What about surrogacy?
Advertiser Staff and Gannett News Service
Surrogacy works by combining medical conception techniques with adoption, using a surrogate to carry the fetus for a couple unable to get pregnant or carry a fetus to term. Upon delivery of the baby, the surrogate relinquishes parental rights, as in adoption. The contracting mother becomes the legal mother through adoption; the father is the legal father either through his sperm or through adoption, if a sperm donor is used.
More than 10,000 babies have been born by surrogacy, though few in Hawai'i use this method, mostly because of complicated legal issues.
In Hawai'i, the birth mother is the legal mother, even if the birth mother is carrying a fertilized egg from another woman. A surrogate would have to sign over the rights, of guardianship after birth.
Dr. Tom Huang of Pacific in Vitro Fertilization Institute says the institute does not work with surrogate mothers because of the legal quagmire. Mainland fertility clinics do, he said, but often will combine it with psychological screening.
Huang's colleague, Dr. Philip McNamee, said there's not a lot of call for surrogate mothers, and the complicated legal status of these women has been "problematical" with Hawai'i courts in the past. "If the surrogate wants to keep the baby, but has a contract, that becomes a problem," he said.
Different types of surrogacy
• Traditional surrogacy involves artificially inseminating the gestational surrogate with the contracting father's sperm.
• Gestational surrogacy occurs when the egg of the contracting mother and sperm of the contracting father create an embryo that is then implanted into the gestational surrogate. The child now has the contracting mother's DNA in addition to the contracting father's.
• Gestational surrogacy and egg donation: The gestational mother carries the embryo that was developed by combining a donor egg with the sperm from the contracting father. A sperm donor can be used with any of these methods.
Surrogacy allows the contracting couple to be heavily involved in a child's birth by allowing the partners to pick the surrogate and/or egg or sperm donor.
