The Waiting Game of Having a Baby Through IVF and Surrogacy

Having a baby through IVF and surrogacy as a queer man is anything but ‘straight’forward (pun intended, and practicing on my dad jokes).

After embarking on this process in earnest about 1 year ago, I was not prepared for the peaks and plains of the journey.  I think this is a crucial component for men to be aware of before starting on their path to fatherhood through IVF and surrogacy.  It’s definitely an (emotional) marathon, not a sprint, and embracing that mentality is important to maximizing the enjoyment of the experience.  

In this article, I want to talk through some of the exciting highs and less thrilling periods of our journey thus far.  I won’t say lows, because (fingers crossed) we have been fortunate enough to not have any significant setbacks or complications, but there have been seemingly vast periods of waiting that have been more challenging than I had anticipated. 

My husband and I did about 6 months of research online before our first major event, which really marks the official beginning of our journey.  This event was the Men Having Babies (MHB) conference in Berlin, Germany (https://menhavingbabies.org/berlin).

This conference was the closest one to us in Sweden, but MHB has incredible events all over the world.  I cannot recommend this conference enough as a way to meet other intended and current queer dads; learn all about the process of ethical surrogacy in the U.S. and Canada; and meet with reproductive endocrinologists, surrogacy agencies, and lawyers that you can consider working with on your journey.

Feel free to read more about the beginning of our journey in a previous BabyMoon Family article (https://www.babymoonfamily.com/original-articles/beginning-surrogay-journey).  This article walks through the thought process we had in choosing our clinic and agency, which was a significant high as it felt like all our research and learnings from the MHB conference came together in a milestone decision.

However, as soon as we had made a decision, we were confronted with one of the more tedious aspects of the journey:  Contracts.

Contracts are essential, vitally important, and incredibly powerful for the process of becoming a father through IVF and surrogacy.  Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but respect for the contracts, and they are one of the things that makes the U.S. a world leader in assisted reproductive technology (ART) because they offer things like giving intended parents the ability to be the parents of record from the beginning of their child’s life.  

That being said, I can also say that reading through contracts and going back and forth with questions is an extremely time consuming and tedious experience.  For our master service agreement with our agency, the document was 25 single spaced pages, detailing everything around egg donors, gestational carriers (GC), insurances, and birthing plans.  Going through this contract took hours of reading, discussions with each other and the agency, and weeks of back and forth comments and clarifications.

This contract is also just the beginning, as we will have separate contracts with our recently selected egg donor, with our GC (when we match) detailing all aspects of the pregnancy and delivery, and additional documentation before and after the birth of our child.  

The time spent on these contracts is enormous, and while that is critically important and should not be minimized or shortened for any intended parent, it can still be excruciating when you are full of excitement and joy and just want to celebrate your growing family plans.

I will say that as the journey has continued, we had an epic high in traveling from Stockholm to Los Angeles to visit the clinic for the first time and make our all important sperm donations, which you can read more about here (https://www.babymoonfamily.com/original-articles/clinic-masturbation).  

I also found the psychoeducational and genetic counseling sessions to be interesting inflection points in our journey thus far.  Talking with the psychologist about the process, what we were looking for in an egg donor and GC, and how we were doing as a couple during the process was incredibly insightful.  It was also fascinating to get a detailed genetic history for each of us to understand any genetic mutations we may carry to help guide our egg donor selection.  These were both incredibly novel and interesting points in the journey, but they were still only a few meetings that were surrounded by long periods of waiting.

Most recently, we went through the challenging mental gymnastics of picking an egg donor.  I have also written about our thought processes in a previous article (https://www.babymoonfamily.com/original-articles/choosing-egg-donor), but I think even more challenging than selecting the donor has been the wait for her medical clearance. 

Our egg donor has had to visit our clinic and get a number of tests done, some of which take weeks to have results, and then - if approved - we will begin working with the lawyers again on her specific contract.  This is all before she starts the process of taking medications prior to the egg retrieval, an approximately month long procedure I have also written about previously (https://www.babymoonfamily.com/original-articles/egg-donation-procedure).

So, in 1.5 years, we have gone from the idea of starting a family to having an egg donor and on the precipice of making our embryos.  It does seem like a lot, and, at the same time, less than what I would have expected.  

One aspect to highlight about the program we selected is that when we signed the initial contract, we were then added to the agency waiting list for a GC match.  At the time, our agency estimated a wait time of about 12 months to match, and it has already been about 8 months.  Therefore, by the time we have embryos, the agency will be ready to help match us with our GC, and so, at least in this aspect, multiple parallel processes have been running during this ‘waiting game’ to help expedite this portion of the journey.

I am not what one would describe as an incredibly patient person.  That is part of the reason that I started BabyMoon Family during this time.  I wanted to have an outlet to focus my own learning and experience of having a baby, not just race through it.  It’s about the journey, not the destination, and nothing could be more true than the experience of becoming and being a parent.

We still have a long way to go before we are officially ‘daddy’ and ‘papa’ to our baby.  However, we are working to enjoy the highs, not dwell on the delays, and know that at the end, all the waiting will be worth it.