What is gestational surrogacy?

Gestational surrogacy is a process where a gestational carrier becomes pregnant through artificial insemination. The artificial insemination is done through In-vitro fertilization treatment. IVF is a major treatment suggested for infertile couples when other assisted reproductive technology treatments are failed. In this therapy, woman’s egg is fertilized outside the human body. In IVF, women ovulatory system is constantly stimulated and monitored by the expert physicians. Fertility drugs are given to the patient to produce more than one egg since ova are required for successful IVF treatment. During this process, doctors use ultrasound and blood test to check whether the ova are ready for retrieval or not.

Once they detect the ova are ready for retrieval, they perform a simple surgical procedure by giving small amount of anesthesia to remove ova outside the body. If they fail to retrieve ova from ovaries, they perform laparoscopic surgery to retrieve eggs. In this surgery, doctors insert suction tube directly to the ovaries through abdomen. Although this procedure sounds simple, it requires strong anesthesia to carry out this surgery. After taking out the ova, a physician examines each and every ovum to select the strong ovum that can support IVF treatment. This strong ovum is placed in a cultural medium to await insemination. Meanwhile, the best swimmers are retrieved from intended father semen. The sperms are added to the ovum in the incubator.

After adding sperm with ovum, within few hours it penetrates and fertilizes the egg. However, doctors confirm this process when they visually see the two pronuclei. These pronuclei are the foundation of the zygote. After six days of fertilization, a fluid cavity is seen, which results in the formation of placenta and fetal tissues. This liquid is injected to the uterus of a surrogate to achieve pregnancy and this procedure is referred as gestational surrogacy. In this procedure, the baby is formed by the intended mother (donor) egg and intended father (donor) sperm. Therefore, the baby is harmonically irrelevant to the surrogate mother. Most of the agencies prefer this procedure because surrogate mum never feel bad to hand over the baby, which is irrelevant to her.