The Important Surrogacy Numbers You Need to Know
In this video, Accredited Family Law Specialist and Page Provan Director Stephen Page talks about numbers — the important surrogacy numbers you need to know.
Transcript
G’day. [It’s] Stephen Page from Page Provan Family and Fertility Lawyers. I want to talk today about numbers, and before your eyes glaze over, these are numbers that illustrate issues to do with surrogacy. I’m often asked, “Well, can we find a surrogate in Australia?”
In fact, only yesterday I was asked that, and the answer is yes, you can. And I’ve got another video coming soon about how to find a surrogate in Australia. But I want to talk about some numbers that put flesh on the bones as to what this actually means for you. The first thing that I want to describe is Australia is a migrant country. And according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about just under half of US 48%, I think, is the number have either come from another country or our parents have come from another country.
And you go, “Okay, so what does that mean in terms of surrogacy?” Well, it means that many people who have come from overseas or their parents have to go back to those countries to undertake surrogacy because they have a look around here and go, “Oh, it’s too hard, or my child will not have the same ethnicity as me because I need a sperm donor or an egg donor, and we don’t have the right type of ethnicity in Australia or enough. So I’m going to go back over there where I’ve got some family support. I know what the systems are over there, and I can do it.”
And you might hear the world people go to places where full surrogacy and I’ll go through the top five destinations shortly in another video.
But some of the places that Australians have gone to, or my clients have gone to, are these: Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Russian Federation, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, UK and US. This is not all of them, but that’s sort of a fair amount of them. Sometimes they didn’t proceed. For example, I had clients who were living in Australia and want to do surrogacy in South Africa. They couldn’t because they had to be domiciled in South Africa.
So South Africa had had some rules. Clients who want to do surrogacy in Ghana. But it didn’t work out my client. So a husband and wife, the wife had a number of embryos transferred to her so fresh embryos and her sister had embryos transferred at exactly the same time. So there they are, side by side.
I don’t know how it worked in the room at the doctors. None of it worked, unfortunately, but that was the intent. They wanted to go through that process in Ghana.
And one of the figures show us in recent times, well, Australians have gone all over the world. And on my web page, the link is here. They have gone to such places as Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, and some of those countries we talked about before. But here are some more. Guatemala, Thailand, and Ukraine.
This is pretty extraordinary stuff. And what we see is that for every child born in Australia, via surrogacy, three are born somewhere else. So put it another way, 75% of children born via surrogacy are born overseas. They’re not born here. So what I’m going to cover in another video is, what are the top five countries?
And how do we compare the number of children born here via Surrogacy with the number of children who are Australian born in the United States? But please please have a look at the paper on my website. All the of statistics are there. Thank you.
For more information and Seeking Legal Advice contact our Surrogacy Lawyers Sydney.
