna be fun
to watch those twin girls grow up, because I bet
they're gonna be very finely dressed if they are daughters

(15:28):
of Sara Jessica Parker. Oh yeah, they're gonna be some
fashionable babies. So if you want to learn more about seriousy,
you can head on over to how stuff works dot
com read a wonderful article called how surrogacy Works. While
you're there, you can check out the blog that Kristen
and I write, how to stuff And if you want
to drop Christen me a line, feel free to email

(15:48):
us at mom stuff at how stuff works dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
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