Baby Steps…

In our last post we wrote about some of the challenges we’ve been facing with domestic surrogacy and that we’d opened the door to exploring international surrogacy via an agency in Canada.

In the few months since then, we have opened that door wide and stepped right through. We have signed with an agency and the wheels are in motion. Exact timelines are still pretty fuzzy, and there have been no shortage of challenges thus far despite only being in the early stages, but we’re hugely excited by the fact that we have an egg donor and surrogate lined up. We’re still yet to create embryos, and our surrogate won’t have received medical clearance for a while yet, but to have these pieces of the puzzle in place has largely vindicated our decision.

Over the summer our focus was on providing our sperm sample (or our ‘ambassadors’ as the Canadian agency likes to call it) to a local clinic to then be shipped to Toronto where the Canadian clinic is based. What we thought would have been the most straightforward part of this process (sample à Melbourne freezer à plane à Canada freezer), turned out to be anything but, but our samples have safely arrived in Canada for the pending embryo creation. We are intent on documenting all aspects of our bumpy road (which this blog helps with immensely), because the story behind this future child’s creation is sure going to be a unique one. We engaged the services of a specialised shipping company to collect our samples from the Melbourne clinic to be transported to Canada. For greater efficiency, multiple samples (be it sperm, eggs, embryos etc.) can be shipped in the same specialised shipper that can keep all specimens at the required temperature for up to nine days. The shipper is also given a certified exemption from being x-rayed at airports and is in fact stored on the plane as hand luggage to ensure no additional handling is required. In our particular case, our ‘ambassadors’ made their way from Melbourne to Honolulu to San Diego before finding their way to Toronto where they are now stored.

We’re anticipating a fair bit to unfold over the coming months as we strive to get closer to our end goal. It feels good to be progressing, but at the moment, it’s still one (baby) step at a time…