Episode 125 – Dwayne – gay dad

00:14
Welcome to our podcast series with Surrogacy Australia. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen and in turn for helping us spread awareness and appreciation for surrogacy. I’m your host Anna McKie and these recordings are from a regular webinar series that I run. You can find upcoming dates on our website at surrogacyaustralia.org. During the one hour webinars I will walk you through the surrogacy process in Australia and you can type in questions for us to answer. My co-hosts have all done surrogacy in Australia

00:43
and they alternate between surrogates, gay dads and straight mums. This episode is one from the archives, recorded in October 2021 and features dad Dwayne. Dwayne and Shane became dads to their daughter Zara in August 2018. Zara was carried by their surrogate, previously a stranger, Amelia, who was also a traditional surrogate for them, meaning it was her egg. You’ll hear us talk about SAS, Surrogacy Australia’s support service,

01:12
and Dwayne was one of my original mentors within that program for many years. The mentor program has in each capital city surrogates, mums and gay dads, so you can meet with them one-on-one to ask all of your questions and hear about a real journey. I’d like to apologize to listeners because as host, I didn’t steer the conversation back to talking about the birth. Over the four and a half years of hosting these webinars, I believe I have improved my interview skills.

01:40
I now usually like to take the host and listeners through a more sequential journey and pausing on the different stages of surrogacy. From memory, I think Dwayne and I discussed the birth off air before the start of the webinar, but then I forgot that that wasn’t in the recording. As you’ll hear, the labor was over 30 hours long and they had three hospitals, that’s right, three hospitals during labor.

02:06
From memory, their obstetrician retracted their care during labour. Something to do with a clash of their personal weekend commitments and wanting an induction, whereas Amelia was aiming for a vaginal birth. So they had to find a new hospital during labour too, in fact. Not what any surrogacy team imagines their journey will look like. Apologies listeners for not unpacking that part of the story in much more depth with Dwayne. Aside from that, I hope you enjoy this episode.

02:36
Wayne, this is you and Shane and your surrogate Amelia here. Clearly a pregnant photo. So clearly there’s a lot that happened to get to this photo. So how did you meet Amelia? So we actually

02:48
met through a catch up. A bit of a long winded story though, we actually went to an egg donations catch up to find out how egg donations happened in Australia. In fact, both Shane and I were walking down a driveway because it was at someone’s house, very daunting. And it just so happened that there happened to be someone else walking in at the same time because we both looked at each other and went, what are we doing?

03:09
We sat, we walked down, we actually met some really lovely people. I suppose the one thing you’ve got to remember with going to these catch-ups is everyone’s in the same boat. So no one’s there and doesn’t know why you’re there. Everyone’s there for the reason and everyone’s there to create a family at another day. And we still attend the catch-ups ourselves because it shows people that this does actually happen. So we actually met through a lady that was actually at the catch-up. Our journey was very fast. So we actually were

03:39
chatting with Amelia over the phone. Amelia’s very much a messenger person so we were messaging quite a bit um and she because she’d done this before she’d offered a lot of information to us and and she was in Sydney, we were in Brisbane. Somehow it came to and now I realize we were a bit pushy back then. um We actually flew down to Sydney to actually

04:00
just meet her more than anything. And it wasn’t about meeting her to become our surrogate, it was about meeting her to get more information about everything. We were so fresh to all of this and we didn’t know the process and the fact that she had done it before was the reason why we were so, I suppose, over enthusiastic.

04:17
to run down to Sydney and get as much information as we could. She had the knowledge and was willing to share it. Yes. And so for those that don’t know, when you say she’d done it before, do you mean egg donation or surrogacy or both? So Amelia has actually done two surrogacies. She’s actually on her third right now. And she also has done two egg donations as well. So both of her previous surrogacies were traditional surrogacies, so they’re all.

04:40
there her egg. So she’s technically got four biological children out there and the current surrogacy she’s doing is a donated egg and actually think they donated embryos to be honest. ah think I remember I met them when we were chatting with you guys up at the Brisbane Conference this year and I met the parents-to-be and I think I remember hearing that too. So we sort of started chatting we went down and funny enough we spent the whole weekend with each other something clicked. Shane and I actually had decided we were actually flying down to

05:10
Sydney and drive back from Sydney because we wanted to digest what we were doing, not just get back on a plane, go back, we’re back in our lives and we haven’t processed what just we discussed. Yep, good idea. And funny enough, you know,

05:23
while we were traveling back, the conversation started about her potentially being our surrogate. So everything clicked from our perspective. It happened very fast. I suppose we did put a profile up on ASC and have a profile. And obviously she had read the profile before any of this anyway, um and had what was looking for IPs and it seemed to click. It happened very fast. As I said, it did happen very fast. That’s probably the biggest thing that was the hardest thing on our journey was because it happened so fast.

05:53
and we were strangers to each other. We didn’t know how each other clicked and or things like that work.

06:01
It’s like having another person in your relationship at the end of the day that you necessarily wouldn’t have had a relationship with if that makes sense or such a relationship with and you don’t understand what makes them tick or what doesn’t make them tick and that’s why I think as as much as our journey was great to be fast it was probably the one thing that I would change in our journey is getting to know Amelia a bit better before we went down the Yeah I want to unpack that with you a little bit more so let’s come back to that. Yeah let’s come back to this photo and so this was

06:31
a pregnant photo I’m assuming? Yes it was, yes it was. uh think, oh goodness me, I say our daughter is actually three years old now so this was, I’d say we were probably about six months pregnant at this stage. we actually had pre-birth photography as well as birth photography as well. Look, I suppose it captures it all, you know, I suppose it was very surreal for us m being that, so Amelia lived in Sydney so there was a lot of traveling back and forth and we’d only see her once a month so for us

07:00
to actually be holding a tummy that was something that was growing inside for us was pretty surreal. Yeah, and it’s like a long distance pregnancy that your child is gestating over there. Yeah, we had uh a surrogate counselor, Sarah Jane Duryea on last week. And one concept that she talked about is that babies are gestated in the body and the mind. that so the surrogates are the one gestating the baby, but the parents to be the ones imagining their baby in their life already in the room, it’s going to grow up in and the things you’re going to do with it.

07:30
you’re back in your home knowing where this child’s going to grow and live up and getting ready for it and occasionally you see the belly I’d imagine and and your friend obviously so and putting it together and so then I mean we could I mean I’ve got so much we could talk about in terms of the birth that that you know we could do all night on just that because it was three hospitals people during labor changed hospitals multiple times so so so the birth photography made it to the last one

07:55
Yeah, so the birth photographer was all the way through. Oh, wow. Okay. And did you know you were having a girl? Yes. Yeah, we did do a gender reveal. Yes, beautiful. And there’s Miss Zara there. So and then oh

08:09
Life after surrogacy, hey? Looks like it could be a of a man house at your place. It is, that was I think a wedding photo that we had gone to, so she’s our barnacle of joy. She owns us, put it that way. She owns you, she’s got a cheeky smile on her there by the looks of things. Big giggle, I’d imagine. Cool, so there’s your little girl and so then, and so Zara there is also biologically connected to Amelia too. So Amelia, so there are a lot, so for those listening tonight, there’s some unique things about Amelia.

08:37
She’s a rare surrogate that has been a surrogate and offered to be a surrogate without having had her own children first. And then she’s also a traditional surrogate. So did you guys, I should know this, but I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten. Did you have to go through a clinic to facilitate that or did you do home insemination? Oh yeah, we went through a clinic. You did, right. And so I hear Queensland’s one of the few places that will facilitate clinic traditional. So did she go through an egg collection to collect her eggs? Yeah, so we went through the egg collection, did the deposit, I suppose, ourselves and created the embryos and

09:07
obviously, we actually did medicated cycles. Oh, right. So you could plan her cycle with her body so you could plan the transfers a bit. Yeah, so we did medicated cycles. think we took memory. think Zara was our fourth attempt. Oh, right. Yeah. And were they just didn’t work after the two week wait or there was some, they lasted for little while sometimes? Look, they did last for a little while but um

09:30
but you get HCG level readings. But because it was a medicated cycle, you didn’t know whether any of that was related to the medicated cycle, I suppose. So in some ways having those three failed transfers then slowed your team down just a little bit then. Very little bit. Just three months. So what are we talking then? So from that first catch up, because I’m sure people listening are going to go, okay, how fast are we talking there? Okay, so from meeting Amelia to actually Zara’s birth was 13 months.

09:58
So you got to remember that in 13 months, there’s nine months of gestation and Zara went to full term. Yep, full term and you had three months of failed transfer. So you’re saying from pretty much that first catch up to the trip down to Sydney, you then smashed out counseling and legals within like a fortnight? Within, I think it was about three or three weeks or something like that, three or four weeks. Wow. Yeah. might be, let’s say maybe 14 months by the time I add it up. It’s probably about 14 months. Sure.

10:26
That’s good. Let’s round that out. That’s it. If there was a uh recipe that I would recommend in SAS, but I mean, every team is different. I would roughly recommend six months of dating and then allowing time to do all that paperwork for us. took six months. So that way, you’re not stressed and buffered. mean, sometimes it can get done quicker and then assuming pregnancy takes nine, 10 months, you know, round out a year. So that’s why we sort of say from the time a surrogate offers or no, no, meets, could two years is a reasonable timeframe. So yours was a quick one there. Lucky. So Amelia was experienced.

10:56
and knew how the steps worked and sort of took you along for the ride. I suppose the one thing that we do recall is, you know, when we went down to Sydney to meet Amelia, she asked us every question that we would get asked in our counselling.

11:10
She knew all the questions already. She’d already asked them all. So she knew what our reaction and everything was going to be and probably sort of preempted a lot of stuff going through. And because she’d done, know, seen the legal agreements before and that sort of stuff for her, was just not so much just a change of name for her. was a she knew what she wanted. It was more about us getting our heads around it. Yeah, definitely. So what does life look like now? So is she still in Sydney? I knew she was Tasmania for a bit, but she actually lives 45 minutes away from us.

11:40
Oh right, okay fantastic. Now had lunch on Saturday so we still catch up. We chat you know every so often to Zara, she’s Zara’s auntie, that’s the way that we decided that that’s how that would work. It’s not like we were going to hide that fact, it’s not like with two guys we could turn around and say but we created you. It’s not like, we’ll put this way, this is something funny from from daycare yesterday, Zara, one of the teachers is pregnant, so she

12:06
ran around to us yesterday and goes, daddy, baby in your belly. And we both looked at each other and goes, well, now we’ve put on some weight since in the last six months, but holy. oh So, from that perspective, she’s only three. She doesn’t fully understand Auntie Amelia, I suppose. But we have books that we read to her that talk about all of it. It’s not ever anything we were going to hide from her. You know, we actually did a lot of uh also, suppose, counseling research in the background of kids who were donated eggs and that sort of stuff that were

12:36
never told till they were 18 and the ramification mentally on someone.

12:40
from that perspective. She might not be biologically one of our eggs, but she’s our daughter at the end of the day. And you know what? Biology doesn’t matter. Yep. She knows who her two parents are. Yep. Be they whatever genders that those parents are. Yep. Can I ask a question that I hope isn’t too, oh, beginner question. So my daughter, the other day, I showed her the post that I did that I was doing this webinar with you. And I said, you know, this is Zara and she’s got her two dads. And so she knows Matt and Brendan and she knows Brendan’s the stay at home dad. I’m sometimes, you know, a classic question

13:10
for the two gay guys might be, yeah but who’s the mum, right? Yeah, roll your eyes. But Emily came up with this question was, who’s the main dad? uh Out of Dwayne and Shane, I said, well who do think the main dad is with Matt and Brendan? She said, oh Brendan, and she’s like, because he stays home with

13:24
Baker most of the time. Is there a main dad in your house? Look, I would say not because we both work now. So we’re both working. We’re both full time work. First of all, she tries it both on for both of us. So it doesn’t really matter. You know, one thing that she currently runs around doing is calling Shane dad and runs around and calls me Dwayne. Oh, does she?

13:46
That’s a bit like Bart Simpson calling his dad Homer. I’m like, I’m like, I didn’t have a child to be called Dwayne. No. And are you a dad or daddy or a pa? So we actually both go by daddy because, and at the end of the day, you know what? When she wants the other daddy, she actually tells Eve, I want the other daddy. The other daddy. Yeah. They come up with their own language and things too. And when she was first born, oh, there’s a thing for people who are new, by the way, you do get paid parental leave in surrogacy if you, if you meet the work test. And so does

14:15
surrogate too. Surrogates also get maternity leave if they’re workplace, education, police, or medical nurses and stuff. They’re quite often quite generous so you do get your maternity leave there. Did one of you two stay home primarily in that first year or you shared it? So Shane stayed home in the primary things and Shane qualified for his work to actually

14:36
paid parental leave. also Amelia qualified for the government paid parental leave as well, which some people see as odd, but at the same time, you know, that’s what happens also with adoption and that sort of stuff. They actually offer the leave to both parties, which is great. It’s fantastic. And you’d be surprised how many employers actually have in, you know, their work policies about surrogacy. I never thought that, you know, in my work, I work for a multi-corporation and they actually have surrogacy listed in there as you can take

15:06
for parental leave. Good and so they should and so again anybody that’s brand new that’s probably the one thing in surrogacy that’s double dipping that two people get paid parental leave for one child because the surrogate is the legal parent of the child initially. Parentage order often goes through I don’t know four, six, nine months after birth depending on teams and states and then the primary care of the child also gets the paid parental leave. Whereas so many other things in surrogacy don’t get covered by Medicare particularly when you’re doing IVF. So if you can do it under fertility preservation to start with

15:36
That’s good. if you’re a straight couple, try and bank as many embryos as you can. Here, nobody’s asking questions. So warm up people. I’ll hit you with some of the classics. How much did it cost you?

15:46
So can I just say as was a very expensive journey, but that was because we went private with a lot of things, did a lot of flying back and forth. So we included all of that sort of in our costings. So let’s say we didn’t see much change from 90,000. But we know of, know, families out there that have done it for 30. Yes. So let me add in my research. So those brand new listings, okay, I’d say the range is 35 to 90, 85, 90,000. I know of another Queensland team, you know, this year birthed that were 90 because I had an

16:17
tens of thousands of loss of wages for the surrogate health issues during pregnancy. An average I would say is about 55,000. Baker cost his dad 60. Those at the bottom end would be people that who already have their embryos made. The surrogate lives locally to them. It probably works first embryo transfer and there are not really loss of wages. That’s pretty normal pregnancy. At the upper end would be people who have multiple embryo transfers, live interstate from each other, possibly have loss of wages, possibly have multiple egg collection cycles because that’s like

16:46
My dad spent 30,000 on two egg collection cycles because there’s no Medicare rebate for them at the time. think something’s changed in Adelaide at the moment. So yeah, so because of your interstate private couple of Enver transfers, even though they were quick ones, they were quick. And remember we did it all fast. So we spent higher amounts of money.

17:04
Yes. And so what we would say to people is that if you could have 10, 20 grand saved before you start surrogacy, that’d be good. My boys, it was a two and a half year journey to spend 60,000. So you don’t have to have it all up front. You still earning money as a surrogate. I wanted to know they had a backup plan. So that’s why it’s really important that I met the parents and therefore knew them. And I knew that if they could cover them for a $10,000 loan, five, 10,000, if they had to. So that was an important thing. Julian, I’m loving that we answering your questions as you type them. So that’s helpful too. These are the classic questions people ask in surrogacy.

17:34
so I’m quite used to what people want to know at the beginning. Alyssa is asking us, are the costs a lot more for international surrogacy that we know of? Dwayne, what about, do you know of other friends that have done international, what they can roughly spend? Before we even went down to domestic surrogacy, we went through the options of adoption and commercial surrogacy. And at that stage, look, I would have thought Canada, we were looking in the vicinity of 90,000 anyway.

17:58
but that’s also altruistic surrogacy. But if we went to somewhere like America, we were talking in the vicinity, and this was a few years ago now, but let’s say 150 US from memory. Yeah, I would say from what I hear, once you add in accommodation, if you go over it for a visit or two, I’ve heard 250. Yeah, and the difference with that is you have to have it upfront. You have to put it into an escrow account for them. Yeah. That was, suppose, big, not an off put, I mean, at the end of the day, know, $90,000 is still a lot of money, but we were able

18:28
to progressively uh save it rather than having to pull stuff off mortgages and etc like that. Yeah, yeah and so I hear Ukraine is possibly one of the cheapest at about 90,000 but don’t quote me on the ethics of any of these countries. Sam Everingham is running some seminars in person in Sydney and a live one in Melbourne. Go to the Growing Families website. That’s a session he’s running in November. That’ll give you a massive rundown of all your overseas options. Thomas asks us, can both dads be listed on the birth certificate after the parentage order transfer is made?

18:58
As Anna said, it was originally Amelia and her husband that was on the thing. And then when we transferred it, funny enough, it came again with Amelia and her husband’s name on it and we rang them up and they got it changed. But I think the way that her birth certificate is actually listed is it’s actually father and then the second one is parent.

19:16
In Adelaide, it’s parent one, parent two. Okay. Yeah, right. So, yeah, so both on there. And then it often has a note saying more information is kept. Is it at birth, and marriages? In case you all lost contact, there’s a record that the first birth certificate existed and that Zara could access that and to say that she was born from egg donation and surrogacy. There too. Did you have any legal issues in terms of needing a birth certificate before you had it? Like for Medicare or childcare enrollments or anything like that? No, so the funny thing was as soon as oh

19:46
we registered for the Centrelink payments with the, you know, your, what the government gives you for maternity leave. It automatically gave Shane a Medicare card with Zara’s name on it. So it automatically happened. We just took our surrogacy agreement into Medicare. We did it before Zara was born. And the only thing we had to supply, Kira, what the name of the birth registration was.

20:10
Yes, that you get from the hospital. Yeah. So we just took a photo of that and uploaded it and it was done from there. Yeah. I think it needs a midwife or obstetricians, know, signature on a roll stamp, something like that. And we had a planned home birth, but we had midwives from our local public hospital here. And again, we got that, you know, the form with the birth registration to confirm a birth happened sort of thing that you need. there’s a thing, don’t put the child on the surrogate’s Medicare card at any point in time. It’s too hard to get off. These are all these things for sass, Dwayne.

20:40
I want to have like a cheat sheet for people when you come to register for parentage order in each state when you come to do Medicare be really good to have that so we’ll add all these things in over time. So in some of the the toughest stressful situations of your surrogacy journey what’s something you learned about yourself in that time?

20:57
That’s a really good question. Geez. Can you get back to a couple of stressful situations? I suppose to not second guess what we were doing was wrong. Yeah. Like there was a couple of points where we felt like there was miscommunications and I suppose between Amelia, Amelia’s very much a text us. She’s not a pick up the phone. I can tell you in the since I’ve known her I’ve been to the phone twice. Yeah, right. So that’s that’s if that puts how much we message and including like we would message you know 30 40 messages

21:27
when we message to have the conversation but and you couldn’t change that so you had to learn to adapt but you also can’t get any emotion out of a text message yes you can read text messages a lot wrong and and i found you know my gut instinct was pretty good yeah so i learned a lot about what my gut was trying to tell me was correct interesting yeah so it’s interesting because i as a surrogate i would read into the tone of voice of the text messages and overanalyze it but it’s interesting then

21:53
you’re sort of on the other end, you’re trying to gain information out of what she’s giving you, particularly when it’s a new friendship relationship, so you don’t have five years of watching their in-person interactions to hear that tone of voice. So were there occasions then you’re saying where there was a miscommunication? Oh, for sure. Even Shane and myself went through counselling together.

22:16
with Katrina Hale. So we actually went ourselves to go get counseling because we found that it was, know, Shane would read a message one way, I’d read it another way, and then we’d have an in-fight in between. Right. I think she means this. No, I think she means this. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And then trying to work out how you reply to that would have been challenging. So that was some ongoing counseling during the pregnancy, you mean? Amelia had a couple of sessions. the way that we worked was it

22:41
We obviously had a credit card that Amelia could use, but we also had a understanding with Katrina that if Amelia wants to come for you to counseling, just charge the card. Don’t ask the question, just charge the card. If she needs it and if we need it, just charge the card. And I suppose maybe that’s sort of some, and look, can I say I’m not discouraging the counseling by any means, but I’m just saying maybe that’s where we probably spend a lot more money than we thought. Cause we just were like, just put it on the card.

23:05
And not the counselling was amazing. Don’t get me wrong. think anyone that is going to have a baby, even straight, you know, anyone that has a baby should go and do that counselling. Yeah, right. Really makes you consider what happens if something’s wrong with the pregnancy. What happens if all those questions that you would never think about, even if you were a husband and wife team and could have a baby really instantaneously. think people like that should have that counselling. I agree. They’re very considered babies in pregnancies here, think. And I reckon

23:35
statistically, like of my five years in the community, watching all the surrogates and IP teams, I can only think of one team who have ever split up as the IPs after birth. I think they all stay together because they’re very considered in their becoming of parents, both straight and gay. Can you think of many that have split? I know of a couple, but at the same time, I can see both sides of the story. Yeah, sure. And at the end of the day, everything does have two sides.

23:59
Oh yes. And then sometimes the truth is the third one in between. And you know, people have, as we say, weird text messages, people have different perceptions of what something is. Absolutely. Got a couple more questions here to sum up the night. So Julian asks, what are some of the difficult hurdles during the pregnancy for both IP and surrogate? I wouldn’t say difficulties, but ours was travel because our appointments were in a different state. So making sure everyone’s calendar aligned up. Amelia was still working full time. We were working full time, making sure

24:29
the doctor’s appointments much stuff so we could all be there because that was the one thing that we said we’re committed so we want to be there I don’t want Amelia to go to an appointment and feel like she’s there what are these guys doing you know what I mean I’ll send them a picture once it’s done so that was probably a hard thing from our perspective this sound really odd but as gay guys working how pregnancy works yes big part from our perspective yeah so we we went through 35 hours of labor and we were in the room the whole time we were in the shower we were everywhere that I

24:59
I never thought that I would ever have been, you know, learning pressure points because we went to 40, just over 41 weeks in the end that, you know, we were trying to do massage and pressure points and I didn’t know what a robozo was for, you know, little things like that, like natural birthing and all these things. We did a hypnobirthing course, so the boys became quite hands on.

25:21
And I didn’t realize I could find my obstetrician midway through pregnancy, because that’s why we changed hospitals twice after. Hear that? People find his obstetrician midway through. And you can. It’s empowering to go. You still have choice.

25:36
and still make changes and go, this isn’t right for our team. So that’s a good question, Julian. Yeah. Little hurdles. guess I’ll just add for us, we got quite good at conflict resolution. Our strategy was when something wasn’t right, everybody say what they, how they feel, but then make a time about a week later to come back. And we’re specifically going to talk about the elephant in the room as uncomfortable as that is, we need to talk about it to get through. So we had disagreements on if we were going to do a gender reveal or not. I didn’t want to, they did. This was before pregnancy nearly broke us as a team. I had to find a way to work through that and we did. And it was really positive.

26:06
miscommunications in text for me, sometimes counseling helped with that. Sometimes it was just us as a team coming back together and going trying to see it from each other’s point of view. So it’s the relationship element, I would say, creates most of the hurdles. It’s not the logistics of all the appointments, they’re manageable once you’re there, but it’s that reading people. And even if you knew the people beforehand, you’re reading them in this pressure cooking situation. So Julian, yeah, and anybody listening, would advise that you almost need to try and practice conflict before the pregnancy.

26:36
So you need to like, and with Sass, one of our team building exercises is like, maybe go to each other’s house and cook dinner in their house and clean up and see if you do it right and put away the dishes and see if the other person, you know, lets you do it or fold their washing or something and see what they’re like under pressure. And then how you talk about that saying, I see you’re uncomfortable. It’s very hard to replicate conflict until you’re in it, isn’t it? Wash their undies, put them out on the dry fold them and give them back to them. And then you’re like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

27:05
Did you guys do that? Yeah, we did too. During when we were signing the legals, had a vasectomy the week before and then they and he needed a rest. It was during Christmas like time. And so yeah, Glen usually folds all the washing. So I’m like, well boys, Glen’s out of action. You need to do his jobs. So they did. And so when you see your dads to be, you know, smacking each other with your husband’s jocks in the face, like, you know, we’re new friends here. And I just, you have to just get over it. Seeing mess in your house and letting other people in. So you’ve got to move through that discomfort, I suppose. And I suppose Amelia lived with us from

27:34
about 30 weeks, 32 weeks onwards. So it was about living with someone we never lived with either. Wow, that might be unusual that worked for your team due to her work and she could come up and yeah, I mean, I guess most surrogates would have their own kids. That wouldn’t have worked. Yeah, you would learn a lot about each other then. Yeah, wow. There’s some good questions there. So Lindsay asks us and thanks us for the webinar. If we’re growing our own embryos, is there an unwritten expectation on how many we should have?

28:00
I can answer this, but what would you give as a guide? I’m probably going to say the wrong thing, but personally, I would have thought as you’d want at least four or five embryos.

28:09
As surrogates that would make them feel comfortable? Yeah, think a surrogate to me and Amelia had said this to us, if we had one embryo to her, it’s a lot of work to go through and get to a point of transfer for one embryo. And especially if the intended parents only have the one embryo and don’t want to actually facilitate going for further uh embryo creation. So to me, you know, four or five, I’ve heard of people do it at three, but then I’ve seen people do it at one. And then once the one transfers,

28:39
done and it didn’t work, everything breaks apart. Yes. Yeah. So you can still do one and yeah, the team falls apart. So by my data gathering in the surrogates group, weirdly enough, 50 % of teams have a live baby on that first embryo transfers and 90 % do it within three embryo transfers. That then doesn’t account for the other 10 % or the other teams that never got to a live birth and stopped after a couple, or there’s some teams that kept going at seven. But yeah, so there’s no guarantee. I would, you’d want at least three in the freezer and have perhaps a backup plan. You have a donor.

29:09
on board or something have a plan there. I’d agree with four or five would be comfortable. And then Jan is asking us, so what’s one thing you wish your surrogate would have done during the pregnancy? I guess something different that you wanted from her perhaps. Talked on the phone. Sorry, that might sound really simple, but it to me, it was very hard to read text messages and I’m very uh

29:29
person that stews on things. So I will make something into what it’s not. Yes, same. So I challenge you on this. If you had your time again, Brian, be it with Amelia or not, knowing that that’s something that’s important to you, would you verbalize that early on and say, I need to talk on the phone from time to time, even if it’s someone like Amelia, can you accommodate this in some way? Do you think she would have?

29:52
But that’s good. Would you have pushed on with it? It wouldn’t have been a showstopper because I would have, I suppose I just would have done a lot more focusing on how I typed things and how, and just said that the communications need to be better. And you know what, in fact, I’d probably more have done a, actually put a calendar reminder in and actually did a counseling session so that we had that sort of face-to-face, even it was a zoom call or something like that. Yeah, zoom calls. Or do you mean counseling as a team? As a team. So even if we had a monthly counseling session where we’d get it all up

30:22
chest and I could see her face to face and that sort of stuff. uh It was hard doing it interstate.

30:27
but then it was hard doing it because Amelia likes to work a lot as well. So that was probably a hard thing to swallow from our perspective as well. know. workaholic, you might want her to slow down a little bit. that’s why we did embryo transfer. We were pregnant and she was on a flight to London. And back. And back because she was babysitting a well-to-do family child, uh albeit first class, but we’d just done a transfer. She jumps on a plane and then you don’t.

30:55
hear from her for such a long period and then coming back it was sort of a uh-oh. You all your head all of a sudden thinks about my goodness she’s just had a she’s just had a transfer is the pressure of the plane do anything to this? You know all of those other things start going through your head which it doesn’t it doesn’t because people do it all the time. That’s true.

31:12
And, I think I’m hearing tonight that it’s, want to empower IPs to say it’s okay to want what you want and to speak up for what it is you want. And every surrogate is going to be different. And we do love languages quiz, you know, in SAS cause it’s communication style. So learning about what people want and speaking up for what it is that you want is what I’m taking from this. Any last sort of, before I sum it up, parting words and advice that you would give to people who are at the beginning. be scared. Yeah. We’re all in this for the same, not for the same reason, but you know,

31:42
We’re all here to support each other. And at the end of the day, make yourself known in the communities. There is an, you know, intended parents pages, you know, ASC, you know, and if there are catch-ups organized, go to them and don’t feel nervous about it because the person sitting beside you is there for the same reason. Just remember that. That’s good advice. And even if you say to them, I’m feeling awkward, bet you’re feeling awkward too. And make that a common theme. So that’s great advice. Thank you. So thanks Dwayne. Thanks everyone. See you around. See ya.

32:11
Thank you for listening to this episode. see the beautiful images mentioned, head to our YouTube channel to watch the webinar recording. If you’re looking for more support and potentially connecting with a surrogate or intended parents, head to our website, surrogacyaustralia.org, to check out the resources and to learn more about SASS. Please subscribe to this podcast if you found it valuable and share it with someone so they too can benefit from this conversation. Until next time, welcome to the village.