An interview with Brad Spencer, co-founder of Same Love Surrogacy
BY MARK ARIEL
What motivated you to create Same Love Surrogacy?
Every surrogacy story is so unique but one thing that brought my business partners and I together was the common thread with the lack of agency support that we received during our own journeys. With that said, we had a lot of parallel success with our journeys. Both my husband and I, and my business partners were gifted with beautiful twin boys with the assistance of an amazing egg donor and generous surrogate.
We all felt that there was a void in the surrogacy agency world from the Intended Parent perspective, and most importantly, from the LGBTQ Intended Parent perspective. This is how we came to create Same Love Surrogacy, the vision of three gay dads getting together to build an agency that caters to our own community.
“Same Love Surrogacy was created by three gay dads getting together to build an agency that caters to our own community.”
… Now, with hundreds of births to date, the number of happy families around the world speaks volumes. We have relationships with IVF clinics and Assisted Reproductive Technology (“ART”) service providers from all over the country.
What are the first steps of action for an LGBTQ couple interested in becoming parents?
Making the decision to start a journey to parenthood is exciting but can be overwhelming. Finding a reliable agency is a huge starting point for LGBTQ couples interested in becoming parents. The agency will offer recommendations for IVF clinics and can assist with finding an egg donor and surrogate. They can also advise on choosing the right ART team such as a surrogacy attorney, insurance providers, mental health provider, IVF clinic and escrow companies that will all be involved in the journey to parenthood. It really takes a village to build a family!
The additional advantage to retaining an agency at the beginning would be to join their surrogate waitlist. Joining a waitlist before starting the embryo creation process could help with the overall timeframe to becoming a parent.
What are the requirements for a woman to become a surrogate
When a woman chooses to become a surrogate, she has made a life-changing and compassionate decision to help other families. All our surrogates have been medically reviewed by our team of surrogate professionals, that includes a doctor and two nurses, to ensure they are ready to be presented to both Intended Parents and to the IVF clinic. All surrogates are between the ages of 21 and 42 years old, have had at least one healthy pregnancy and delivery, and have not had past occurrences of serious pregnancy complications. They lead healthy lifestyles, live in surrogacy friendly states, and have no criminal history. But most importantly, our surrogates come to us because they want to help the LGBTQ community build families.
What other services does Same Love Surrogacy offer?
Same Love Surrogacy supports the largest amount of LGBTQ individuals of any agency in the country, with 85% of our Intended Parents being a part of our community. As a full-service agency, we also offer services with egg donation. We maintain our own database of wonderful egg donors and offer a unique service where Intended Parents can actually meet face to face with their potential egg donors. Our agency is structured in a way to offer the best support to each group of individuals. All egg donors are supported by coordinators who have previously been egg donors; Intended Parents are supported by a coordinator who is a gay father through IVF/surrogacy; and each of our surrogates is supported by one of our wonderful Surrogate Coordinators who have all gone through IVF and/or been a surrogate themselves. Additionally, we offer multilingual services to assist with building families for individuals and couples all over the globe and we have helped parents in over 25 different countries.
For more information visit: www.samelovesurrogacy.com.
