And just like that, we are back to waiting and leaning on whatever the actual success rate for an IVF pregnancy is. That’s a weird sentence; let me explain.

Surrogacy is not a highly regulated thing. Because of this, a lot of clinics or agencies will report wildly different (read: usually fictional or skewed, unfortunately) success rates.

But what about the Web MD’s of the world? This is a medical procedure, after all; what does infallible internet medicine say about such things?

Good question. They have data, but it’s from 2009. The chance of having a surro-baby from studies released that year for a woman under 35 was 39.6% and for women over 40 just 11.5%. Regarding baby-having, age is more than just a number. But, again, this is all 9 year old data. This science is always being aggressively advanced. Unfortunately, because there is a lot of money involved, the data surrounding is not always reliable.

It is likely that we are looking at something in the 50-60% success rate given we are nearly a decade removed from the 2009 dataset above. But I’m no scientist or subject matter expert here. No — I’m just a guy with a keyboard and an internet connection; a virtual truth warrior! And 50-60% looks and sounds way better than 39.6, so we’re just gonna go with it!

Another question that has been asked after each of our two transfers now: How did it go? or Did it go okay?

I completely understand the nature of this question and we are always happy to be checked-in on by friends and family, so don’t hear this as “Well, that’s a silly question. *scoff*”. I hear the question and I know what happens during a transfer so I smile at the two things when I mentally put them together.

Here’s how it all works. It’s not exactly the same as the movies: typically Hollywood shows us a scene involving a turkey baster — sometimes the woman is even upside-down!! 😆 This is how it *actually* happens according to my better half with me paraphrasing:

• Step one: don’t pee all morning — a full bladder makes watching the transfer via ultrasound much more feasible.
• Step two: at the appointment, undress from the waist down and cover up with a sheet.
• Step three: there’s no turkey baster involved. Instead, it’s like a giant bendy straw.

That’s it. Literally. In, out, pants on, French fries. There isn’t really room for variable unless a meteorite smashes into the clinic and kills everyone or the doctor, I don’t know, grabs the wrong sample? Pretty much any of the possible alternative outcomes would be worthy of a TV show not all that unlike Jane the Virgin.

All of that said, we love your questions and will be happy to feature them if you like, so ask away!

At the time of this writing, we were in search of a McDonald’s because apparently those French fries are the right French fries according to a bunch of superstitious surro-crazies other women who have pursued the incredible adventure of helping build families through surrogacy. Also, the photo below is not a photo of some classified alien installation on the moon. It’s a (hopefully!) future squish.