With adoption becoming legally more difficult, and greater awareness of surrogacy as an option, many couples (and even individuals) that cannot otherwise bear children are increasingly turning to surrogacy as a possibility to fulfill their parenthood dreams.
In general, couples first investigate surrogacy in their home country. Some couples find that either the cost, or their country's legal environment, makes it very difficult to pursue surrogacy and then start investigating options for surrogacy abroad. The most common overseas option is surrogacy in India, although there are other options.
Although India's first surrogate baby was delivered on June 23rd, 1994, the practice started receiving widespread international attention in 2004 when an Indian woman delivered a surrogate child for her daugther in the U.K. Surrogacy in India gained more attention in 2007, when Oprah featured a U.S. couple pursuing surrogacy in India during her daytime television program.
While 2007 figures from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported 276 successful gestational surrogate pregnancies in the U.S. (with the patient's oocytes), India's clinics likely delivered 150 successful gestational pregnancies (with both patient's and donor oocytes). This makes India the second most common location for gestational surrogacy. However India, unlike the U.S. and Europe, has clinics that specialize in gestational surrogacy.
Each Indian clinic provides support for different types of surrogacy, with many support all types of surrogacy including:
- Traditional: Oocytes (eggs) from a donor are retreived using traditional IVF-ET techniques, are fertilized from the husband's sperm and placed in the recipients uterus. In traditional surrogacy, the recipient is the mother that will raise the child.
- Gestational: Oocytes (eggs) from the biological mother are retrieved using traditional IVF-ET techniques, are fertilized with the husband's sperm, and are placed in the carrier's uterus. The carrier is also known as the gestational surrogate.
- Gestational with egg donor: This is very common for gay male couples, as they seek both a gestational surrogate and an egg donor.
For cycles with gestational carriers using patient's oocytes, SART figures for clinics in the U.S. show that fresh cycles in 2007 had the following results:
- 48% of cycles resulted in live births for women less than 35 years old
- 41% of cycles resulted in live births for women 35 to 37 years old
- 23% of cycles resulted in live births for women 38 to 40 years old
- 19% of cycles resulted in live births for women greater than 40 years old
Of these cycles, 30% had twins, and almost 3% had triplets or more.
In general, oocytes from younger women possess greater fertility potential, so if you are using a donor egg, the donor's age is one of the most significant factors for a successful birth.
Clinics in India have not yet published such specific results, but many do claim success rates close to 50% (although it is difficult to verify these claims). Surrogacy costs for a single successful round typically range from US$17,000 to US$25,000.
In India, surrogacy as a medical process has matured to the point where some clinics specialize in surrogacy (which generally means they have IVF-egg transfer facilities, help identify surrogates, and assist in the legal/contractual process), generally giving them more experience and a greater understanding of the process than U.S. and European clinics that focus primarily on the more traditional IVF.
In researching whether surrogacy India is right for you, this guide provides an overview for selecting a clinic, the process of working with a clinic, the pregnancy, birth and baby pick-up, and then post-baby birth issues.
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The midday sun is ferociously hot outside the Akanksha Infertility Clinic, a scuffed concrete building in the small Indian city of Anand. Crammed into a single patch of shade by the gate, a stray cow and a family of beggars — caked so uniformly in dung-colored dust they resemble clay models — wait out the noontime heat.
Inside, the lobby is jammed with barefoot female patients in circus-bright saris. Nurses in white Indian tunics scuttle among them, hollering out names and brandishing medical files. The air smells faintly of sweat and damp cement.vcp training On the walls, blurry photos of babies and newspaper clippings celebrate the clinic's raison d'être: "The Cradle of the World" declares one headline.In this case, the metaphor is also literal. The Akanksha clinic is at the forefront of India's booming trade in so-called reproductive tourism — foreigners coming to the country for infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization. The clinic's main draw, however, is its success using local women to have foreigners' babies. Surrogacy costs about $12,000 in India,base sas certification questions including all medical expenses and the surrogate's fee. In the U.S., the same procedure can cost up to $70,000.How surrogacy came to be so popular in the choking backwater of Anand, a dairy community with a population of 150,000 in India's western state of Gujarat, is a long story. The short answer is Dr. Nayna Patel, 47, the clinic's director. A charismatic woman with flowing hair and a toothpaste-commercial smile, Patel single-handedly put Anand on the map when, in 2003, she orchestrated the surrogacy of a local woman who wanted to "lend" her womb to her U.K.-based daughter.The woman gave birth to test-tube twins — her own genetic grandchildren — and the event made headlines worldwide. Afterward, Patel was inundated with requests for surrogacy. She now has 45 surrogate mothers on her books, mostly impoverished women from nearby villages. Twenty-seven of them are currently pregnant, and each will be paid between $5,000 and $7,000 — the equivalent to upwards of 10 years' salary for rural Indians. More than 50 babies have been born at the clinic in the past three years, half to Westerners or Indians living overseas.Another example of third-world exploitation?ccie written exam preparation Globalization gone mad? The system certainly lends itself to the criticism that foreign women unwilling or unable to pay high Western fees happily exploit poor women at a tenth of the price it would cost back home. The system also avoids the legal red tape and ill-defined surrogacy laws women face in the U.S. (Not to mention that India, unlike some developing countries, has a fairly advanced medical system and doctors who speak English.) Or is it a mutually beneficial relationship?
The ChaiBaby blog has a post titled "Aged Mummy" and the need for an ED - really?? that also shows ART data on success rates with ones own eggs based on age, and also adds that miscarriage rates go up as egg age increases with the following:
The miscarriage rate after ultrasound confirmation of pregnancy was:
10% at age 25
14% at age 35
28% at age 40
47% at age 43
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