Video: What Are the Two Types of Gestational Carriers or Surrogates?

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0:00:00.000,0:00:05.000 (text on screen): Ask the Expert 0:00:05.000,0:00:07.000 Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source 0:00:07.000,0:00:10.000 What are the two types of gestational carriers or surrogates? 0:00:10.000,0:00:14.000 Mira Aubuchon, MD, Missouri Center for Reproductive Medicine and Fertility: A gestational carrier is a woman who, because she wants to help other people, 0:00:14.000,0:00:22.000 chooses to have a baby and give the baby to a couple who could not otherwise have a child on their own. 0:00:22.000,0:00:31.000 There’s two major types. The first type is where the gestational carrier has no genetic link to the couple that wants to have the child. 0:00:31.000,0:00:42.000 So, for example, the couple who wants to have a child, the woman in that couple may not have a uterus, or for whatever reason her uterus is not suitable to have a baby. 0:00:42.000,0:00:53.000 But she still has her ovaries. So what she can do is, she can go through a medical procedure called IVF to harvest her eggs, 0:00:53.000,0:00:59.000 and have those eggs be fertilized with her partner’s sperm to form embryos. 0:00:59.000,0:01:09.000 And then those embryos can be placed into the uterus of the gestational carrier who then carries the pregnancy, delivers the pregnancy, 0:01:09.000,0:01:14.000 and then gives the baby to the couple, without having any genetic link to the child. 0:01:14.000,0:01:24.000 And that’s actually probably the simplest type of genetic carrier, from a legal perspective, because there’s no genetic link. 0:01:24.000,0:01:32.000 The other kind of gestational carrier is where the gestational carrier does have a genetic link to the child that she carries. 0:01:32.000,0:01:45.000 And this may come about through a couple who enlists a friend or family member, especially in the case of a family member, the genetic component is desirable, 0:01:45.000,0:01:55.000 particularly for a woman who has no uterus and, say, has no ovaries, but wants the child to have some of her genetic makeup. 0:01:55.000,0:02:06.000 So she enlists a family member, and the family member is inseminated, meaning sperm from the patient’s partner is injected into the gestational carrier 0:02:06.000,0:02:14.000 and so the gestational carrier’s own egg fertilizes with the sperm from the patient’s partner 0:02:14.000,0:02:20.000 and so then the gestational carrier is genetically related to the child that she then delivers. 0:02:20.000,0:02:30.000 And that can certainly be very nice for families to have that genetic connection, but it can also sometimes cause some complications socially and legally. 0:02:30.000,0:02:34.000 (text on screen): Ask the Expert 0:02:34.000,0:02:36.000 Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source