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Speaker 1: From housetop works dot Com. Hey, thereon, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Kristin and this is Molly, So Molly. There
Speaker 1: was some big celebrity baby news in the news. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex in the City and foot
Speaker 1: Loose fame and her husband Ferris Bueller Matthew broder Matthew
Speaker 1: Broderick just are are well are now the new parents
Speaker 1: of twin curls Marian Loretta l Well and Tabitha Hodge right,
Speaker 1: and sort of. The thing that these girls are getting
Speaker 1: a lot of attention for is that they didn't come
Speaker 1: to the world via traditional celebrity pregnancy. Yeah, there's no
Speaker 1: no brad Lena style, no you know, tabloids watching fashion
Speaker 1: choices and baby bumps. But rather, these twins are born
Speaker 1: via surrogate surrogate mom who lives in Ohio, and now
Speaker 1: the twin are at home with Matthew and Sarah Jessica
Speaker 1: in New York. And to borrow a phrase from Sarah
Speaker 1: Jessica Parker, we couldn't help but wonder how does surrogacy work.
Speaker 1: How does surrogacy work? Yeah, we just had a lot
Speaker 1: of it brings up a lot of questions of well
Speaker 1: the birth mother ever, you know, see the twins again,
Speaker 1: what kind of legal contracts are involved? Was there money involved?
Speaker 1: It was their money involved? How did she even get
Speaker 1: pregnant in the first place. So we just thought it'd
Speaker 1: be interesting to take a look at at how this
Speaker 1: whole process works. Because there are two main types of surrogacy.
Speaker 1: There's traditional surrogacy, which is kind of you know biblical
Speaker 1: times where let's say Abraham Sarah Haygar. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know this this biblical story, Molly Um. Basically,
Speaker 1: Sarah was too old to have a child, and so
Speaker 1: she let Abraham um copulate with the handmaiden. How biblical, yes,
Speaker 1: and so they carry the child. So that would be
Speaker 1: a traditional surguit. If if a woman uses her own egg,
Speaker 1: if her own egg is involved in the process, and
Speaker 1: then there's a gestational surrogacy, and that's the kind of
Speaker 1: surrogacy that you'll see happening more often these days. And
Speaker 1: that's when the woman would be inseminated with a donor egg,
Speaker 1: so she does not have any real biological or genetic
Speaker 1: I should say connection to the offspring, right, Basically, she
Speaker 1: just gives it a place to grow, she gives birth
Speaker 1: to it, and that's the only really connection she has
Speaker 1: with the kid. And then within those two types of surgasy,
Speaker 1: there are two arrangements you can kind of go with.
Speaker 1: You can go with a commercial arrangement whereby you know,
Speaker 1: you're paid to deliver the goods the babe um or
Speaker 1: altruistic where you know, you see a lot of human
Speaker 1: interest stories about you know, a grandmother who carries her
Speaker 1: own grandchildren for an infertile daughter, or you know a
Speaker 1: family friend who carries the baby, uh, you know more
Speaker 1: just I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart.
Speaker 1: You don't need to pay me. That's sort of had
Speaker 1: the money part of the bricks down, right and um.
Speaker 1: The commercial surrogacy is the type of surgacy that gets
Speaker 1: a lot of attention because it's obviously pretty controversial. When
Speaker 1: we were talking about egg donation in a former podcast,
Speaker 1: where it's kind of a similar thing of paying for
Speaker 1: you know, other other women's kind of reproductive assets. I guess,
Speaker 1: especially at this point where you're you're basically paying for
Speaker 1: a body. That's what has a lot of people riled
Speaker 1: up is it's you know, if you want to be
Speaker 1: kind of disgusting about it, it can be seen as
Speaker 1: like a former prostitution, you're selling your body in this case,
Speaker 1: not for sex, but to grow baby. Right, And those
Speaker 1: are and those are not our those are not our words,
Speaker 1: our opinions, Easer, this is what Molly and I have
Speaker 1: gathered from our research cover that. So let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about the process of gestational commercial surrogacy.
Speaker 1: When you know, a family find a couple finds out
Speaker 1: that they can't conceive, or if there is a gay
Speaker 1: couple who wants to have have a have a child
Speaker 1: through a surrogate, what happens right, or you know, another
Speaker 1: growing instance of surrogacy is that a woman or either
Speaker 1: either one the man or the woman might have some
Speaker 1: sort of genetic defect that they don't want to pass along.
Speaker 1: So if you know you're a carrier for a certain disease,
Speaker 1: you may say, you know, I don't want my egg
Speaker 1: involved in this. I can't carry the kid for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: Let's get a surge involved, right, So those couples are
Speaker 1: going to go to an agency, you know, let's say
Speaker 1: a reputable surrogacy agency, and they're gonna go through a
Speaker 1: pretty intensive screening, right they get screened for all of
Speaker 1: their health conditions with their psychological testing involved. And the
Speaker 1: same type of thing is going on in the other
Speaker 1: end with these potential surrogates, right in order to eventually
Speaker 1: find a find a match. Right there looking for emotionally
Speaker 1: stable people obviously, because it takes, you know, quite a
Speaker 1: deal of fortitude to carry something for nine months and
Speaker 1: then be able to give it away, So they're looking
Speaker 1: for someone who's not going to backtrack on that or
Speaker 1: and be healthy. Be healthy. Um. A lot of these women,
Speaker 1: which I thought was interesting, are actually older than you
Speaker 1: would see with just your run of the mill egg donors.
Speaker 1: A lot of women who just donate eggs are usually
Speaker 1: in their twenties, but a lot of times women who
Speaker 1: are surrogates have to have already given birth at least
Speaker 1: one other time, so a lot of times these women
Speaker 1: are older and might be even up into their forties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, they basically they're looking for women who have
Speaker 1: finished their own family, because I guess that's one of
Speaker 1: it's a pretty big prerequisite that you have a kid
Speaker 1: in most states, which I guess is so that you
Speaker 1: don't feel some emotional longing or emptiness after your pregnancy.
Speaker 1: You go home to your own family. Right. According to
Speaker 1: how Surrogacy Works on how stuff works dot com, about
Speaker 1: of surrogates are already married and approximately one third are
Speaker 1: employed full time. So, and actually we're reading a recent
Speaker 1: Newsweek article it's about a year old. I guess they
Speaker 1: said there's a growing number of surrogates who are military wives.
Speaker 1: You know, they've got a husband who's deployed. They probably
Speaker 1: already have their family, but it makes some extra money
Speaker 1: they become surrogates. Right. They're kind of stuck on these
Speaker 1: military basis. They can't really go anywhere, and they can't
Speaker 1: really start a career because they might move around a
Speaker 1: lot in general if they have, you know, military husband.
Speaker 1: So what better way for them to kind of have
Speaker 1: their own own career in and be able to stay
Speaker 1: home and raise their own kids than being a surrogate.
Speaker 1: And there's been a direct correlation between, like since the
Speaker 1: war in Iraq began and the steady number of of
Speaker 1: military wives who are acting as surrogates, and some clinics
Speaker 1: will now actively target military bases and advertise there because
Speaker 1: they know that a lot of these um that some
Speaker 1: of these women are just you know, more willing to
Speaker 1: do it. It's a good pool of women, right. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the surrogate decides to do it, she goes through
Speaker 1: all this screening and um also background check. They don't
Speaker 1: want any criminals, bad drivers, sneaking through thanking irresponsible uh
Speaker 1: in many cases professional women, right, I mean you can't
Speaker 1: just walking off the street and sign up to be
Speaker 1: a surrogate. I would say that the Baby Mama starring
Speaker 1: the beloved Tina Fey might might not have been the
Speaker 1: best was a cure it portrait might not have been
Speaker 1: accurate surrogate. That's what you're saying. Poler's character might have
Speaker 1: failed the surrogacy test. Get to know, I'm shocked to
Speaker 1: find that movie was unrealistic in some way. It was
Speaker 1: more like a documentary watching it really. So they go
Speaker 1: to the clinic, um, and then we kind of go
Speaker 1: into like a match process much much like rush. You know,
Speaker 1: you say, you know, here's the here's the list of parents,
Speaker 1: here's a list of surrogates, and they kind of find
Speaker 1: each other and make kind of a mutual agreement, like hey,
Speaker 1: I like your parents, and hey I like you surrogate,
Speaker 1: Let's have a baby, right because you need to have
Speaker 1: And it's not just it's not just personality wise logging
Speaker 1: each other. It's being talking about really uncomfortable things such as,
Speaker 1: if let's say later on they find out that the
Speaker 1: baby has down syndrome, would the surrogate be okay with
Speaker 1: having an abortion? Yeah, I mean, that's that's a It's
Speaker 1: a pretty heavy issue that comes up, like what kind
Speaker 1: of attachment issues might the surrogate feel like, in what
Speaker 1: kind of post bird visitation rights what they want to have.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a whole host of things, especially legal issues,
Speaker 1: that they have to get worked out before they can
Speaker 1: make that match. Which is why it's it's really not
Speaker 1: something you should try to do on your own. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, it's not really something maybe you just arrange
Speaker 1: with a buddy. It's it's probably best to go through, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a group that has experienced organizing these and
Speaker 1: matching people. Right. There was one of the one of
Speaker 1: the characters, one of the subjects in that Newsweek article
Speaker 1: that we were talking about, was saying that, uh, she
Speaker 1: was a surrogate and sort of a shadier type of
Speaker 1: clinic and didn't receive any kind of psychological counseling at all,
Speaker 1: and had a terrible time with attachment issues after she
Speaker 1: had to, you know, give give the baby up, and
Speaker 1: she said, it was just heart wrenching. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a bigger, better client might have given her a
Speaker 1: little bit more direction on how to handle those types
Speaker 1: of emotions. And so those bigger, better places are probably
Speaker 1: gonna have a lot of lawyers on staff. Um, they're
Speaker 1: going to kind of guide you through the process formulating
Speaker 1: the Mary important surrogacy contract, right, and it's it's gonna
Speaker 1: be like I think I read it's gonna be like,
Speaker 1: And it's going to involve things like an escrow account,
Speaker 1: which is where all the money will kind of be
Speaker 1: funneled through from parent to surrogate. Um, and it's going
Speaker 1: to have all sorts of stipulations. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: we think about these controlling parents who may only want
Speaker 1: their unborn child to hear to eat organic foods, or
Speaker 1: to listen to certain music in utero. I mean, basically,
Speaker 1: if you have requests like that, it's kind of a
Speaker 1: joke among surrogates. According to this Newspeek article. The stipulations
Speaker 1: that intended parents will try to put on their surrogate,
Speaker 1: and one reason only the parents these intended parents might
Speaker 1: be able to demand so much is because they are
Speaker 1: paying a lot of money. This is not a cheap
Speaker 1: process to go through. A lot of times surrogates are
Speaker 1: compensated outside of medical bills and all of the stuff.
Speaker 1: The money that they actually receive for for carrying the
Speaker 1: child is usually between what twenty and thirty dollars, and
Speaker 1: then on top of that you have medical fees, um,
Speaker 1: transportation fees, insurance which is huge. That's another reason why
Speaker 1: military wives are often favored for surrogus because they have
Speaker 1: fantastic insurance through the military. UH and a lot of
Speaker 1: times the tab will end up running up to anywhere
Speaker 1: from a hundred to a hundred and twenty dollars for
Speaker 1: the entire process, because you've got lawyers involved, you've got
Speaker 1: the IVF procedure to actually implant the woman with the
Speaker 1: egg and the sperm, and then um, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a lot of money, so about a hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and you know for twenty to thirty thousand dollars that
Speaker 1: you're paying this woman, it is conceivable that you'd be like,
Speaker 1: you know, no driving in the last three months or something.
Speaker 1: You know, it seems kind of bizarre and crazy to
Speaker 1: an outsider, right And speaking of money, um, there's been
Speaker 1: there's a New York Times article that I ran across
Speaker 1: talking about how India has become a new hot spot
Speaker 1: for surrogacy because it's a lot cheaper to get it
Speaker 1: done there. It's just new, booming um industry. People are
Speaker 1: going going to India, and it costs a fraction of
Speaker 1: what it would in the US to have a woman,
Speaker 1: um carry your child there. And and even though it
Speaker 1: costs less than it does in the United States, that
Speaker 1: the amount of money that those women are getting paid
Speaker 1: in India translates to an entirely changed lifestyle for them.
Speaker 1: Although it's still obviously highly controversial that this is that's
Speaker 1: going on, but it's a new thing. That's that's been
Speaker 1: happening right outstarting happens all the time. But the reason
Speaker 1: you would go to India is there's really not a
Speaker 1: lot of places you can go for this. Actually America,
Speaker 1: the United States is sort of a hot spot for
Speaker 1: surgacy because it's banned and a lot of Europe, and
Speaker 1: even amongst individual states, there are a lot of rules
Speaker 1: and regulations. In some states, surgacy is just outright banned, um.
Speaker 1: And so there's a lot of sticky legal issues we've
Speaker 1: already alluded to around surgacy. One thing I found kind
Speaker 1: of fascinating is even though we have sort of maybe
Speaker 1: a I thought that this is a good option for
Speaker 1: a couples, in many states, there's a requirement that the
Speaker 1: couple that's receiving the baby be a male female married couple.
Speaker 1: And speaking of all these all these laws surrounding surrogacy, um,
Speaker 1: I think we can't talk about serci without mentioning Baby M.
Speaker 1: Baby M is probably the most famous child conceived through
Speaker 1: a surrogate um. This case happened in Nix and basically
Speaker 1: Mary Beth Whitehead was the surrogate mother who was artificially
Speaker 1: inseminated with the intended father's sperm. She had the child,
Speaker 1: and she refused to get the child up. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they used her eyes. As we mentioned before, this is
Speaker 1: this is why you don't do that anymore, right, That's why, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the gestational surrogacy is common practice now. Because Mary Beth
Speaker 1: white had the surrogate was you know, she's the biological mother,
Speaker 1: she wanted to keep the child, that would be breaking
Speaker 1: the contract um. And so the case went to court
Speaker 1: and the court ended up ruling in favor of the father,
Speaker 1: but they did grant the biological mother limited visitation rights.
Speaker 1: This case highlighted all the controversial legal aspects surrounding surrogacy,
Speaker 1: and I mean, how do you actually work through like
Speaker 1: who is the rightful mother father and all that? So
Speaker 1: that is why there's been this growth in gestational surrogacy.
Speaker 1: I was reading one article, I think it was Newsweek
Speaker 1: that was talking about how right after the baby m case,
Speaker 1: women would come in wanting to be matched with the
Speaker 1: surrogate and they'd be so concerned like what if Surga
Speaker 1: doesn't want to give up the baby? But now with
Speaker 1: you know, good agencies and strong contracts, it's really not
Speaker 1: an issue anymore. Right. And there's also it seems like
Speaker 1: there's a difference to and a woman carrying a child
Speaker 1: when it's from a donor egg and donor Sperniam instead
Speaker 1: of her own egg. They think that there's less of
Speaker 1: a psychological burden, there's less psychological bonding with that child
Speaker 1: because it's not part of that as much part of
Speaker 1: it gemtically part of them, but it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: just so ethically questionable. What does make a mother is
Speaker 1: that the is that the genes, is that the carrying.
Speaker 1: You know, that's sort of why surrogacy is so controversial.
Speaker 1: But to get you know, the mother who did not
Speaker 1: carry the baby legally placed as the mother requires a
Speaker 1: little bit of wrangling, depending on where you live. Right
Speaker 1: before the baby is even born, um, everyone has to
Speaker 1: go to court and get what's called a pre birth
Speaker 1: order to be filled out, and that allows the names
Speaker 1: of the intended parents to be placed on the original
Speaker 1: birth certificate upon birth. So when the baby is out
Speaker 1: of the hospital, the names the surrogate's name is nowhere
Speaker 1: on that birth certificate. Yeah, and but in some other
Speaker 1: states you would essentially have to adopt your own child
Speaker 1: because the surrogate mother's name is placed on the birth
Speaker 1: certificate and you kind of go through a little mini
Speaker 1: adoption process to get recognized on the birth certificate as
Speaker 1: legal mother. Right. So I guess from all of this,
Speaker 1: moming um, I I have learned that surrogacy is it's
Speaker 1: not a simple process. It's not a ninety minute comedy
Speaker 1: starring Tina fe No, it's not. It's not Phoebe on
Speaker 1: Friends carrying her brother's triplets. No, there's a lot more.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more to it to it than that,
Speaker 1: And there's still obviously a lot of controversial issues that
Speaker 1: are still out there with surrogacy. But but I can
Speaker 1: tell you one thing, all right, it's gonna be fun
Speaker 1: to watch those twin girls grow up, because I bet
Speaker 1: they're gonna be very finely dressed if they are daughters
Speaker 1: of Sara Jessica Parker. Oh yeah, they're gonna be some
Speaker 1: fashionable babies. So if you want to learn more about seriousy,
Speaker 1: you can head on over to how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com read a wonderful article called how surrogacy Works. While
Speaker 1: you're there, you can check out the blog that Kristen
Speaker 1: and I write, how to stuff And if you want
Speaker 1: to drop Christen me a line, feel free to email
Speaker 1: us at mom stuff at how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Want more house stuff words,
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