Information for parents - Surrogacy Decision

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Prices

Surrogacy prices

The main criteria to distinguish the cost of surrogacy programs are: the availability of guarantees, the ability to choose the gender of the child, the possibility of choosing an egg donor, the availability of paid accommodation for parents.

In this table, we present the comparative prices for 2020 for the most popular surrogacy destinations:

USA	140,000 € - 180,000 €
Czech Republic	85,000 € - 100,000 €
Greece	80,000 € - 90,000 €
Mexico	65,000 € - 85,000 €
Russia	60,000 € - 70,000 €
Georgia	55,000 € - 65,000 €
Ukraine	50,000 € - 60,000 €

Prices include the use of eggs from an anonymous donor, do not include parental accommodation fees and they may vary from one clinic to another.

As we can see from the table, the reproductive medicine clinics of Ukraine and Russia offer the lowest prices. There are several reasons for such proposals:

there are a large number of IVF clinics in Ukraine and Russia, and as a result, there is a lot of competition;
a large number of women who are willing to rent their belly for a relatively low fee;
the largest number of oocyte donors of the most popular phenotypes in the world, Caucasian and German (Nordic).

The prices indicated include the payment of the surrogate mother and the payment of the clinic services and are minimal, as long as the quality is maintained. The services of a reputable clinic and highly qualified specialists cannot be cheaper. We would like to warn you about significantly lower priced offers, as in this case you will most likely receive the program at a clinic that does not officially record your results or at a new clinic with no experience, and in the end you will lose much more money and time. You should also pay attention to the amount of payment to a surrogate mother; If this amount is too low, you will be offered the candidacy of a surrogate mother who, for medical reasons, was rejected at reputable clinics, putting your child's health at risk.

About clinics

In an issue as important as surrogacy, a very important aspect is the choice of a clinic that meets all the requirements, and this is very difficult to do.

We will try to describe which factors you need to consider when choosing a clinic, and the problems you may face:

clinics focused on medical tourism: in recent years in Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, a large number of clinics have appeared that provide services only to foreigners. It is very convenient for the patient when the clinic has its own translators from all the languages of the world, and yet one has to think about why the clinics do not accept or accept a very small number of local patients. It is obvious that it is much easier to hide certain information about the clinic by providing surrogacy services only to foreigners. After all, local residents can easily verify the accuracy of the data provided.
new clinics: opening new clinics is always a very positive trend, but if you don't want to be among the first patients when looking for qualified doctors, medical equipment testing and the like, we recommend that you refrain from visiting them. A company that has worked in the same direction for at least the last 5-8 years is not considered new. Always ask the agency to provide a license issued by the Ministry of Health.
family clinics: in most large medical institutions, IVF control is multi-stage. Each department maintains a log book and different physicians are responsible for the accuracy of the information. In small family clinics, all the responsible specialists are, in most cases, relatives and, if necessary, it will be much easier to hide any information.
clinics "all in one": there are “closed cycle”, which strive to earn money in the whole range of services necessary to accomplish the surrogacy program: accompaniment, ensuring the search for housing for parents, transportation services, etc. This is a very ineffective solution, which leads to the impossibility of correctly performing the functions in which they are not competent, because each one has to follow their own professional specialization.

In addition, an important aspect is the absolute lack of control over the implementation of the stages of the program, since if desired, it will be much easier to carry out a forgery without the external control of professionals. For example, a clinic that is looking for a donor and buying eggs may not provide you with reliable information on the number of eggs received. The remaining oocytes are frozen by the clinic and can be used for other parents who have chosen a package with an anonymous donor. Of course, these packages are not popular and are practically not being sold by agencies, since all parents want to see how their child will look like and what genes will inherit. Without external control, you have no guarantee that the oocytes used to create your embryo will be the same oocytes of your chosen donor. After all, parents cannot control this, and as a result, they do not trust the origin of the eggs or guarantee that they will keep all the donor eggs. At the same time, the clinic has the opportunity to receive payment for the eggs taken from you and transferred to another couple, while saving money on payments to the donor, medications and the stimulation and puncture procedure.

On the other hand, If we are talking about a clinic with a reputation and clear official reports, which performs only a medical function, while the search for an egg donor is carried out by an agency that also exercises control and requires that all reports be provided to it officially, the possibility of counterfeiting is reduced to zero. Otherwise, all this information remains exclusively internal and you will never know how many eggs were actually obtained as a result of stimulation from your chosen donor.

However, the agency will not allow deception, as by offering guaranteed options, it is interested in increasing your chances of successful implementation of the program, as well as its completion as soon as possible. In addition, approximately half of the agency's clients, shortly after the birth of the first baby, want to have a second baby, in this way, preserving as many frozen embryos as possible from a couple, gives the agency the opportunity to Immediately implement a new process and complete your work in the shortest time possible.

The agency has many more options for this than the patient.

If you have already chosen the clinic where you will undergo the treatment program, we strongly recommend that you collect information about this institution on the Russian-speaking Internet segment in order to receive negative feedback and any other negative information. You should not look for positive reviews, as this is mainly advertising information written by the clinics themselves, because very rarely people who have finished the process will spend time writing reviews when they now have other happy concerns.

About agencies

In this regard, it is also necessary to describe the work of independent agencies and other intermediaries in the field of surrogacy.

To understand what kind of agencies exist, you need to understand who created this surrogacy agency.

Most European surrogacy agencies are created by:

Parents who went through the surrogacy program themselves, faced mistakes made by the surrogacy agency and decided to create their own. Of course, they have neither medical nor legal knowledge or experience.
Lawyers who were once involved in the judicial registry of children's rights in Spain. The knowledge in the field of jurisprudence and the experience of these specialists is very useful, but only in Spain, not in other countries, with other laws, not to mention the fact that the head of the agency must also understand many medical aspects and not trust in the employees of the associated clinic.
Intermediary agencies that do not carry out the work themselves, entrusting all its implementation to another Ukrainian agency. In this case, you pay more, since there are intermediary services, but at the same time you lose quality, since the intermediary agency tries to provide a competitive price, but is forced to include its interest in cost savings in quality.
former employees of other agencies who have created a new agency, who may have experience in a certain part of the process, but still their knowledge is not sufficient for the competent and successful organization of the entire program, perhaps due to lack of awareness on all issues or, most importantly, due to the impossibility of implementing the right thing to work in a foreign country. Since, without knowing the details of Ukrainian and Russian medicine, without knowing the legislation, workflow and business traditions of these countries, it is impossible to do this qualitatively.

An agency with European roots cannot guarantee quality service to its clients, as it does not have the ability to control a foreign clinic and simply does not have the reliable information about it. In the event of an unforeseen situation, the clinic will always be able to transfer responsibility to that agency.

Out of more than 100 reproductive medicine clinics in Ukraine, many hide reports on the success rates of IVF procedures. This is not difficult to do, since the state is practically not involved in the control of success. It remains for agencies and patients to receive information about the clinic only from the official website of the clinic itself. The only way to discover the real situation of the clinic is possible only from within the clinic, knowing the main specialists, embryologists, the real success rate and other important data.

Unfortunately, most agencies do not have this information, so the deciding factor in choosing a clinic for them is only the amount of commission they are offered for providing a client. And unsuccessful or new clinics, in turn, try to reduce the price as much as possible to attract agencies and patients.

Therefore, every year more and more low-cost IVF programs appear on the medical market which European agencies work with, without knowing the real situation within the clinic.

In any case, we recommend that you do not check on ads and reviews on the site, but before concluding a contract, speak personally with the head of the agency, and not just with a sales specialist. It is important to know what kind of person he or she is, what reputation they have, what experience they have, whether they understand all the complexities and why they chose this particular line of activity for a living. Everything will be immediately clear to you, you will understand whether the agency was created to make trivial money, or to earn honestly without cheating and to help people at the same time.

No matter how pathetic the last sentence sounds, believe us, such agencies exist, you just need to find them.

Independent search

It must be said that the patient has the opportunity and the right to directly contact a Ukrainian or Russian clinic. And this practice also has the right to exist, but at the same time you must understand that the relationship between a patient and a foreign clinic or agency will not be regulated by European law, and in case of violation of the terms of the contract, all disputes will have to resolved ONLY in local courts. Without knowing the language, laws, and traditions of a foreign country, given corruption issues, and not having a trusted local attorney, we do not recommend doing so.

It will also not make economic sense in this, since the price of IVF programs in clinics practically does not differ from the cost of programs purchased through surrogacy agencies, since clinics always offer partner agencies a discount and indicate the recommended price for patients. As a result, the price of the clinic and the agency is practically the same. Understand, if this is an honest agency that does not seek to win 2 times.

In addition, it will be quite difficult for a foreigner to obtain reliable information about a surrogacy clinic, and it can turn out that a large and publicized clinic has in reality a very bad reputation. And the patient will not be able to control the actions of a foreign surrogacy clinic while in his own country.

About donors

The most important thing in a surrogacy program, after, of course, choosing a surrogacy agency and clinic, is the choice of an oocyte donor. The search for egg donors is carried out by specialized agencies or the clinics themselves, which provide a full range of services.

The main difference is that the agency creates a base of donor phenotypes, selects the desired candidate together with the parents, after which a rather long process is carried out: the donor performs all the medical checks and then the cycles are coordinated for the collection of oocytes from the donor and the transfer of the embryo to the surrogate mother. That is, a clear calculation is made of the dates of stimulation and puncture of the donor according to the cycle of the surrogate mother. Such a complex procedure is needed to carry out the fertilization of a fresh egg.

Clinics that provide a full range of services most often organize work in a different way: they have their own cryogenic bank and accept at any time those who want to sell their eggs, which are subsequently frozen. For use in programs with an "anonymous donor", this is a fairly good inexpensive solution, as there is no need to sync cycles, pay an agency to find a donor, etc., but virtually no one chooses programs with an "anonymous donor. "as all parents want to know who their child will look like. For an additional fee, clinics provide the opportunity to select oocyte donors based on photographs from when they were young whose eggs are in the clinic's cryocyte bank, but we don't know how to guarantee that this particular egg donor is specifically selected for your program.

There is nothing wrong with the oocytes being vitrified, this practice has been used for a long time all over the world and has many advantages, and it is used more frequently in cases where the oocytes that remain after the Fertilization are stored for the same parents if they decide to re-do the program, as well as, if a young woman wants to postpone pregnancy to a more mature age and decides to vitrify her own eggs. But freezing eggs has two very important disadvantages:

lower percentage of fertilization success, compared to fresh oocytes. How much loss is something we cannot say with certainty, but it is obvious that the procedure of vitrification (freezing), storage, thawing leads to the loss of a part of the eggs, as well as the loss of their quality.
It is difficult to verify if the oocytes belong to the donor in the photo. In the case of a fresh oocyte program, it is practically impossible to carry out a counterfeit, and it makes no economic sense to take fresh oocytes to freeze later.

Egg donors are conventionally divided by professionals into three ABC groups:

A - the donors of this group are few in the national clinics. We are talking about donors with a beautiful appearance and a high level of education. They prefer to cooperate with European or American agencies, they go to a foreign clinic for 2 weeks to sell their oocytes for € 7,000-15,000. If you add to this the costs of the examination, the stimulation, accommodation and the puncture, to the expectant parents will cost at least € 12,000-20,000.

The search for such donors is carried out in a very primitive but effective way: promoters from the donor search agency approach them on the street and offer to participate in the program.
B - It is not a very large group either, these are the girls with correct anthropometric data and high growth.

They are looking for them in the same way as in the first case, they themselves do not usually request an offer to sell oocytes, but if they do, they do not go to clinics, but they look for buyers only through specialized agencies, where they can receive 5,000- € 7,000. For patients, this donor will cost in the region of € 7,000-10,000.

Whereas, on the clinic websites, the price of a puncture is indicated in the range of € 700-1,000.
С - the largest category of donors (more than 90%) with completely different anthropological data, these are girls who only need money. They go to the clinic themselves, get paid a fee, are asked to complete a short questionnaire, and provide photographs from when they were kids (sometimes adult photos). In any case, your oocytes are frozen for later storage.

For parents