Latest Surrogacy News

Under new legislation before Parliament, they would be breaking the law.

Roth-Edney, 33, and Edney, 34, spent four agonizing years trying to have a baby, until their doctor concluded she would never be able to carry a pregnancy.

They recently decided to try gestational surrogacy, in which their embryos will be transferred to the uterus of another woman.

Every year, thousands of babies are born in Canada using assisted reproductive technology — everything from simple insemination to cutting-edge in vitro fertilization.

But there have been no laws governing any of it, and few regulations, leaving doctors and infertile couples to come up with their own guidelines. Now, as the House of Commons prepares to pass Bill C-13, the Act Concerning Assisted Human Reproduction, some infertile couples find their desire to be parents colliding with broader social concerns over how the technology is used.

Besides banning cloning and regulating the use of embryonic stem cells, Bill C-13 bans the practice of paying a woman to carry a pregnancy. It will also make it illegal to pay a man for his sperm or a woman for her eggs — gamete donation, as both are known.

An estimated 50 to 100 babies are born through surrogacy every year in Canada, while hundreds more result from gamete donation.

Dr. Patricia Baird, distinguished professor of medical genetics at the University of British Columbia, was co-chair of the 1993 Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technology. She's pleased that many of the commission's recommendations are finally making it into law.

"You have to balance the desires of infertile couples with the fact that we don't want to commodify reproductive capacity," Baird says. "What the legislation is trying to do is ensure that having children doesn't become an industry."

The Edneys used an agent who assessed their personalities and matched them with a compatible surrogate, a married, middle-class 31-year-old woman with children. Both parties have been examined by doctors and counselled by social workers.

They even had separate lawyers who hammered out a contract covering everything from alcohol consumption during pregnancy to the amount of compensation the surrogate would receive for the risk and time involved.

If the legislation passes, that process will disappear, says Roth-Edney, a social worker. "People looking for surrogates are going to go underground, they're going to go to the States, they're going to find surrogates off the Internet."

Ethicists and the adult children of donor sperm are upset with Bill C-13's proposal to preserve the anonymity of egg and sperm donors, but they support the ban on compensation.

Olivia Pratten's biological father was paid $50 for his sperm in 1981. Now a 20-year-old student in Nanaimo, B.C., Pratten believes all gamete donation and surrogacy should be open and unpaid, to avoid turning children into marketable products who grow up wondering about the identity and motivations of their biological parents.

"I recognize the pain of infertility — after all, I'm the child of infertile people," Pratten says. "But you have to remember that there's a child at the end who has to live with the decisions made for them."

Fertility clinics pay women in their 20s and early 30s in the range of $2,000 for their eggs. The procedure involves taking injection drugs daily for several weeks, followed by daily monitoring and an uncomfortable, often painful, procedure to retrieve the eggs.

Sperm donors receive about $70 each time they visit a sperm bank, and multiple visits are required over several weeks.

Surrogacy arrangements can cost a couple from $35,000 to $40,000, with about $15,000 going to the surrogate and the rest to lawyers, doctors, social workers and agents.

"Buying, selling and trading human eggs and embryos — that's exactly what's going on," says Diane Allen, executive director of the Infertility Network, a Canadian patient organization. "Should we just do anything it takes to give someone a baby?"

Bill C-13 allows voluntary, altruistic gamete donations and surrogacy, but no money may change hands beyond reimbursement for basic expenses, and no person or company may profit from assisting in such arrangements. The bill sets out maximum penalties for violators of $500,000 or up to 10 years in jail, or both.

Cathy Ruberto, assistant clinical director of Etobicoke-based ReproMed, the largest sperm bank in Canada, says the new law will probably put sperm banks out of business and eliminate the pool of egg donors.

"At least three-quarters of our donors have told us they would not continue to participate without compensation and/or reimbursement," says Ruberto, who points out that sperm donation is already regulated by Health Canada.

Supporters of compensation are fighting an uphill battle, as the rest of the world seems to be heading to a system of voluntary, unpaid and open donations. Commercial surrogacy was banned in Britain in 1985, and in most of Australia in the 1990s.

Still, the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, the professional body representing fertility doctors, has several objections to Bill C-13, including the prohibition on payment.

"We believe as strongly as anyone else that human gametes are not commodities; they are things to be given freely," says Dr. Roger Pierson, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Saskatchewan and chair of communications for the society.

"But we have to recognize there is considerable nuisance and time involved, and that deserves some sort of compensation."

Allen, of the Infertility Network, says her group has come under tremendous pressure from doctors and some patients to change their opposition to compensation.

"This has turned into a multi-million-dollar industry, and the people who are the most upset about the legislation are the ones with the most to lose," Allen says.

The Edneys are going ahead with the surrogacy arrangement. The process requires their surrogate, who lives several hours north of the city, to take hormone injections and be monitored by a Toronto fertility specialist frequently in the weeks before the embryos are transferred to her uterus.

Under Bill C-13, they would be able to reimburse the surrogate for such expenses as medication, gas and maternity clothes, but they would not be able to give her anything for her time away from work and family, or medical risk and inconvenience.

"The people who take issue with surrogacy are missing the point," Roth-Edney says.