Issue 20: So much red tape, so little time

Saturday October 27 2018

The (otherwise fantastic) staff at our fertility clinic in Miami are notoriously slow at answering phones/emails/questions. And we have a lot of those. It’s frustrating: anxious British couple, barren, seek transatlantic doctor to facilitate their wildest dreams. Frequent correspondence preferred. The time difference compounds things, but even without that they take their sweet time with us.

That is, until we need to pay our package fee and sign an agreement. Then we get chased by email every four hours without fail. Cynical, moi?

The chasing is necessary because wading through the legal jargon takes time. Of course, we’d sign whatever we needed to get things going, but my dad has instilled in me a good old-fashioned fear of signing my life away. I like to know where I stand when drawing up a contract in one of the most litigious countries in the world. No one’s going to risk being sued and this agreement to create embryos (it’s really happening! yay!) and embark on surrogacy IVF reflects that, with bells on.

The payment is for a fertility package that allows for four embryo transfers, which means that if it works first time we will have paid above the odds, but if it takes all four, we will have saved quite a lot of money. This includes clinic appointments, scans and the transfer itself when they carefully place the viable embryo in your uterus. Off the package, each embryo transfer alone costs about $10,000. This shocks me, a woman who has had that very procedure five times in Russia at a 20th of the cost. It takes five minutes or so, is not unlike a smear test, just with more people in surgical scrubs and an ultrasound afterwards so you can see your little embryo lit up in your uterus. That definitely felt like an invaluable moment every time in Russia, but $9,500 extra to do it in the US? Um. No choice.

So before we can start the process of egg collection from our donor, we need to finalise the legalities. We sit down to read through the contract and it’s as monotonous as you would expect, but one line brings a lump to my throat. “The clinic will in no way be liable for damage to embryos due to human error.”

So hang on, hold up, wait. If Mr or Ms Embryologist had a few too many the night before and drops my future babies on the way to surgical suite no 3, they don’t face any repercussions? They take no responsibility because they had the forethought to include a clause that we have to sign? Basically, yes. The mantra that I’m beginning to think I must get tattooed on my palm rings in my head, “we have to trust in the system”.

Surely there is insurance for this kind of thing? Our embryo creation cost us around ten times more than my securely insured engagement ring. Can I not take out some kind of protective policy?

Coincidentally, while we have been thinking about all this, I heard about a fertility clinic near Cleveland that had a freezer malfunction and lost 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos. On the same day, purely by terrible coincidence, a similar thing happened at another clinic in San Francisco. Once the embryos are there, waiting patiently in their freezer for a womb to take them, they’re potential children to the couples who created them. This must have been a devastating loss to all involved. I acknowledge another little bubble of impending self-pity (why do I even have to do this! No one should have to worry about someone drunk dropping their embryos!) but I pop it, and keep reading the contract.

“In the event of divorce who will take ownership of the embryos? A) You, B) Your husband, or C) Neither, destroy them.”

I sign them over to my husband. The brutality of the question is obvious. At the point of creation, before I get to meet and look after and love them, they will be more his than mine.

I just hope this hypothetical divorce is over something that will make me never want to see his face in these babies anyway. So there.

What am I thinking? I’m losing my mind. This red tape is making me twitchy, I want to sit and sulk like a teenager. I want to have a child without arguing over contract clauses or having to imagine divorcing my husband. Mr B comes to the rescue, ever level-headed when it comes to any kind of life admin, takes the contract out of my hands and makes an executive decision. We’ll have a glass of wine and hold hands while we watch TV and come back to it later. As if I’d ever divorce this knight in cable-knit armour!

It takes another couple of days of the clinic chasing, but we eventually read through everything and, feeling excited, sign it and press send. Well, this is monumental; we’re getting the ball rolling, we’re officially under the care of the American medical system and we have four chances to get this done.

And then after all that chasing we get an out-of-office response and it is in Spanish. As if this journey weren’t indecipherable enough, now it’s literally in another language. Hasta luego, baby.