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Strollerderby
The expanding world of baby-making
When I think of international surrogates, I think of U.S. couples paying a woman abroad to carry a baby (my limited perspective). But as Carolyn reported last week, international surrogacy is increasingly going the other way. More and more people in European and Latin American countries are using surrogates in the U.S. to host their babies.
An estimated 1,400 babies are born to surrogates in the U.S. every year — here’s the proportion that are thought to be the babies of international couples: Continue reading »
Happy to be here!
As if the questions raised by IVF and surrogate mothers weren’t knotty enough, new businesses in global surrogacy are adding a whole new layer of complexity.
Companies like one called PlanetHospital put together packages for couples who wish to become parents using donor eggs and/or donor sperm from one part of the world and a surrogate from another. They’ll find surrogates in India, egg donors in Europe, use sperm from wherever and make all the necessary arrangements. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, a US based surrogate can cost around $200,000 while an internationally assembled baby will run you from $32,000-$68,000, depending on the package. Continue reading »
The path to parenthood used to be fairly narrow: get married, get knocked up, gestate for 9 months and Viola! You have a baby.
That’s a great way to get a kid if you’re married, to someone of the opposite sex, you both want kids and you don’t have fertility problems stopping you from getting them.
In other words, the old-fashioned approach leaves a lot of people out of the parenting party. Modern technology has done an end-run around the limits of the birds and the bees. Fertility treatments give us the possibility of making babies with a little help from a variety of donors: donors of sperm, of eggs, of wombs.
This leads to some pretty strange arrangements. In Modern Love this week, writer Jerry Mahoney writes about his decision to create a family with his boyfriend, Drew. Their search for the perfect egg donor led them to Drew’s sister. The twins born of that arrangement are now ten months old. They look a bit like both their dad’s, and a bit like their aunt. They have the beginnings of a secret language, and a very happy raising them.
Amidst the powerful love story of a sister willing to give anything to her much-adored brother, Mahoney asks questions no one knows the answer to yet: what will it be like for her to always be the kids’ aunt, and never their mom? What will it be like for the kids?
Probably just fine.
Want a beautiful baby but don’t have the genetic material to make one yourself? You’re in luck! Beautiful People, a dating site where the average and ugly are not welcome, has announced a fertility introduction service for “people who want to maximize their chances of having good looking children.” Continue reading »
She’s seventy-two, but Jenny Brown says she’s ready to be a mother. No matter how much it costs.
The British woman is about to undergo her seventh course of IVF in attempts to become pregnant at an age four years past the age of the current oldest new mom in the world (who just died at sixty-nine).
And that’s not all, she’s asking women to come forward Continue reading »
The “where did I come from” question is one most parents sweat about. Explaining their origins to your children is one of those major “don’t screw this up” parenting moments, because if you get it wrong at worst you damage their self-esteem and at best? You’re getting mocked every time they reminisce about their childhoods with their friends as an adult.
It’s even more fraught for parents who have had some sort of help to bring their children into the world. This NYT article talks about how parents whose children were carried by surrogates address that issue with their kids. Continue reading »
The recurring theme in headlines in the last few days? They all claim Michael Jackson is not the dad of his kids.
But he was. And not just in a legal sense. Continue reading »
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