Conceivable Options/Surrogacy (FM)

To highlight Infertility Awareness Week as in international issue, I brought Mindy Berkson back on the show. As founder of Lotus Blossom Consulting (www.LotusBlossomConsulting.com), she has become the premier national resource for offering unique, unbiased infertility consulting to help explore family building options for individuals and couples. And one conceivable option for family building being discussed on my show is surrogacy.

But before Mindy talks in depth about the many movable parts involved in gestational or traditional surrogacy, one of her clients Shari Stewart is very gracious in sharing her personal journey, with her husband Bob, to find a surrogate.

After going through numerous IVF treatments to conceive their two boys, Shari and Bob found themselves with a difficult decision. It seemed to confront them on a yearly basis when a bill came due for the storage fee of their 8 frozen embryos they had created from their previous IVF treatments. What should they do? Discard them, donate them to research, or locate a surrogate to implant the embryos and carry their child to birth?

These are all interesting, emotional and philosophical questions that a couple faces when dealing with stored embryos.

It was one of the reasons the Octuplet mom gave when talking about all the embryos she had implanted.....she didn't want to discard her frozen embryos and her belief that those embryos were her children.

Supposedly there are hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos being stored across the country.....costing families a lot of money in storage fees, and creating an ultimately difficult decision about their fate.

Which was one of the reasons I liked what Dr. Shapiro discussed with me on an earlier show, regarding the fact that it is easier for people to discard frozen eggs, rather than frozen embryos.

Tap into this show to learn more about how Shari and Bob chose surrogacy, and how Mindy Berkson helped them achieve their goals.