Issue 59: A fork in the forking road

Saturday July 27 2019

Well, haven’t we stumbled across a ginormous fork in the road? And now haven’t we got some seriously heavy decision-making to do? For fork’s sake.

Here are our options:

One, press ahead with our American surrogate, Lydia, knowing that she wants this, but also knowing it’s probably not in any of our best interests — Lydia’s included. This would technically be the easiest and fastest option, but it makes me uneasy: I just want to shut my eyes and imagine I’m on a gentle swing under a banyan tree in Thailand. Real life? What’s that?

Two, introduce our new, British, altruistic, potential surrogate, Rebecca, to my UK doctor to see if she is even a candidate for surrogacy and bring the whole sorry story full circle. We’ll deal with the associated legal implications when we have to. At least at this point I’m a veritable expert in surrogacy law. It’s not the ideal answer, but the goalposts keep moving and to be honest they’ve gone a bit blurry. Might need new glasses.

Three, and this is a perfectly productive outcome of a 3am anxiety attack, look into bringing our embryo home. Take Dr Fernando and Lydia and the US out of the equation entirely.

And this is where it gets complicated. You see, we’ve had an email from Dr Fernando that changes things. We left our previous exchange on a positive note, but with a dilemma. He advised us that using a new person for our final embryo transfer would have the same chances of success as using Lydia. (Remember, he doesn’t yet know about the divorce.) I was hoping he’d make our decision for us, telling us it would be way more likely to work with Lydia, because we’ve done all the investigations possible and he knows her, um, inside and out. In fact, he was concerned as to why it hadn’t worked so far with Lydia and suspected it was best to move on, so seemed to be leaning in the Rebecca direction.

Saying that, we don’t even know if Rebecca is a candidate for surrogacy. Dr Fernando wanted to Skype her first to kind of medically interview her for the role, while he spoke to his team about the logistics.

Which in no way explains what plopped into our unsuspecting inbox a few days later.

“I have decided that we will not do an embryo transfer into a surrogate from the UK where surrogacy is not even considered. Therefore I see no reason to talk to the potential candidate over a Skype.”

Love and kisses, Dr Kindsoul Fernando. (Actually, there was no sign-off whatsoever, I added that last bit to take the razor-sharp edge off).

What? Hold on a moment. This is a prime example of the problem with having no international consensus on surrogacy and incompatible rules about altruistic or commercial surrogacy. What he most likely means is that there is no commercial surrogacy in the UK, therefore we cannot pay the surrogate or sign an ironclad contract. It is, however, perfectly legal to transfer an embryo into our UK surrogate — women travel from the UK all the time to do IVF or surrogacy in the US. It seems to me that he is just misinformed and bullish.

There is a positive way of looking at this. Easy. Done. Decision made for us: we have no choice but to go ahead with Lydia. But there’s a big bit — aside from the divorce issue — that my concerned (and wonderful) UK doctor brought to light. He is the doctor who cared for me during my own IVF attempts, and the only one I’ve met whom I truly trust.

When I spoke to him about Rebecca and where we could go from here, I outlined everything that had happened in the US so far. He was shocked. Dismayed even. “No, no, no, this doesn’t sound right. Let me speak to my colleagues in Washington.” His colleagues in Washington were also appalled. He reported back that it was worrying we had spent so much money to get to this point. And worse: “The biggest spend happens once the surrogate gets pregnant. That’s where the bulk of the payment comes in. With the fee and the hospital and medical costs, you’re looking at around £70k best-case scenario.”

Fork. We don’t have £70,000. We don’t have £5,000 at this point. Like a renovation project that you did without a survey, it has all gone on mending the cracks so far.

For all these reasons and more, we know it’s not possible to continue with Lydia. Even if the advice was to continue because the odds are in our favour (they are not), we now wouldn’t be able to afford the pregnancy. It’s frightening how we got to this point. One wrong turn at the beginning and we somehow got lost in the maze.

And there is one small extra bit of info to add here. We have already paid Dr Y for this transfer that now shouldn’t happen. Argh! Stick hot needles in my eyeballs because that’s the level my emotional pain receptors are firing at , so we may as well give them some context. Can this go any more awry? At the start we paid for three embryo transfers: that’s about £15,000 per transfer (I know). So he’s sitting on that extortionate sum, knowing our circumstances, and not budging.

In essence, it feels as though Dr Fernando is holding our last embryo hostage — USA or bust.

I reason: you can’t possibly work in such a caring industry if you don’t care. So we appeal to him. We tell him about Lydia’s divorce and the worry of whether she is emotionally able to continue. We explain about the £70,000 difference. We send the most outrageously beautiful letter of intent, written by Rebecca and her husband (that I can’t even go into here because I well up every time I think about it), and we even put him in touch with my wonderful UK doctor, to speak medical professional to medical professional. Dr Hiyer could personally explain his credentials, that he has worked on many international surrogacy cases and therefore can absolutely assure him it is both considered and entirely legal in our country.

All this effort and love and support from every angle, it’s an emotionally rousing no-brainer. I suddenly feel so lucky. We’ve got this! The absolute dream team. He only needs to read the first two lines of Rebecca’s letter and he will relent with cherries on top. It’s our last hope, our precious embryo, chilling in his cooler until Rebecca can bring it home.

At last he replies to my doctor, cc’ing in Mr B and myself.

“It is a pleasure to be in contact with you Dr Hiyer.

“Unfortunately, as you were informed in a recent email I sent to Sophie and her husband, I will not help them with their request to do an embryo transfer into a British surrogate.”

And that, my friends, is what a full force, transatlantic gut-punch feels like.

What the hell now?