We are going through a surrogacy procedure........Say What?

When Daniel and I first thought about surrogacy, it was the logical first step for us to look into when planning to have a family, yes we did consider adoption but surrogacy was the first avenue for us to look at before making any other decisions.
Once the decision had been made we did start telling some friends and our families what we were planning to do...these made for some interesting conversations.

First of all our friends were about a 50-50 split on those who understood what surrogacy was, and those who had no clue of what it meant. This was a conversation we both became very good at explaning to people, and once our friends understood it and what it meant they were all on board and thought it was great. Telling our families were quite a different story.....

My parents are a bit older, in their 70's, we sat them down one day to go over our plans with them. "Daniel and I are going to be exploring the possibilities of having a baby through surrogacy at a hospital in Panama this next year", simple enough of a statement we thought, we have been talking about it with each other for the last year and to us it became part of our everyday conversations with each other. It soon became ultimately clear when across the table their sat my parents with a glazed look over their faces, a small nervous smile on both their faces. After about 5 minutes of dead silence we finally asked them if they understood what we were talking about..."not really" was the answer. To us what seemed so simple of a concept we then realized surrogacy is not common, at least in Canada it hasn't been widely accepted and to be honest not a lot of people have ever heard of it. Our simple conversation turned out to be several longer conversations to my parents about how it worked, what all was involved and even to this day I don't think my father fully understands the process. I agree it is confusing when you tell someone we fertilized eggs from one women, then a different women is carrying the embryos, and this all has to be done in a Country far far away.... but that's OK, all he knows is that he is going to be a grandfather again, which to him is all good news.

Our conversations with Daniel's side of the family was a bit better, again its hard for anyone who has never heard of this before to fully understand what all is involved but with each conversation we have with people the more on board everyone seems to be, and finally after a year at least our family and friends understand what surrogacy is.

Each week that passes and the more comfortable we are with telling people about our pregnancy these conversations are getting better, as well we enjoy telling more people and seeing the looks in their eyes when we tell them what we are doing. Most people have loads of questions, which we enjoy answering and welcome any and all questions people have....the other day I started getting some questions through email from people I dont even know asking about the procecss and how to go about it...so hopefully writing this blog is doing a little bit of good....or at least entertaining some folks!