Egg donation and surrogacy help men share a biological connection with their children
Fertility Specialists of Texas is a destination for gay family building services, including egg donation and surrogacy. Our team offers advanced and highly effective fertility treatments in a welcoming and warm environment. We believe that everyone deserves the chance to become a parent, so our team supports gay family building.
Gay family building involves different professionals who help make parenthood possible
Single men and gay couples will need a little help from IVF with egg donation and surrogacy to have a biological child. Not only that, but they also need support from our LGBT fertility center as well as surrogacy agencies, egg donor banks and attorneys.
Most patients want to know how long it will take to bring home a baby using third party reproduction. The answer is that it varies, depending on how proactive patients are about finding the right egg donor and gestational surrogate for their family. Generally, it takes about six months from your first appointment to complete prescreening and an IVF cycle.
The first steps of conceiving using egg donation and surrogacy
You’ll start your journey with a consultation at our LGBT fertility center. This consultation involves meeting with one of our fertility doctors to discuss your medical history and family-building goals. We’ll also introduce you to our egg donor and surrogacy coordinator as well as your patient care coordinator and one of our financial counselors. After this appointment, you’ll have a basic understanding of gay family building.
The next step is selecting your egg donor and your gestational surrogate. The egg donor will provide her eggs for the pregnancy, and the surrogate will carry and deliver the baby.
Egg donor selection. You can opt to use a donor from our in-house egg donor program or a donor from a different egg bank or program. Reputable programs like ours allow you to view the profiles of prescreened donors. Another option is asking a friend or a family member to be your donor. The donor cannot be related to the person providing their sperm for the pregnancy.
Gestational surrogacy selection. You’ll be happy to know that Texas law supports the use of surrogacy. Our LGBT fertility center can connect you with respected surrogacy agencies to help you find a surrogate. These agencies perform background checks on their surrogates and can help you navigate the process. Our team will also support you on this journey.
Taking the final steps on the journey to bring home a baby
The next step applies to the person who is providing their sperm for the pregnancy. After the patient collects his sample, our cryobank will test it and store it until it’s time to fertilize the donor eggs. Once this step is complete, the medical process for conceiving using egg donation and surrogacy can begin.
- The egg donor and the surrogate will start taking medications. The egg donor will take injectable fertility medications that encourage her ovaries to produce multiple eggs. As for the surrogate, she will take medications to prepare her uterus to carry a baby.
- When the donor’s eggs are mature, she will have an outpatient egg retrieval procedure at our LGBT fertility center.
- Our embryologists in the IVF lab will fertilize the donor eggs using sperm from you or your partner. They will then monitor the development of the resulting embryos.
- On Day 5 of the embryos’ development, your doctor will transfer an embryo to the uterus of your surrogate. Our embryologists will freeze the remaining good-quality embryos.
- About two weeks after the embryo transfer, your surrogate will have a blood pregnancy test, and we will hopefully be celebrating your good news.
If your surrogate has a positive pregnancy test, our team will monitor her for the first few weeks of pregnancy. After that, we will release your surrogate to the care of her obstetrician. This doctor will care for your surrogate for the rest of the pregnancy.
We realize that gay family building can seem overwhelming at first, so we’re here to answer your questions. Contact us to learn more about having a baby using egg donation and surrogacy.