Episode 140 – How to find a surrogate

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you

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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 McKay 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

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and they alternate between surrogates, gay dads and straight mums. How to find a surrogate. This episode is a recording from a presentation that I gave at the annual Growing Families Conference in June, 2021 in Brisbane. This presentation meant a lot to me and it is with great pleasure and pride that I share this with the surrogacy community of Village. What I talk about in this presentation is very close to my heart.

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and one of the key elements is about being vulnerable when exploring surrogacy, both as surrogates and IPs, that stands for Intended Parents. So to model that vulnerability, I channeled Brene Brown and embraced my vulnerability in terms of not having cue cards or written notes for this talk. I had rehearsed the talk many times and decided that it was about going with the flow because there is no such thing as perfect.

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I guess I feel the key message from this presentation is for those who ask, how do I find a surrogate in Australia? The answer is time and investment of time into talking about surrogacy among your family and friends and an investment of time into the surrogacy village and into building friendships. At the end of the presentation, the person to join me on the stage is Narelle Dickinson. Narelle is one of our leading psychologists in the field of surrogacy.

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She’s located in Brisbane and conducts video sessions with people across Australia. If you’d like to see the full presentation of this talk with the images that I mentioned, there’s a link in the show notes. For more ideas like what I discuss, head to the Surrogacy Australia website, then the webinar section, and then a link called further reading. Feel free to share this episode with your families and friends as a way of talking about surrogacy. I also encourage people to attend a growing family seminar or conference

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to hear more talks like mine, usually I’m there doing one of them, and to hear from the panels of parents and surrogates who have navigated surrogacy in Australia and overseas. As always, you’re welcome to reach out to me if you have any questions. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, welcome to the village. My name’s Anna McKay and I birthed as an altruistic surrogate about nine months ago. I birthed for my two dads, and Brendan, and we had a baby boy called Baker.

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and they were initially strangers two and a half years before birth. So you’re new and that can be scary. Quite overwhelming to join a new village. But you’ve done it before, you can do it again. Have a think about those other villages in your life that you’ve been new at. A new school, a workplace, sporting group, neighbourhood, music group. You have to get to know the hierarchy of a village when you join. You have to try and work out who’s new.

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like you, who’s a beginner and going through similar experiences to you, who’s been around for a while, who’s helpful that you can ask questions to. There’ll be some people in each of those villages that’ll be casual acquaintances that you won’t have much to do with. And then there are the elders of each village, those who have a lot of wisdom to share. So how does that work in our village, in our surrogacy village? So we have lots of intended parents. We often abbreviate that to IPs.

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who are new, like yourself, so there’ll be other people that you can share similar experiences with. There are IPs who have matched with a surrogate, either from a stranger or family or friends. Those going through the process, the counselling, the legals, engaging with an IVF clinic, IPs who are pregnant with a surrogate, and then those IPs who are now P’s, who are parents through surrogacy. I’ve got some photos here of our village people. Most of them are here this weekend.

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Of course, there are surrogates in our village. Surrogates learning about surrogacy and looking for people to carry for. There are surrogates who have IPs and are going through the planning stages. Pregnant surrogates, and then surrogates who have birthed a surrogate baby, and they’re some of the elders of our village. There are supporters in our village. The IVF clinics, counsellors, psychologists, doctors, lawyers. There are educators, like myself.

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working for Surrogacy Australia to run SASS and the growing families team who put on conferences and seminars like this to educate you about your surrogacy options. There are partners of surrogates and there are children in our village. There are the children born from surrogacy and the amazing stories that they have to tell. And there are the children of surrogates who have watched their mum be pregnant. And there’s actually a panel later this afternoon about that where you get to hear some of their stories.

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It’s a bit like the first day of school I’d imagine, standing at the front gates there, watching everybody else rush into school, and it feels like they all probably know each other. And you’re probably feeling a little bit overwhelmed, a bit lost, and wondering what to do. And this is your goal. How do I find a surrogate? I’m standing there, I’m looking at that crowd. Where is she? Which one is she? If you had tunnel vision on this, you’d think, okay, what’s my checklist for a surrogate? Right, she has to be female.

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So that means I’m not going to talk to any of the men in the village, because they’re not going to be able to help me. Please don’t do that. That’s not how our village works. We expect you to actually get to know the other village members and to show empathy and to get to know them and share some of your story. But if you did have tunnel vision and you’re just looking for that woman, what’s your other thing on your checklist? She must have a working uterus. So perhaps this talk should actually not be how to find a surrogate. Perhaps it should be…

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How to find a working uterus. Right, that’s what you’re looking for. What else? Okay, have you got anything else on your checklist for this working uterus person? What if I flipped it for you? What if I presented you with 20 women with a working uterus? Here’s a photo of 20 women with a working uterus. Imagine if they were all standing up here with me. This was taken at the surrogates retreat that we had a couple of weekends ago in Adelaide, a national thing with surrogates from across Australia and one from New Zealand.

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So if you suddenly were spoilt for choice and you had 20 you could pick from, what else is on your checklist now? Would she have similar expectations for a surrogacy journey? What are you looking for in terms of pregnancy, perhaps termination of a pregnancy, amount of contact during the building of the surrogate ship, the pregnancy and life after surrogacy? What are her requirements of you? What is she looking for in her set of IPs for this journey? The tests.

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to undergo, but also would you vaccinate your child? Is that important to her or not? So perhaps this talk should not be about how to find a surrogate because the description that you would each have for that might be different. Perhaps this talk should be about how to find your surrogate because the answers that one set of IPs would have to that question about which one of the 20 up here would be your surrogate would be different to another set of IPs. What else can you tell me about your surrogate?

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Is she kind? Is she funny? In a group of people, is she a bubbly one? Is she a quiet one? Was she born in the same era as you? Do you listen to the same music growing up? Do you support the same football team, you and your surrogate? What about this journey that you’re going to go on? It’s gonna last a couple of years. You’re going to create life together. It’s quite a significant thing. Think about other journeys that you’ve been on with other friends in your life. Other.

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sporting groups, workplace milestones, musical events. These people that you go on a journey with inevitably end up being your friends when you share something significant with them. So this woman that had the title of a working uterus or a surrogate, by the end of it, it’s going to be your friend and you’ll be her friend. So perhaps this talk should not be about how to find your surrogate, perhaps it should be how to find a friend. oh

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How do you find a friend? Good morning world, it’s Saturday. My job for today is to find a friend. How do I do that? Right. You’ve done it before, you can do it again. Perhaps it’s easier to imagine how not to make friends. First day in a workplace, coffee machine. Hi everyone, I’m here, Anna’s here, I’m here to make friends. Who wants to be my friend? It’s tricky though, isn’t it? Because you do need to introduce yourself.

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You do need to let people get to know who you are, but you also need to show an interest in them, ask them questions, find out what’s important to them. You’ve made friends before, you can do it again, which means you are worthy of finding a surrogate because you are worthy of having friends. Have a think about some of those other friendships that you’ve made in your life before. A surrogate is a female.

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And so inevitably she’s going to be a new female friend that you have in your life. So I’d actually like you to take a few moments to picture a female friend in your life. I’d like to get you to close your eyes. Imagine a female friend that you currently have in your life, a close friend. Choose someone that’s living. For the hetero guys out there, you might choose your female partner. For surrogates and IPs, other ones, choose one of your female friends. Choose someone

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that has not been your friend since birth, someone that’s come into your life at some point when you joined another village, perhaps school, a workplace, a sporting group. Imagine an arc connecting that friendship from the beginning to now, a line across all of that together. Think about them now in your life. Are they a close friend? Are they someone that you could lean on for support? Can they lean on you for support?

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What have you been through together, the highs and the lows? What highs have you celebrated together? Marriages, birth of children, workplace achievements, sporting milestones, health milestones, sharing all of those good times, both of theirs and yours. Why is this friend a close friend? What makes them different? Is it because you’ve shared the hard times as well as the celebrations and the lows?

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And what about those low times, supporting each other through grief, loss of a family member, fertility struggles, health struggles, sporting defeats? You’ve been there for each other. You’ve been there for her and she’s been there for you. This friendship, I imagine, has happened over a period of time, many months, probably many years. Thinking back a little bit further, back to the beginning, what village did you meet them in?

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Was it a mutual friend that introduced you to each other? There were other villagers there when you met that person. Lots of other people. You may still be friends with some of them. Some of those friends will be friends for a season and some for a lifetime.

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When you went into that village, you didn’t have tunnel vision. You didn’t just focus on that one friend and only spend time getting to know them. You didn’t know at the time that they were going to be one of your closest friends and that you’d have a long arc of a friendship together. You spent time with lots of other people in the village too, asking them questions about themselves, sharing a little of yourself, trust. So you’ve done that before. You can do that again.

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You can open your eyes if you like. And this is what a surrogate’s going to be. Your potential surrogate is going to be in your life. So you are worthy of finding a surrogate because you are worthy of having friends. Surrogacy is going to take time and you need to invest time into your life talking about surrogacy in a couple of ways. One, investing time into our village, into the other village members, be that an online community or in-person catch-ups.

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but also time talking about surrogacy in your life, telling your friends and family that you have a need for a surrogate to either start or expand your family. Not just once, but many times, and perhaps even asking your friends and family to tell other people about your need for a surrogate, because you are statistically more likely to find a surrogate from known connections. Let me tell you why I believe that.

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So I’ve been in a surrogate’s Facebook group for four years. It’s an Australia-wide one, and in that time I collected data from the girls. And of the questions that I asked them, one of them is about are they carrying for a new relationship, so initially strangers, or a current relationship, or an existing one where it was friends and family or introduced via a mutual friend. And then I tracked the births from each year. So in 2018, there were 15 births.

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from new relationships, so people like myself who carried for strangers, obviously now lifelong friends. We don’t have a national set of data on the number of surrogacy births. Each state records their own through when you register the births there. We do have one piece of data. From 2018, there were 86 recorded births through IVF clinic cycles, which means of all the embryo transfers that they did, how many live births via surrogate, 86.

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Now they’re only the surrogate teams that went through an IVF clinic. Sarah Jefford and myself know that there were many other traditional surrogates that happened and those were conceived via home inseminations, which means they’re not recorded in the IVF clinic data. Again, by my data gathering, about 10 % of women are traditional surrogates, so about one in 10. So we can extrapolate that out and add in the traditional surrogates perhaps born in 2018 because Sarah Jefford’s baby was one of them. We can round that out to about 100, let’s say.

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100 surrogate births in Australia in 2018. I can tell you that 15 of them were from new relationships. So where did we have to go to find IPs to carry for when we uh wanted to do it for strangers? We had to go to a Facebook group. Now there’s SASS as one option for finding new connections, but at the time it was just Facebook. So I would like to think that of those 100 births, I could pretty much track all of the ones that were from new relationships.

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whereas the rest, therefore, some may have not been in Facebook groups or online support groups for surrogacy. So 15 out of 100, maybe 20, that means the other 80. 80 % of other surrogate teams were for existing relationships. So you are statistically more likely to find a surrogate from a known connection, which means you need to be continuing to talk about surrogacy in your life to be part of that.

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If you join SAS, we can help educate you about how to share your story. So we have an education and mentoring package. We’ve got a team of mentors across Australia that can help support you and they’ve all been in your shoes and navigated surrogacy before. we can, yeah, help educate you about how to share your story and how to be brave and talk about surrogacy among your family and friends. To be in with that chance of being in the 15 to 20 % who do surrogacy with strangers, obviously there are some Facebook groups as well.

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but you could join for that. So same for surrogates as well. So we pre-screen surrogates and IPs with the hope of introducing people to each other who have similar expectations for a surrogacy journey in terms of the amounts of contact, how you feel about termination. Of course, you still have to invest the time to build that friendship, the surrogacy, but we can guide you on that. We feel like we’ve got the recipe for success having watched other teams do it. And you get access to me and the team up until 12 months post-birth. And so I guess for surrogates as well,

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It saves you having to sort through a Facebook group trying to work out who’s who and who’s gonna be similar to you and have a similar journey that you’re hoping for. So that’s another reason why you join SAS. I suppose it’s the first surrogacy agency in Australia that we’ve created. So it’s a friendship-first model and that’s what we believe in at SASS and that’s how altruistic surrogacy works. Are you up for it? It can be pretty overwhelming.

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because it’s a large investment of time. Altruistic surrogacy will still cost you money, but the larger investment will be one of time. This could probably all seem quite overwhelming and sometimes unachievable, but it can be done. And the photos that I’m about to show you are from teams where they were originally strangers. So I’d like to bring you some hope. There’s some gay dad teams here. So we had surrogate Cass carrying for dads Juan and Christian.

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Myself, we had a planned home birth. Surrogate Madeleine, the two dads on the right there. Beautiful photo here, so many hands bringing this little girl into this world. Surrogate Marnie, all of these teams were strangers before birth and now they’re lifelong friends. Again here with her now mum, Christie through surrogacy. Surrogate Angela, Suze, surrogate for a second time and Charmaine. So, how do you find a surrogate? You don’t, you don’t find a surrogate.

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You find a friend. How do you find a friend? You don’t. You don’t find friends, you make friends. How do you make friends? You already know the answer to that. You’ve made friends before. You’re all amazing people with amazing qualities that other people value and they know, they’ve gotten to know you and know you’re an amazing person. You have to invest time. Time into the village and time into talking about surrogacy in your life.

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The emotional payment for surrogates is one of time and friendship and love, not money. This is the altruistic model of surrogacy. Are you up for it? If not, that’s okay. You might consider some of your overseas commercial surrogacy options instead. But if you are up for it, understand that this investment of time is what we expect of you as a member of our village. So welcome to the village.

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Thank you so much. Does anyone have any quick questions for Anna? Yeah, don’t run away yet. It’s a lot to take. So start with hello. Start with hello at morning tea. Hello at an online group. You’re all new, be brave. Come up to me, say hello. I’ve got a question for you Anna, because one of the things I notice is that often when people are looking to start a surrogacy, there’s a real sense of urgency. Everything was, you know, we wanted to have a baby.

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Years ago. Not in another year or so. How do you slow down and take that time? We say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You have to pace out your energy. How do you slow down? I don’t know. That’s an individual. Willpower. Willpower. You look at those photos and you believe that that’s going to be you at some point. Your child has a story that they will tell. It’s not a one night stand. You wouldn’t

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hook up with your new partner on day one and go, I like you, let’s have a baby together now. That’s how it should work with your surrogate. You owe it to your child that their story is no disrespect of any kids who are a one night stand, but that’s the story that they often say is, I know I was a one night stand. No surrogate baby ever tells that story. They’re not a one night stand. You owe it to them. You want it yesterday, of course you do. But so that we have seen teams fall apart, I guess you have to trust me.

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that when we tell you to take your time, it’s because we’ve seen teams fall apart because they didn’t take their time in the beginning. Even if they were part of that 80 % that did it with friends and family they already knew, just because somebody says, yes, I’ll be your surrogate, don’t start booking the appointments. It takes six months of dating or just thinking about it as a team and have ongoing counselling. So just to repeat the comment that was being made towards the back of the room and then there’s one more question and then we’re gonna have to stop.

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That was that IVF is not a guarantee, whether it’s within surrogacy or otherwise. So part of that slowing it down, taking the time to make the team means that you can roll with the ups and downs and deal with any disappointments if they come. And the chances, they probably will at different points, And one last quick question. So the surrogate at the back was saying there that you need a genuine friendship together to go back to, or to continue with, and again, so that

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We owe it to our children to say, yes, we’re still friends. And so have some ongoing counselling. I’ve had lots. Treat it as a tune up like you would for your car. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you to have counselling. If you’re nervous and you’re anxious and you want it to happen, have a chat to someone and go, what you’re experiencing is totally normal. And you develop a relationship with one of the counsellors that you may end up having for your surrogacy journey. Thank you. Excellent. Start with hello.

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Thank you for joining me. If you’d like to see other recordings with photos, head over to our YouTube channel to watch other webinars. You can head to surrogacyaustralia.org for more information about surrogacy. Also check out our Zoom monthly catch-up sessions, which are a great way to connect with others in the surrogacy community. Attending a Zoom is scary the first time, but there’s only ever one first time.

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We have all been beginners at some stage. As we say, it takes a village to raise a child, and in the case of surrogacy, it takes a village to make a child. So welcome to the village.