I should clarify that when I say surrogacy, I’m referring to gestational surrogacy, not the old-school turkey baster method of insemination. Modern IVF technology is so advanced that the egg donor is almost always different from the surrogate. The reasons are two-fold. 

First, there’s the risk of attachment. By using another woman’s egg, there’s a lower likelihood that the surrogate struggles to part with the baby. She views herself less as the mother and more as the carrier, a word often used instead. (I’ll use them interchangeably.) One friend’s surrogate put it nicely: “I don’t think of it as making a baby. I’m making parents.”

The other reason for this division of literal labor is the distinct job descriptions and corresponding qualifications. 

The ideal carrier is a happily married woman with her own children. She enjoyed being pregnant, presumably, and likes the idea of helping someone else grow their family. She has a stable living arrangement and steady household income. She’ll use the money—typically around $30k—for a non-urgent expenditure like her kids’ college fund. This profile tends to align with Mormons and Army wives, a Venn diagram I’d love to see fully fleshed out. 

A donor’s lifestyle is less important. Her involvement totals days, not months, and on the most basic level, she’s a viable candidate so long as she has eggs. It’s a lower bar in that sense, and her pay reflects this—a donor usually makes more like $8k. Unless she’s a supermodel and/or Ivy League student, in which case she can command six figures, I’ve heard. But do your homework! There are cautionary tales of couples finding out they paid top dollar for a beautiful woman who had also paid top dollar to look that way.

In addition to the many subjective things to consider when choosing a donor, there are two objective factors: medical history and age. Women between 18 and 25 tend to produce higher-quality eggs and more of them. (This fact, I learned the hard way, was not as exciting to my childless female friends.)

As for where to do surrogacy, Paolo’s native land bans it, which didn’t surprise me in the home of the Vatican. Then again, surrogacy is the closest thing to Immaculate Conception, so maybe it just needs a rebrand.

What did surprise me was the U.K.’s law. Paying a woman to carry your child, or “commercial surrogacy,” is illegal. The only option is “altruistic surrogacy,” an arrangement based on the claim that the individual or couple isn’t paying a woman to carry their child but merely reimbursing her expenses during the pregnancy. The surrogate is doing it out of the goodness of her heart, not for financial gain. 

It’s a clever loophole to avoid framing surrogacy as a direct transaction in countries that forbid that, but this means there are no legal guardrails around it. An altruistic contract is as binding as a pinky promise. This is bad for surrogacy-enabled parents because a carrier could change her mind and win parental rights in court. It’s bad for carriers, too, because they aren’t protected in the event something goes wrong (e.g. the parents change their mind and don’t want the baby). For this reason, we never considered the altruistic path.

Canada, Australia, and a few other countries share the U.K.’s rule. The world is a total hodgepodge of surrogacy policies, and it’s all relative: at least the U.K. isn’t as bad as Portugal, which, at the time of this writing, allows straight couples and lesbians to use a surrogate but not gay men. Or Croatia, where a friend went to a public hospital for IVF and received a pamphlet that read, “Only Jesus Helps.” 

Finally, there are developing countries like India and Vietnam that are popular for being cheaper. Generally speaking, these places do not allow commercial surrogacy, so my impression is that it’s done under the table with little transparency and questionable ethics. In the best case, you find a surrogate doing it of her own free will with a company that’s only altruistic in name and manages to pay her a fee. In the worst case, you could be funding a coercive system.

By process of elimination, we were left with the United States. 

Well, 46 of them. 

There is no federal law governing surrogacy. When we began looking in 2017, commercial contracts were illegal in Louisiana, Nebraska, and Michigan. If you know American politics, you might think, red state, red state, swing state—makes sense. But the fourth state was New York. A high-profile custody battle in 1988 led to a ban on paid surrogacy that wasn’t repealed until 2020. 

We only knew one gay couple who had kids via surrogacy, and they recommended a Boston-based agency called Circle. 

Actually, wait. Rewind. Is an agency necessary? 

It wasn’t a given for us at the start, but it didn’t take long to appreciate how helpful it would be. Agencies vet surrogates to verify that a woman isn’t doing it out of desperation. They monitor state laws down to the county level to ensure parental rights are never in jeopardy. They manage a master calendar in conjunction with the IVF clinic and the surrogate’s local hospital. And they offer mental health resources for everyone involved. While it’s possible to tackle all of that (and more) on your own, it could easily become a full-time job that results in minor cost savings and major headaches. 

Circle was founded in 1995 by a lawyer who discovered the need for overarching support after having his own two children through surrogacy. We wrote to them and learned from email signatures that many employees also had a personal connection:

Victoria   
Program Manager
Experienced Surrogate

Brett
Outreach Associate
Parent Through Surrogacy

Shannon
Attorney
Experienced Egg Donor

Now this is where I include the massive disclaimer that it was a luxury to do surrogacy in the U.S. with an established agency. It’s incredibly expensive to go this route—in the ballpark of $125k per child when we did it—so it’s often a question of privilege rather than preference. I understand why someone would choose a country or person with more potential risk if the alternative meant not having biological children at all. Paolo and I were in a fortunate minority that could afford this “gay tax,” as he calls it. 

Hopefully the price comes down as the American industry matures and as other countries follow suit in legalizing commercial arrangements. That would be the expected trajectory, just like any other free market where supply grows to meet demand. It’s largely non-economic factors that prevent access today: homophobia, religion, and governments choosing blanket opposition over thoughtful regulation.

Before our first meeting, Circle sent us an Intended Parent Questionnaire “to get to know you, your specific situation, and your needs for the journey better.” 

Thus began the official process and so, too, our initiation into surrogacy vocabulary. You do not say “Mother” or “Father” but “Intended Parent” (IP), an umbrella term for all genders and a means of managing expectations: you intend to become a parent, and fingers crossed that that happens, but if you don’t end up with a baby, this qualified title did not give false hope. 

The other keyword here is “journey,” a euphemism for “total mindfuck and emotional rollercoaster.”