“How long is this going to take?” It is probably one of the most common questions I am asked by intended parents when we first meet, and I completely understand why. By the time most intended parents find their way to surrogacy, they have already spent a lot of time waiting. Waiting for appointments, test results, fertility treatments, embryos, another cycle, another answer. Sometimes they have spent years watching everyone around them build their families while they feel like their own life has been sitting in the waiting room. So when they finally make the decision to pursue surrogacy, of course they want a timeline. When will we match? When will we transfer? When could we have a baby?
I wish I could give them one. After more than a decade working in surrogacy, I can give people averages. I can explain what I have seen happen before and walk them through every step of the process. I can tell them what might happen next and what we can reasonably expect. What I cannot do is look someone in the eye and promise that they will be matched in three months, pregnant in six months or holding a baby next year. Surrogacy simply doesn’t work that way, because there are far too many human beings and variables involved.
Matching is probably the first place intended parents really experience this. Surrogacy isn’t a process where you sign up, take a number and wait for your turn. A surrogate isn’t assigned to an intended parent. She chooses who she wants to help build a family, and that human connection can’t be put on a schedule. Sometimes it happens quickly. Sometimes it takes much longer. Sometimes two people meet and everyone thinks this is going to be the match, only for one person to realize after a few conversations that something doesn’t feel quite right. I would much rather have someone step back at that point than ignore that feeling because everyone is worried about losing time. A fast match is not necessarily a good match, and the goal should always be the right relationship, not simply the shortest timeline.
Even once a match happens, we still aren’t suddenly on a predictable path. There is medical screening, psychological screening, legal contracts, cycle preparation and transfer, and at every one of those stages something can change. A surrogate who appears completely healthy can have something come up during medical screening that needs further investigation. A cycle can be cancelled. A lining might not cooperate. Medication might need to be adjusted. A transfer date can move. None of those things mean the journey is failing. They mean there are real people and real medicine involved, and neither operates according to the timeline we wrote down at the beginning.
Then there is the embryo itself. This is another place where I think we need to be very careful with the language we use in surrogacy. Even a beautiful embryo does not come with a guarantee. Even a PGT-tested embryo does not come with a guarantee. Sometimes the first transfer works beautifully and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it takes two transfers or more. Sometimes intended parents find themselves having conversations they never imagined they would have when they first started. Pregnancy brings another layer of uncertainty because pregnancy has never cared very much about our carefully organized calendars. There can be losses, complications and babies who decide to arrive on their own schedule.
None of this is meant to frighten anyone considering surrogacy. Quite the opposite. I think people deserve to know what they’re walking into, because there is a huge difference between being hopeful and being promised something that nobody actually has the power to promise. I see timelines talked about a lot in this industry. Match in X number of months. Baby within X amount of time. Guaranteed match. Guaranteed something. Whenever I see that word, “guaranteed,” I struggle with it because what exactly are we guaranteeing? We cannot guarantee another human being will choose you. We cannot guarantee medical clearance. We cannot guarantee an embryo will implant or that a pregnancy will continue. Ultimately, no ethical surrogacy professional can guarantee you a baby.
That is a hard thing to say to someone who wants a child more than anything in the world, but I would rather have a hard, honest conversation at the beginning than sell someone certainty that doesn’t exist. That also doesn’t mean intended parents should enter surrogacy expecting everything to go wrong. Most journeys are filled with incredibly exciting milestones. There are matches where you immediately understand why these people found each other. There are first transfers that work. There are wonderfully uneventful pregnancies. There are delivery rooms filled with happy tears and babies being placed into the arms of people who have waited years for that exact moment. I’ve been lucky enough to witness those moments over and over again. I’ve also been doing this long enough to know that getting there isn’t always a straight line.
Sometimes the road loops around a little. Sometimes it stops completely and you have to figure out another way forward. Sometimes the timeline you carefully built in your head has to be thrown out altogether. That can be incredibly difficult for intended parents because so much of surrogacy requires letting go of control. You can control whether your embryos are ready and your finances are in place. You can control how prepared you are, how you communicate, how you treat your surrogate and how you show up for your journey. You cannot control everything else, and I think one of the most important things we can do for intended parents is help them understand that before they begin.
I don’t want people entering surrogacy with a countdown running in their head. It’s been three months, why haven’t we matched? They told us it usually happens by now. Why is everyone else moving faster than us? Once you start measuring your journey against someone else’s timeline, it becomes very easy to believe something is going wrong when it isn’t. I’ve seen people match quickly and I’ve seen people wait. I’ve seen journeys move at lightning speed and then suddenly stall. I’ve seen journeys that felt painfully slow in the beginning come together beautifully in the end. There is no universal surrogacy timeline. There is your timeline, and we won’t know exactly what that looks like until we walk through it.
So what can I promise someone who comes to Canadian Surrogacy Community? I can promise that I will be honest with you. I won’t tell you something simply because I think it is what you want to hear. We will prepare you as much as possible for what this process can look like. Your surrogate will be treated like a person, not a means to an outcome. When something doesn’t go according to plan, we will talk about it and figure out what comes next. Most importantly, I will always believe that protecting the people involved in a journey matters more than protecting a timeline.
After all these years, that is probably one of the biggest things surrogacy has taught me. You can plan, you can prepare and you can hope like crazy, but you cannot guarantee. There are no guarantees in surrogacy. There are people, relationships, medicine, embryos, pregnancies and a whole lot of variables that none of us get to control. What there can be is honesty about all of that from the very beginning, and I think intended parents deserve nothing less.
M(Other) starring Angela