Surrogacy is an absolutely amazing process. We are here to explain the step by step process in this blog.
Leia Swanberg, CFC’s CEO and founder, has been a surrogate twice and has said many times that it truly changed her life.
The First Step
The first step of the process is to decide who do you dream of helping, what type of contact do you want with intended parents during the process and after the process, are you looking for a very close and connected process or are you looking a bit of distance and are participating as a surrogate but are very private.
Our job is to help everyone, so it’s really about what works for you and the amount of contact and relationship that you would want.
Second Step
The second thing we would ask you to do, is start thinking about what we call immovable values.
Immovable values are how you feel about termination or selective reduction in a pregnancy. For us, our goal is to find you someone who has that shared value and so the potential for termination in an IVF pregnancy would be detective, typically very early on in the pregnancy. Generally, between 6 and 10 weeks, sometimes up to 12 weeks, and it would be noted whether there was an abnormality, whether that’s down syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality, or another case.
It’s really important prior to us matching you to know where your values are around that because we want to make sure you share those vales with the intended parents.
Whatever your surrogate journey looks like for you is perfectly okay.
Whether you’re thinking about working with an agency or matching privately, it is a beautiful gift you are providing and an amazing journey you will embark on.
Should you choose to work with us we can really help in the entire process as well as be there to lean on any hour of the day or night.
An Outline of our Process
A brief outline of how partnering with an agency like ours can help you through this process is:
- put together a surrogate profile
- they can help review intended parent profiles
- they can arrange medical appointments at clinics,
- ensuring that if the clinic is outside of your home community, make sure that your travel and hotel is booked, make sure that your childcare is arranged
- expense reimbursement is availed for you, to pay these people who are going to take care of your life whole you’re at the medical screening
- manage the receipts for the expenses that you will have throughout the pregnancy to receive your monthly reimbursements.
Having an agency or support team that is able to focus on key aspects of your journey.
Our Support
We have a support staff that can help answer any questions you may have. Whether it’s about the process or even connect you with other surrogates in your area going on a journey as well.
We also have a finance staff that can answer any of your questions about money.
It’s important to have a team that will be able to coach you on how to manage the expense reimbursement. In Canada it is an altruistic method. But that does not mean free and that does not mean IPs don’t need to cover your expenses.
We also have a therapist on staff. Surrogacy in Canada is a beautiful thing but it’s not without its challenges and heartaches
There are many issues that could come up and aside from that, life happens throughout this journey. We are here for you to celebrate every single high and positive pregnancy. We are cheering through all of it. But when problems arise or our surrogate goes through something, we are there just as loudly.
This is a group of women who are going to commit to you, and we are committed to you.