The surrogacy agency that we picked is mainly a law office. This is a different approach than the companies that we looked into five years ago that were mainly fertility clinics. Some surrogacy agencies are independent organizations that outsource every aspect of the process.

And it’s a complicated process.

Gestational surrogacy is an arrangement in which the surrogate agrees to have embryos created from sperm and another woman’s egg implanted in her uterus through in vitro fertilization (IVF). I think when a lot of people think about surrogacy, they think of traditional surrogacy, which means that the egg is the carrier’s own. Traditional surrogacy can be accomplished through IVF or through less sophisticated means (i.e., the so-called Turkey Baster Method, which I pray involves something a bit more high-tech than an actual turkey baster).

Gestational surrogacy offers many legal benefits, but also an important emotional one. The carrier is less likely to form an attachment with the child she’s carrying if she is not its biological mother. The egg donor is unlikely to form an attachment with the child if she doesn’t carry it. In most cases, the egg donor won’t even see the child until much later in his or her life, if at all.

Gestational surrogacy is also a hell of a lot more expensive, mostly because there are more parties involved and IVF is a more complicated medical procedure. The organization that coordinates everything gets an “Agency Fee”, for bringing everything together. This is sort of like the fee a General Contractor gets when building a home.

Since our agency is a law office, they do all the legal work in house. This includes writing the contracts for the egg donor and carrier and finalizing the adoption by the intended parent who is not the natural father. In addition to the legal work, they have a team of licensed social workers on staff who screen the donor and carrier and also offer support to the carrier throughout the process. Both women have to take psychological tests and have to pass background checks. The carrier also has to have an extensive phone interview with the social worker. If the carrier has a partner, he or she must undergo screening as well. The agency recruits donors and carriers, but will work with donors from other organizations’ donor pools. Finally, our agency has an in-house staff of financial coordinators that handle billing and administer the trust account where our up-front fees were deposited.

Our agency outsources the medical work. The organizations that are mainly fertility clinics do it the other way around. We were able to pick essentially any fertility clinic we wanted, although our agency made some suggestions to narrow the field. We went with a clinic within driving distance, although compared to the overall cost, travel to a clinic anywhere in the country would have been a small expense. We chose our clinic because the people we met with seemed organized and emphasized choosing an egg donor based on her qualities not her schedule (more on that tomorrow).

There are intended parents that choose to coordinate this process on their own, just like there are some people who will build a house without a general contractor. They will choose their own lawyer, IVF clinic, egg donor and surrogate. They will attempt to recruit a surrogate online. They may work with an established egg donation agency or they may try to find a donor on the Internet as well.

Even though “going independent” can save thousands of dollars, that is not for us. I’m not going to trust some woman that I found on Craigslist and met once at an Applebee’s to carry my child. We want both the screening and the hand holding that comes from working with an agency. We’ve been assigned a coordinator that acts as a single point of contact and schedules travel as well as visits to the IVF clinic for the various medical procedures involved. She has set up phone calls and answered a ton of questions (or forwarded them to the various legal, financial and medical experts involved).

This journey is already stressful enough without having to worry about syncing everyone’s schedules. Google Calendar is not a substitute for a good agency.