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

In this video, Page Provan Director and Award-Winning Surrogacy & Family Lawyer, Stephen Page discusses the 2nd reason why you won’t become parents through surrogacy.

Transcript

G’day, Stephen Page from Page Provan. Since 1988, I’ve advised in over seventeen-hundred surrogacy journeys for clients throughout Australia, and at last count, thirty-one countries overseas.

I’ve talked before about when, not if, you’ll become parents through surrogacy and I want to talk about the second exception to that, and that is if you don’t have enough money. Surrogacy is not a free process. There are limitations on how you undertake surrogacy, and I just want to throw some numbers out there, and these numbers come from the sheer number of surrogacy cases that I’ve advised in, that I see how much people are spending.

I advise on how much they’re spending, and I don’t just look at how much the surrogacy agency might say it costs, or how much the IVF clinic says it might cost. I look at the whole journey, and I do that from this experience, not only because I’ve helped clients to go there, but I’ve done it myself.

There is nothing quite like it standing at the counter of an IVF clinic and being told ever so sweetly by the woman behind the counter, that’ll be $3,000 thank you, and you immediately think, aside from having heart fluctuations, do I have that on my credit card?

Is it there? So I want to talk to you about a budget. If you’re doing surrogacy in Australia, you should be looking at somewhere between $30,000 and $70,000. If you’re lucky, you’ll get away with it for $30,000. If you’re unlucky, $70,000. So I say budget $70,000. Most of that cost is the cost of IVF.

The less IVF you do, the cheaper it will be. A portion of that cost, but certainly not most of it, by any stretch of imagination, are the lawyers costs and that’s both sides and counselling, and it’s hard to give a general rule because everyone’s case is different, and it’s also the case that there are different laws in each state and they say what counselling should occur and these laws are pretty tight and they vary.

So for example, Victoria, there’s two counsellors that are required before you go off to the patient review panel. In South Australia, there is one counsellor at the beginning. New South Wales has one or two counsellors at the beginning, depending on which clinic you go through, and one counsellor… Sorry, two counsellors at the end, one doing an assessment, and one providing counselling. So this just gives an illustrational in those states how the amount of counselling varies.

But that kind of number, thirty to seventy-thousand. If you’re going overseas, the numbers go up, and the kind of numbers you’re looking at is, if you’re going to Canada at current exchange rates, I’d be saying one-twenty to one-forty thousand.

If you’re going to the United States, then the kind of cost is between at current exchange rates, one hundred and forty-five thousand and three-hundred thousand. Although one agency has a VIP option, I’d say four-hundred thousand would be your overall cost. So going overseas has the complication that, aside from being more complicated and more expensive, you might be committing a criminal offence back home.

So I’ll cover that in another video.

Thank you.