‘Our Baby: A Modern Miracle’ C4 10pm tonight

[Haveastock]

The story of Jake Graf and Hannah Winterbourne’s surrogacy journey. They’re the photogenic transgender power couple who are patrons of Mermaid.

Their surrogate was an Irish woman and I followed Jake on Instagram during the whole drama of the birth happening amidst a pandemic. I actually shed a tear when I saw a photo of the baby in their arms and thought about a nameless woman in the background having to deal with the post-birth pain and bleeding without a baby to hold.

I’ve just watched a trailer where Jake said they were hoping for a boy first (they used their own eggs and donor sperm) as they knew how to handle boys - throw them around, be boisterous etc. and werevmore familiar with that then girls who, as far as they were concerned mainly played with glitter and dolls!!! Yes, they laughingly admitted they’re were as prone to gender stereotypes as the next man, woman etc.! How we laughed!?

I’m sure it will be an interesting programme and the baby is so gorgeous. As I’ve said before, I wish them all well. The baby won’t be short on love. But by championing Mermaids and their push for the affirmation model, no matter how young, Jake is indirectly encouraging a generation of young kids to start on a treatment pathway that will end up in depriving them of any chance of a biological child of their own. I find that absolutely tragic.

(Am sure they’re a bit frustrated that their programme is airing during the 48 hour Twitter blackout)

Hope no one minds me posting about it on this board. Am sure there will be a thread in Telly Addicts too. I imagine they’ll get a lot of positive feedback.

@KingFredsTache I'd encourage you to watch Eggsploitation to learn more about the risks and harms off egg harvesting.

It is in English but with Spanish subtitles.

Another study showing the much increased risk for hypertensive disorders in Oocyte donation (OD) pregnancies.

"Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and pre‐eclampsia
The incidence of HDP in singleton pregnancies was 13.0–39.3% in the OD group, 1.9–23.3% in the IVF group and 2.1–3.8% in the SC group (Table S4)."
(SC = spontaneous conception)

obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1471-0528.14257

Women are being exposed to unacceptable risk and do not have this sufficiently explained to them.

Thank you Fanny - have just watched a bit of 'Eggspolitation'

I'm glad you've watched KingFred

I've been reading, learning, listening to podcasts and watching documentaries for nearly two years now since I learnt of the Law Commission proposals for new surrogacy law in the UK.

Surrogacy is relentlessly presented in the media as a lovely gift for a kind woman to help the childless have a baby.

Scratch the surface and I'm afraid it's all bad!

But for me, the bottom line is - I think it's a damn cheek to ask a woman to go through nine months pregnancy and childbirth for another person, and to give away sell her baby. Maybe I'm not very empathetic or good at looking at things from another person's point of view (I'm not, it's true!) but I really can't imagine why anyone would do that.

And no baby should be bought, sold, wrapped in ribbon and gifted.

It really is that simple - for me, at least.

We all know you can't sell your ten year old if they are getting a bit annoying, or your five year old, or your two year old. Why is it OK when it's a newborn?

Anyway, this is a great article that covers lots of the issues.

mercatornet.com/use-and-abuse-the-exploitative-reality-of-surrogacy-and-egg-donation/24920/

Those adverts for egg donation! How can they advertise as safe. Surely that could lead to being sued?

£75k for egg donation would be hard to turn down at that age. Now I'm older there is no way I would donate eggs, not for any amount of money. I don't understand how a woman can be comfortable knowing she has biological children walking about in the world and not know if they're OK, if they're happy, safe. Not know what they're like. Could bump into them and not know.
But as a twenty somthing, the fact they are my children wouldn't really occur to me. I fear these women would donate eggs in their early 20s thinking no big deal - then go on to have their own child in their early 30s and learn to regret their decision.

Thats not even taking into account how you would feel if the donation lead to infertility, cancer or both.

@FannyCann

Donor eggs are an independent risk factor and women who act as surrogates, having previously has problem free pregnancies frequently run into difficulties with their surrogate pregnancies. This applies to women using donor eggs for ivf as well as surrogate mothers.

This major study concluded

"Donor oocyte pregnancy acts as an independent risk factor for pregnancy complications, including hypertensive disorders, small for gestational age, and preterm delivery. Women should be counselled carefully before undergoing DO ‐assisted conception."

obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1471-0528.13910

There is also the matter of the risks and harms of obtaining the eggs, which I hesitate to refer to as egg donors. True, in the UK payment is capped at £750 which in no way would tempt me to go through the process.
In the USA college students are targeted as good genetic material, clever, sporty etc and payment may be as much as $10,000 so obviously a significant temptation to help pay college fees this way.

I heard something on Radio 4 this week about young women in the UK cutting the cost of harvesting and freezing their eggs by using a scheme where they have to ‘donate’ half of the harvested eggs to get the discount. The scheme had a catchy name like ‘spend and save’ (but not that obvs).

Not RTFT sorry, but on the subject of egg donation, lesbian couples are often targeted as good supply for this too (or certainly were - it’s been a while since I was anywhere near this). Approaching a clinic for artificial insemination, lesbians are persuaded to “upgrade” to IVF, told it has a higher success rate and that if they donate half their eggs from the egg harvest to a couple needing donor eggs, that couple will pay for large part of the IVF cycle for them, reducing the cost hugely. Risks are barely mentioned, and not until the idea has been sold to them as a good one.

Ivf clinics need to be much more highly regulated.

I've heard of people being talked into full ivf rather that just sperm insemination (sorry don't know the actual term) the clinics sight sucsess rates, but why wouldn't you try a pretty much non invasive almost natural approach first,especially when the woman hasn't got fertility problems.

I know a single woman who just got pregnant by donor sperm. No clinic or ivf required. Just a cup and syringe and willing male.

boatyardblues
I'd be interested to listen to that radio 4 programme - was it on Woman's Hour or can you let me know which programme please.

The problem with IVF clinics is they are totally profit orientated. Most NHS hospitals don't offer IVF in-house, they refer women who qualify to for NHS funding to the local private clinic. This is what my own hospital does. It may be that one of the NHS consultants also works at the private clinic or it may be other specialists that take on the work.
The profit motive means that they take on even hopeless cases with practically zero chances of success to keep the money rolling in. Any problems that arise then fall to the NHS to deal with.
Being private the only oversight is the HFEA, you can't do an FOI to a private clinic.
I have been investigating this because although the department I work in isn't maternity or gynaecology, I have had some dealings with women who have run into problems with OHSS.

We recently had a case that very closely resembled the details of the woman in this case report.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174786/

Women with substantial surgical background, very unlikely to achieve IVF success and a high risk factor for problems related to ovarian stimulation.

The surgeon was, shall we say, a little concerned.
This has had significant ongoing health impact for her.

Fanny and boatyard - I heard that too. It was on You and Yours on Thursday, about 20 mins into the programme.

Did anyone also happen to hear the very worrying Woman's Hour item on Monday about artificial gestation and so-called 'bio-bags'? It was in the context of pushing the boundaries of what was ethically possible regarding birth, and the interviewee, who I think has written a book on this, raised the prospect of this becoming a serious likelihood in the foreseeable future. Needless to say, no mention was made of the enormous elephant in the room....I found it chilling tbh. I didn't see the documentary but reading this thread made me think about that interview with even more concern for the welfare of the babies involved in these transactions.

Thanks Zeugma - I had no idea which programme it was on.

Neither did I, boatyard, but I knew I'd heard it somewhere! Tracked it down in the end....

Thanks so much Zeugma

I will have a listen later. Had to rush out without finishing what I wanted to say, re egg sharing.
My local IVF clinic is part of Care Fertility who are big players in the business. Prices are on the website, I think they might vary slightly between clinics but I doubt there is a significant difference.
They quote £1000 for treatment if you egg share compared to the full cost of £3500 plus. Considering payment to donors is capped at £750 I think this sort of discount is not really in the spirit of the rules.
I have been corresponding with the HFEA over a number of issues but they haven't responded to this particular question that I raised with them. I will go back to them again about it when I have listened to the programme.

Concerns about egg sharing include firstly, the obvious that a woman may fail to have a baby despite IVF but her eggs may produce a baby for another woman. I think that would be very hard to come to terms with. I think, tbf, I saw something about this on the Care Fertility website, at least it is mentioned, I think it said you have a right to find out if you have a child elsewhere, I need to check facts when I am home again.

My other concern is that this may mean a difference in a woman's treatment regime. NICE recommendations to reduce the risk of OHSS are that the minimum dose of ovarian stimulation drugs should be used to achieve the number of egg needed. I sometimes lurk on the IVF threads on Mumsnet to learn more about treatments. Several posters have said their consultant reassuringly said "you only need one good egg" and they had success with just the one although probably more were collected but not all made the grade. Or some could be saved for another try. But clearly a woman doesn't need to go for maximum stimulation to produce say 40 eggs as happen with egg "donors" in the USA when they are being paid $10k.
So are egg sharers overstimulated to produce more eggs so there are plenty to go round?
This is a question I asked the HFEA.
I can't log in and access their reply just now, but they sent me some figures that showed egg "donors" and egg "sharers" did produce more eggs than individual IVF patients but they posited the reason was because the average age in this group was lower so they were a more fertile group.

It wasn't a massive difference to be fair, bearing in mind the range that goes into an average statistic. In the region of about 16 v 10, so not a huge red flag.
But theHFEA said they don't monitor individual treatments (unless there's a reason to look at an individual case). So that question remains unanswered for me.

Well this is odd. I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist but I wonder if something has put the wind up Care fertility.
I previously looked through the costing schedules and readily found the bit about egg sharing and the cut price £1000 deal.
Now I can't find it.
There is mention of egg sharing in a different part of the website but the link won't open.

Odd. 🤔

Thought I’d post this update. Someone on Jake’s Instagram said that they were concerned that Laura was sidelined during the programme and that they were worried that the last image we had of her, was her crying. Jake replied 2 days ago and said:

‘Those were tears of happiness and pride at what she had given us! We chat every week and we’re doing it all again next year.’

So Laura is going through another pregnancy and birth. I just spotted the cannula in her hand when she handed Millie over - does this mean she had a CS?

HaveaStock there can be lots of reasons for being cannulated after/during birth which don't include having a CS. Fluids after a haemmorage for example.

Yes, I did suspect there could be other reasons for the cannula. (Both mine were born by emergency CS so I’m well familiar with cannulas - horrible things!) Either way it’s an indicator that she didn’t have an entirely straightforward birth.

Doing it again? Well I'm not surprised but they sound broke. Maybe the documentary payment was a lot of £.

I expect poor Laura for a buzz from it as well as needs the cash. She might also like having some attention? I don't mean that in a bad way, more just the gratitude and feeling like you're the most special person.

I do hope she changes her mind. That would be her fourth pregnancy and her hormones might not have settled before making such a huge decision. She has her kids to think of too.

I had a cannula in each hand and I had a VB. In my case it was the syntocin drip & glucose sliding scale as I'm diabetic. So not necessarily.

I hope she is/was okay

Bit late as it was posted on 2019 but I have only just come across this article and I'm quite shocked. A sister acting as a surrogate for her brother & his partner... using her own egg. So basically handing over her own baby to be raised by its uncle who is also its dad

www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/9521048/mum-birth-brothers-baby-stranger-surrogate/

Well her egg was fertilized by her brother's partner's sperm, not by her brother's sperm. Which would be incestuous and genetically inadvisable of course. Did you misread?

So in their case, it's really no different than if she were doing it for her sister.

I have read all the arguments against surrogacy and I agree wholeheartedly that in most cases it is using women's bodies as commodities, and not thinking about the baby's needs. There's something very wrong about it, even where the mother is doing it altruistically. Also did not like Jake's attitude in the show at all.

But if you are going to have surrogacy, I'd say doing it for a sibling is one of the most positive situations, and has the best chance of working out. Why did you find that case so shocking? (unless you thought she was literally allowing herself to be impregnated by her brother - ew! ) Nobody would want that anyway.

What's miraculous about this non story? When the male of the species manages to give birth all on his own, with all his male plumbing intact, that will be a miracle worthy of airtime.
Not this nonsense.

I accept there have been some successful and happy sibling surrogacy arrangements.
I still think there are too many ways it can go wrong from family coercion to actual harm (birth injury etc) to the mother. It's too much to ask if your sibling. I have told my daughters in no uncertain terms they are not to ask this if each other should one of them suffer infertility.

This brother / sister arrangement nearly lead to family breakdown, it was the grandmother (who was shocked when she found out what they were doing - why had no one told her before I wonder....) who held the family together. A 48 year old carrying twins. How predictable that it all got a bit hairy at the end of the pregnancy, raised blood pressure, premature delivery etc.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/27/secret-diary-of-a-surrogate-mother

Sorry. I keep typing an i instead of an o.
"If" instead of "of".

My dB struggled to conceive and I dreaded being asked (not that he I don't think).

I'm not an overly caring generous person. But I would still have felt a certain amount of guilt saying no.

I wonder how many relatives or siblings do it purely put of guilt?

Laura may have had an form of induction where they use a drip in your hand. Not a plesent way to give birth. Having another baby for them? They've only just got this one and already they are rushing for another. I've seen that a lot with surrogate parents. Smacks of greed to me and also not having to consider the strain on you're own body, why not keep churning them out. In reality (if feeding naturally) your body won't let you have babies that close together.