Our team makes fatherhood possible with egg donation and surrogacy for gay men
At Texas Fertility Center (TFC), our team believes that adoption shouldn’t be the only family-building option for gay couples and singles. With egg donation and gestational surrogacy for gay men, our San Antonio fertility doctors help men become fathers.
Traditional and gestational are the two types of surrogacy arrangements. Our team only assists patients who are pursuing gestational surrogacy. This means that the woman who will carry the pregnancy (the surrogate) is different from the woman who provides her eggs (egg donor). This practice removes the legal and ethical uncertainties that can come with traditional surrogacy.
Getting started with egg donation and surrogacy
To achieve pregnancy and welcome a baby, our patients need healthy eggs and sperm, which will come together to form the embryo. They also need a uterus that can carry a pregnancy to term. Because a man does not have eggs or a uterus, we help gay men find generous and highly screened egg donors and surrogates.
TFC has a large in-house egg donor program, and our team can also connect you with respected outside egg donor centers if you prefer. As for finding a surrogate, we can also help with that, because our team works with multiple surrogacy agencies, including the first surrogacy agency in the world.
Before you move forward with egg donation and surrogacy for gay men, you should think about your wants and needs.
- When reviewing an egg donor database, you will be able to view information about each woman’s education, interests, health, personality and appearance. As you do so, think about what characteristics are important to you in a donor. This is especially important, as half of your baby’s genes will come from the donor.
- As you select your surrogate, you should consider what type of relationship you would like to have with her and how involved you’d like to be in the pregnancy. You should then strive to match with a surrogate who wants the same level of involvement.
To streamline the selection process, our San Antonio fertility doctors recommend thinking about these considerations before beginning your search for an egg donor and a surrogate.
The process of building a family with egg donation and surrogacy for gay men
After selecting the generous women who will help you grow your family, the general steps of this family-building process are as follows:
- The egg donor will take medications to stimulate egg development and maturation. Then, she will undergo an egg retrieval procedure.
- In the IVF laboratory, our embryologists will fertilize the eggs with sperm from you and/or your partner. They will then monitor the growth and development of the resulting embryos. During this time, our embryologist can take a biopsy from each embryo to perform preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) in order to identify those embryos that are not chromosomally normal.
- The surrogate will take medications to prepare her body for pregnancy. She will then undergo an embryo transfer and our San Antonio fertility doctors will monitor her for signs of early pregnancy.
Once your surrogate conceives, the pregnancy should proceed as any other. On the big day, she will deliver your baby and you will be able to hold your child for the first time. This is the miracle of egg donation and surrogacy for gay men.
If you have questions about this fertility treatment, contact us to schedule an appointment. Our doctors would love to answer your questions about welcoming a baby using LGBTQ fertility options.