Episode 45 – Help us advocate for surrogacy

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This episode is a recap of a webinar we held recently titled Becoming an Advocate for Surrogacy in Australia. If you’re keen to help us spread the word about surrogacy in Australia, regardless of what month or year you are listening to this episode, please get in touch via email to volunteer your time. You can find me at anna@surrogacyaustralia.org During the webinar, it was wonderful to see familiar and new faces come together for a cause that we’re all passionate about. We had about 16 attendees.

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with some suggestions also sent in ahead of time from those who are unable to make it. So to summarize the key points, there are five. Hospital policies, recognizing the need for these in all states and territories and for consistency. A working group would be needed to review surrogacy policies from hospitals that do have them in place and work towards perhaps having a template on our website for hospitals to access when they come to write them and also to reach out to hospitals and share our template policy when that’s written.

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Social media presence, recognizing the impact that reels, videos, with real life stories have in terms of spreading the word. Finding ways to connect that are personal and human. There is power when people share a video of themselves talking about their journey, as evidence from some of those attendees that talked about sharing their own health journeys, which led them to surrogacy, and also those among their family who have shared stories about organ donation.

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Surrogacy Australia currently has a Facebook page and Instagram account which we encourage you to follow and you can see some of the stories that we already share there. But clearly there is a need to share more stories and more of these real personal human stories. Number three, baby expos, fairs.

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Pride Day, so having a presence at these events with people manning booths, being on hand to talk about surrogacy from lived experiences and to hand out brochures. These events cost money for participation, so perhaps some corporate funding or donations would need to be acquired to be able to have a presence at these. National Surrogacy Week. The UK have this, and Australia is quite closely aligned with them in terms of the altruistic model for surrogacy. As a bit of a side note, the paid agency we run, SAS, Surrogacy Australia’s support

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was modeled off a group called Surrogacy UK. They shared their model, their time, and their resources with us when we started SAS in 2019. The UK are probably 15 years ahead of us with their three agencies, and in terms of advocating for surrogacy, so we can learn a lot from them. The idea of a Surrogacy Week could be a celebration of community stories.

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and with a presence from us, the main Facebook group, ASC, Australian Surrogacy Community, the state-based Facebook groups, and perhaps growing families who help people navigate overseas surrogacy. Because the idea of a National Surrogacy Week would also be to celebrate those who were born overseas from surrogacy, because their stories are still similar to those who were born via Australian surrogacy. Part of our vision, my vision, is to increase the awareness of surrogacy. And so for the children that are born from surrogacy, it’s totally normal to grow in the tummy

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of somebody else who isn’t one of your parents. For a National Surrogacy Week, we would want things like TV, radio, social media platforms to pick up on a surrogacy week to help us promote it. Do you have any contacts in this field? If you do, please let me know. And the fifth idea, Socratic discussions. So these would be similar to the social catch-ups that happen in most capital cities, but with a theme to discuss each time.

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Discussions could include how the IVF process works, what ideas do you have for finding a surrogate, how to support a surrogate during pregnancy, what brought you to surrogacy in the first place. We imagine a couple of people might team up to host the event and then to lead the discussion.

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Right, well there’s a summary of what was discussed. As you can hear, lots of great ideas. Now it’s a matter of working with members of the community who have the right skill set and some spare time to make these happen. If you have other ideas or you were not able to attend, please email me as we would love to hear them. If you would like to volunteer your time to help us with one of the ideas mentioned or with a different project, please email me, anna@surrogacyaustralia.org If you would like to join our board, you can read more about it on our website. I’ll put a link for that in the show notes too.

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We have meetings once every two months on a Thursday night at 8 p.m. Sydney time. So where to from here? Please keep in touch with us if you would like to volunteer your time to work on a specific project. In the meantime, help us talk about surrogacy. A good way to do that is to share the social media posts from Surrogacy Australia onto your own page or within groups to spark conversation or even share this podcast episode. Thank you for sharing your time with us and for already being advocates for surrogacy within Australia.

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The Village is stronger because of each of you. If you are looking for more guidance on how to navigate surrogacy in Australia, please check out SASS so that you can have me as your navigation tool on this journey. Until next time, welcome to the Village.