If you’ve been following our journey at all, you’ve seen that we have started our journey toward gestational carrier/surrogacy. (Just an FYI, we use the term “gestational carrier” because we will be using my egg, my husband’s sperm, but just using another “oven” – if you will).
I’ll start with the BIG news first: we submitted our application to the surrogacy agency yesterday and we just found out that we are ACCEPTED!!!!!!!!! Cue the happy tears!
Obviously surrogacy will come with lots of costs and it isn’t cheap. I wanted to share with y’all the costs so you could get a better understanding of what we will be paying for. Keep in mind, we live in Illinois where it is mandated that companies have to provide some sort of infertility coverage – hallelujah. We are blessed in that sense, which will save us a TON of money. We will need to do another egg retrieval (number five to be exact) before we can start anything – luckily we have met our deductible this year so the cost for OUR medical care should be slim.
Our fertility clinic works with a surrogacy agency out of Wisconsin and so far, so good. They’ve been wonderful in working with us, answering questions (day and night), and are making this scary, new process easy for us. We are veterans to the IVF world, but surrogacy is a whole new ball game to us.
Because we are BYOS (Bring Your Own Surrogate) as the agency calls it, LOL – this alone is saving us quite a bit of money. Thank God for close friends that have offered to carry for my husband and myself. I would guess that we have had at least 12 to 15 women offer to be our surrogate – we are extremely blessed!
Here is a list of the fees for the surrogacy agency:
Yep, that’s a big number, we know. Lump in your throat kinda number.
Now, we have not yet decided if we will do PGS testing before transfer into our surrogate. If you need a refresher, PGS is preimplantation genetic screening and it screens for numerical chromosomal abnormalities. We have tested our embryos in the past for this and we had a good percentage of normal embryos, but it might give us a better chance of success if we do this – however, it comes with a bigger price tag.
Here are the numbers/fees for our fertility clinic WITH and WITHOUT PGS testing:
If you’ve done the math, we could either end up paying in total around $26,000 (without PGS) or around $32,000 (with PGS). Talk about sticker shock. We have spent tens of thousands of dollars the past five years on tests, monitoring, ultrasounds, medications, surgeries, etc but we will just add this one to the tab. And I know it will be SO unbelievably worth it. This journey has been hell but the end result will be unlike anything I’ve ever imagined.
We will be doing some fundraisers over the next few months to hopefully help a little bit with costs. Currently, we are hosting a puzzle fundraiser and we are receiving an excellent response! We are over halfway to our goal – we couldn’t be more blessed and thankful. See link below.
Click here to check out our current puzzle fundraiser!
As far as a timeline goes, we are hoping to transfer before the end of the year – fingers crossed.
Thank you again to ALL of our supporters, near and far, without you, we would not be where we are today. Love to you all!
Our Journey To Three 