Welcome to Surrogacy Talk with me, your fabulous host and family building expert, Frank Golden. I'll be talking about surrogacy, IVF and making babies. Hi everyone! Frank Golden, here, from Golden Surrogacy and this is Surrogacy Talk. Before I get started I would like to kindly ask that you please like and subscribe to Surrogacy Talk on YouTube and anywhere else that you consume your content. Also, don't forget to check out our fantastic blog at goldensurrogacy.com.
Thank you so much for tuning in and for considering Golden Surrogacy your trusted source for surrogacy information. Welcome to Surrogacy Talk. Or should I say Surrogacy 101? Nope. Scratch that. This is Surrogacy Talk, surrogacy 101 edition. Today I will be going through fundamentals of a surrogacy journey, and there are going to be five different topics that we go through.
And so if you follow our Instagram page, you'll notice that our Surrogacy 101s we do have usually one minute clips where I kind of go in and explain certain topics regarding surrogacy. And so I hope that this is a good guide to try to give all of you out there, whether you're an Intended Parent or prospective Surrogate, a little bit of information so that you understand, like I said, the basic fundamentals or concepts of what surrogacy is and a little bit more about it.
So without wasting any time, let me get started and dive into the first question or topic that I have here today, which is the difference between gestational surrogacy and traditional surrogacy. So let me start by saying here at Golden Surrogacy, we only facilitate gestational surrogacy arrangements. So what is that in a gestational surrogacy arrangement, the egg that is used to create the embryo is not biologically related to the Surrogate, who will be carrying that embryo, aka your baby.
So there is no genetic link between your Surrogate, your Gestational Surrogate, and your baby, or the embryo. So that is very important to understand. Now contrast that with traditional surrogacy. In a traditional surrogacy journey, the egg of the Surrogate is being used to create the embryo. Thereby she has a genetic connection to the resulting child.
Golden does not embark on the or facilitate the traditional surrogacy cases because from a legal perspective, they can be quite challenging and not legal in some states and in some instances. And we like to make sure that our Intended Parents are embarking upon their surrogacy journey while having their legal rights protected to the best of our ability. And facilitating gestational surrogacy only provides that in the best way that we can.
So I hope you learned a little bit about gestational surrogacy versus traditional surrogacy, and kind of what those key differences are at a glance. Next up. How does surrogacy work? So let me start by saying on this topic, no one is having intercourse. Okay. That's very important. Oftentimes you might overhear friends at a party or someone discussing surrogacy, and they typically get that fact all wrong.
Or it is something that you've seen, in a movie that is not, what a surrogacy journey is that is not considered surrogacy. So let me break it down for you. In a surrogacy journey, for the process of creating the resulting child to qualify as surrogacy, an embryo is created through IVF. So in a lab with doctors aka reproductive endocrinologist, they take sperm and egg, fertilize them in the lab, and create an embryo.
The resulting embryo is then transferred into the host uterus of your Surrogate, and then nine months later, we have a baby. And that is essentially, in a nutshell, how surrogacy works, and yes, there is a legal contract. It is a legal agreement between the Gestational Surrogate and Intended Parents. And there's a lot of, I should say, minutiae involved in a surrogacy journey to ensure that it's done correctly. And that's what we do here at Golden Surrogacy, making sure that it's done correctly.
But that's how surrogacy works. If you overhear your friends or anyone at a party talking about it and they're not talking, you don't hear words like IVF clinic, lab, reproductive endocrinologist, surrogacy agency, they're probably confused., and you might want to pop in, and that's your, that could be a moment for you to have a great icebreaker into that conversation. The third topic in explaining the fundamentals of a surrogacy journey is who is the baby's legal parents?
Well, certainly not the Gestational Surrogate because she does not share any sort of genetic connection with the resulting child. And certainly that would mean no legal rights to the baby. The Intended Parents are the legal and rightful parents of that resulting child. Here at Golden, we ensure that the parentage paperwork is started.
The beginning of the second trimester, so that your legal team has ample time to have all the documents signed filed with the courts to ensure that the legal process post-delivery is very, very smooth. The fourth topic that I would like to touch on in explaining the fundamentals of a surrogacy journey that often is asked is how do Intended Parents find a Surrogate? Well, that's what we're here for. That's what Golden Surrogacy does.
So as an Intended Parent, I would highly encourage you to embark with a reputable surrogacy agency like Golden, and we take care of your Surrogate recruiting, the screening, the matching, and then the complete journey case management and coordination.
It is very important that when you go through a surrogacy journey, you are either partnered with a reputable agency, which is really what I advocate for every single time, if you can, if you're going the independent route, be highly researched, and know exactly what you're getting into. But again, this is what your trusted agency is there for it to help you find your perfect match in your Surrogate. And the last question is how much does a surrogacy journey cost?
Which is always the million dollar question.
it does not cost $1 million. I will link to this Surrogacy Talk, the segment where I dive into how much a surrogacy journey costs in great detail so that you can understand all of the various cost buckets. But generally speaking, when Intended Parents already have embryos, the floor is usually around $150,000.
Up from there, depending on what your Surrogate’s insurance disposition is, and if you're starting out, like I said, with frozen embryos, or if you do need the help of an egg donor and you are creating embryos from scratch, the fees can be much higher from there. Typically in the $200,000 range. And that, again, is what you can expect for your overall surrogacy journey to cost. And there you have it. I have explained some of the fundamentals of the surrogacy process.
And just to recap, I've gone over gestational surrogacy versus traditional surrogacy, how does the surrogacy process work, which I hope was very enlightening. Who is the baby's legal parents? How do Intended Parents find their Surrogate? And then how much does the surrogacy journey cost overall? Remember, surrogacy is a highly complex experience to embark upon. It's very important that you have all of the right knowledge so that you can start your surrogacy journey in a well-informed way.
This makes all the difference. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you think of any questions or you have any comments, perhaps future content ideas, please do get in touch. I would love to hear from you. I can be contacted at our Instagram handle, which is @golden_surrogacy. And once again I am Frank Golden reminding all of you that Everyone Deserves a Family.