Born in the USA

May 5, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Photo by: Scott Strazzante

MCT

Photo

Laurie Thompson, left, is a mother of three and is a surrogate mother of twins for a couple in Spain, the second time she has been a surrogate. Thompson helps her daughter Avery open a new refrigerator at home in McHenry, Illinois, on April 4, 2011.

Photo by: Scott Strazzante

MCT

Photo

Laurie Thompson, left, is a mother of three and is a surrogate mother of twins for a couple in Spain, the second time she has been a surrogate. Thompson helps her daughters Avery and Kyrra, right, with homework at home in McHenry, Illinois, on April 4, 2011.

fast facts

Surrogacy first became commercial in the U.S. in the late 1970s.

Between 1976 and 1988, 600 babies were born to surrogate mothers. The number of surrogate births soared to 5,000 in the next four years.

There are three types of surrogate mothers; gestational, traditional and egg donors.

A surrogate can earn a fee of anywhere from $10,000 to upward of $25,000, as of 2009.

Ideal surrogates are between age 18 and 35 with at least one child of their own.

Source: ehow.com

Growing number of American surrogates carrying babies for foreign couples

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO

With a flag hanging outside her house, a crate of Girl Scout cookies in her living room, and a dog named for Disney sensation Miley Cyrus at her feet, Laurie Thompson is about as American as it gets.

The same cannot be said for the 14-week-old twins in her gently protruding belly.

Conceived with a donor’s eggs, they are the children of a same-sex couple from Spain who turned to Thompson because paid surrogacy is illegal in their country.

“There’s such pride in knowing that I did this for somebody,” Thompson says of her experience as a surrogate, which has also included a pregnancy for a married couple from Serbia.

“This is something that is probably hard for most people to do — with the emotional connection and everything — and I was able to do it.”

Thompson represents a new twist in global fertility tourism.

In the past five years, would-be parents from as far as Istanbul and Uruguay have turned to healthy young mothers in the U.S. to carry their children.

The babies are born U.S. citizens, surrogacy agency officials say, but that’s not a primary motivation for the parents, who typically come from European and Latin American countries where surrogacy is illegal or socially unacceptable.

The parents have exhausted other options and are willing to pay about $50,000 to $100,000 — part of which goes to the surrogate — to have biological children.

No one tracks how many of the estimated 1,400 babies via surrogacy in the U.S. each year are carried for international parents, but one of the larger U.S. agencies, the Center for Surrogate Parenting in Encino, Calif., estimates that about half of its 104 births in 2010 were for international parents.

“We’re getting inquires from international parents constantly. Because of the referral process, it’s skyrocketed,” says Zara Griswold, director of Family Source Consultants in Hinsdale, Ill.

Casual and confident in jeans and a hoodie, Thompson, 34, was in good spirits on a recent morning, despite a to-do list that included moving, caring for three young daughters, working part time as a bus driver and finding a new obstetrician.

Her journey into surrogacy began 17 years ago, she says, when a close friend confided she might not be able to carry a baby.

Thompson’s response was immediate: “I would totally do that for you.”

Her friend’s fertility problem resolved, and Thompson got married and had three children of her own, Avery, 8, Kyrra, 6, and Lacey, 5. When the youngest was born in 2006, Thompson and her husband, Damion, 39, a U.S. Army Reserve unit administrator, knew that their family was complete. Her urge to carry a baby for someone else, however, was still there.

She’d had easy pregnancies, and gestational surrogacy, in which the surrogate’s genetic material isn’t used, seemed like a good emotional fit.

“I was told that I could be an egg donor, but I can’t do that,” she says. “I drive a school bus and if a local couple got an egg and I saw this kid walking on my bus that looked like me, it would be really hard.”

In late 2008, Thompson told her husband she was interested in surrogacy.

“I wasn’t shocked,” he recalls. “I just know her, and that’s just the way she is.”

Laurie Thompson had to undergo medical and psychological testing in order to enter into a legally binding surrogacy contract under Illinois law.

The law also requires that a surrogate be at least 21, have health insurance and have given birth to at least one child.

Once Thompson had submitted her surrogacy application to Family Source Consultants, she received three profiles of potential parents. A couple in their 40s from Serbia who were aging out of parenthood after years of unsuccessful fertility treatments struck Thompson as the ones in the greatest need of her services.

The money — her pay was in the $20,000 to $25,000 range, plus expenses — wasn’t very important, she says. Nationality was, but only insofar as it made the Serbian couple’s situation more desperate.

By the time Thompson delivered a healthy baby girl last May, she’d come to realize she preferred international surrogacy. Domestic couples sometimes hover and micromanage. Thompson preferred the privacy and autonomy.

As for letting the baby disappear across the Atlantic, she was ready to let the parents dictate the extent of communication in the years to come.

“I went into this with an open mind, saying, ‘This isn’t my kid, there’s nothing biological, I’m pretty much just the incubator,’” Thompson says.