The surrogacy process is a challenging and exciting journey for intended parents. This procedure requires a lot of mental stamina and endurance, but eventually, the happiest of the days comes and a healthy baby is born. The most important part of this journey is to find the right surrogacy agency — the success of the procedure depends solely on this factor.
Insurance doesn’t cover medical procedures associated with surrogacy, so finding a reliable agency with highly qualified personnel and high success rates is your key to invest your money right and return home with your new healthy baby.
In this article we’ll cover the most important factors you’ll have to keep in mind while looking for a really successful surrogacy agency.
What do you need to know about the agency?
At the first look, every agency looks the same: list of IVF and egg donation options, nice website, promises to help every family come back home with their own child.
When you look closer, some things get clearer: this agency has less experience, the other one works with multiple clinics. How to not get lost in the options and find the one that guarantees you high chances for success?
There are three factors that are too important to be ignored:
- agency experience;
- number of the clinics they’re working with;
- success rates.
Let’s dive deeper into each one of them.
Agency experience
First of all, the experience can be counted not only in years of work but also by the experience of the doctors and the number of patients that received treatment. Also the number of couples who received full treatment and got to the end — to the baby’s birth — is also important. It’s a good sign of the agency that is confident in their experience.
A good sign of a reliable agency is its willingness to show you how they work and be clear on it. This way, you’ll be able to learn more about them, talk directly to doctors and staff, and evaluate their professionalism. If they can answer your questions about success rates, matching and screening processes and explain medical examinations needed — they clearly know what they’re talking about. Having a lawyer on staff also gives some bonus points — this way both the newborn and his family can be legally protected.
Also, a good sign of the experience will be honesty about failures. Of course, it’s not something to be hung proudly at the poster by the reception desk, but if you can sincerely ask about possible bumps in the way and receive an honest answer, the chances are high you’re talking to professionals.
Number of the partnering clinics
This one might not be obvious, but the fewer fertility clinics the agency works with, the better. This is a sign of quality preference over quantity.
Also, this number can be another indicator for agency experience: new agencies tend to partner with more fertility clinics in order to have more chances of success, being not experienced enough in this area. Therefore, more experienced agencies tend to choose one-two fertility clinics that they trust.
Success rates
Asking for success rates is totally fine. Keep in mind that the only surrogacy agency with a 100% success rate is the one that did only one procedure and got lucky enough to do it successfully. Agencies always improve their methods and approaches to get closer to 100%, but there’s no chance that highly complicated processes like surrogacy and egg donation are always successful even with the best doctors. This factor doesn’t depend solely on professionalism.
But still, the higher the success rate is, the better. Parens Fertility helped more than 1500 couples to become parents, and this number is constantly growing. We have a way above average success rate of full-circle processes — in 2019 this number peaked at 56%. Of course, we won’t stop improving our methods. You can discuss your own chance to succeed in becoming a parent with our medical professionals.
Other things you should ask
Knowing what the procedure will look like is an important part of interviewing an agency. This includes surrogate screening and matching processes — they can be different from agency to agency.
Ask if any background checks on the surrogate are done, and if yes, then which ones exactly. What kind of health checks are usually performed, are there any psychological examinations? All in all, the surrogate should be a perfect match to carry a baby and give birth without any complications to their health. Be confident in your curiosity — you have every right to be so.
The matching process is also important. As an intended parent, you want your gestational carrier to be a perfect match by a list of criteria. While holding an interview with the agency, ask them about how the matching process is being conducted. Which criteria they allow to list, which they use on their own to determine the most suitable carrier — every bit of this information is important for your comfort as a future parent.
We organise a full screening long before the matching process starts. This includes a number of psychological and laboratory tests conducted by specialists, as well as physical and instrumental examination. This way, our intended parents can be matched only with a completely healthy surrogate that is both physically and mentally ready to go through this procedure.
How to find a reliable and successful agency?
Finding the right surrogacy agency to grow your family bigger can be quite challenging. Too many factors to consider, too many opinions to listen to, too many options to research.
Our best recommendation on this is to ask the right questions and not be shy to ask them. Look for independent reviews, do some research on the doctors and other medical staff that can possibly guide you through this journey. Ensure that an agency can provide full legal support — this part is also very important.
Create a list of agencies that meet your criteria and seem reliable enough for you. The next step can be quite exhausting for couples, but nevertheless, it must be done: interview every agency you’ve circled as a candidate. Ask questions about both the medical and legal parts of the journey.
At Parens Fertility, we value your right to be informed about every little step of the process. We treat our clients and patients with respect and provide them with every little bit of information about medical procedures performed and legal support. Our No.1 priority is the health and peace of every party involved in this procedure: intended parents, carrier and, of course, the baby.
