The First Reason Why You Won’t Become Parents through Surrogacy

In this video, Award-Winning Surrogacy & Family Lawyer, Stephen Page discusses the first reason why you won’t become parents through surrogacy.

Transcript

G’day, I’m Stephen Page from Page Proven Family and Fertility Lawyers, and I’m talking with you today about if you give up being the exception to when, not if, you’ll become parents through surrogacy.

Since 1988, I’ve advised in over seventeen-hundred surrogacy journeys for clients from all parts of Australia, and at last count thirty-one countries overseas, and as you’ll hear shortly, I’m also a dad through surrogacy. Most people have straightforward surrogacy journeys. Surrogate gets pregnant, usually the first time. Surrogate gives birth, everything works. Most people, the surrogacy journey takes eighteen months to two years. You’ve got to find a surrogate, you’ve got to get her pregnant, you’ve got to go through all the legals.

So eighteen months to two years is about right, no matter where you go. But if you’re unlucky, it’ll take four years or more. I get asked, well, how many people are in the four year category? Answer, not many, but some and how do I determine whether I’m in the 18 month, two year category or the four year category? You don’t. It’s just random luck because of medical science and how all these moving parts come together. You can’t control it, you get along with it.

But I have clients who give up, and if you give up, you won’t get there. Because in a previous video, I talked about when, not if you were comparing. So one of the exceptions is if you give up, evidently, and who gives up? Well, I’ve had clients who’ve gone through a lot.

They’ve gone through umpteen rounds of IVF, and then they hit a hurdle. Their surrogate has a miscarriage. What do they do? Well, some people give up, and if you give up at that point, you won’t become parents. It’s quite simple. Do something else, do travel, collect stamps, go bush walking, whatever you might do, engage in cooking, have a hobby, have a pet. But you won’t have a child.

On the other hand, I’ve had clients who lost a child. Their child was born at 23 weeks, born far, far prematurely. Three weeks later, it died. They were devastated, as you’d expect. They contacted me and they said, What do we do, Stephen? I said, well, you’ve got two choices. Choice one, give up. No one in their right mind could ever criticise you for giving up. You’ve had the worst thing that can ever happen to a parent, the death of their child.

But what you haven’t done is raise your child to adulthood. They said, Well, that’s what we’d like to do. How do we achieve that? I said, grieve, then breathe, then when you’re ready, get back on your bike. A year later, they had a child.

Now, if they’d been in the same category as the clients who had a miscarriage and given up, we wouldn’t have had that conversation, we just wouldn’t have got there, and my own surrogacy journey was a particularly brutal one, it was a difficult one, and I’ve covered that in another video, but I just want to summarise it. Our surrogate had a miscarriage in the first pregnancy. It was devastating. The second pregnancy was ectopic, something that none of us expected and I’ve never seen in any other journey. Our third pregnancy worked, but our daughter almost died in childbirth. Thankfully, she didn’t. She gives me joy every day of my life.

I am so lucky to have each of my children. So if you give up, you won’t get there. If you persist and you are resilient, you will become parents when, not if you become parents through surrogacy.