What Services Does a Fertility Clinic Provide During a Surrogacy Journey?

Choosing your fertility clinic is an incredibly important step in your surrogacy journey. Your fertility clinic will conduct extensive medical screenings, help you create your embryos, and ultimately help your surrogate achieve pregnancy. Here is a rundown of most of the services provided by most fertility clinics:

• Sperm analysis: Your fertility clinic will conduct a semen analysis on the sperm provider, whether you will be providing the sperm sample or you will rely on a donor, to ensure the samples are in the best condition possible. Your fertility clinic will work with you to improve your sperm quality where needed, including suggesting certain lifestyle changes, such as quitting smoking and the usage of certain medications, and steps to help you maintain a healthy weight. Though roughly 98% of men will have viable sperm following these changes, the remaining 2% may need to seek the aid of a urologist for further analysis. Your fertility clinic will help connect you to a urologist if necessary.
• Testing and screening of eggs: Fertility clinics will conduct extensive screenings on the eggs that will be used to create your embryos—whether you are providing them yourself, or you are planning to use the services of an egg donor. Your doctor will screen the egg provider for infectious diseases, drugs and alcohol, as well as for her overall physical health. The clinic will also look at an egg donor’s ovarian reserve, to determine that she will be able to produce a sizable number of eggs. Ideally, this number will be between 15 to 30 in order to produce the largest number of healthy embryos possible.
• Embryo Creation: Your fertility clinic will fertilize the provided eggs with the sperm source, and then observe them as they grow into healthy embryos—known as a blastocyst. Not all your embryos will make it to this stage, and some will be “stronger” than others. Regardless, any embryo deemed healthy enough for transfer will be cryopreserved, or frozen, until you and your gestational carrier are ready for the embryo transfer. At this point, your clinic will also oversee the process of thawing the embryo and placing it into the uterus of the gestational carrier.
• Preimplantation Genetic Testing: You may want to consider working with your clinic to conduct what’s known as preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). This is a helpful test that can determine which of the embryos you have created have the best chance of resulting in a successful pregnancy, and avoiding miscarriage or difficult conceiving. PGT also helps you identify embryos with chromosomal abnormalities that can lead to conditions such as Down’s Syndrome, cystic fibrosis, or that predispose your child to other illnesses.
• Monitoring of your donor and surrogate:  Once your surrogate achieves pregnancy, your fertility clinic will also be responsible for monitoring her for several weeks—usually up to about 10 weeks. After the pregnancy is deemed healthy and without complications, your surrogate will begin to work with her own OBGYN, who will monitor her pregnancy just like any other.
• Storage: Some fertility clinics will offer you the ability to store your unused gametes, including unused eggs, sperm, and embryos. If you decide to grow your family later on, you can work with the fertility clinic at that time to achieve a second pregnancy. Down the line, you will need to work with you fertility clinic to decide what to do with these unused gametes if you don’t decide to use them—you can donate them to others struggling to conceive, donate them to science, or simply have them disposed of.