Restarting Our Entire IVF and Surrogacy Journey
Setbacks are part of every surrogacy journey, but I didn’t think we would experience a setback of this magnitude.
We are going back to the very beginning and redoing our entire journey. Everything from depositing our sperm, to selecting an egg donor, to making embryos, to matching with a surrogate, and to legal contracts. It all has to be repeated.
We had our three PGT-A embryos - our three Olympians. We had our incredible surrogate, who we only met after several unsuccessful matches. We had our amazing trip to Los Angeles during the first transfer in November 2025. We stayed in Sweden for the 2nd transfer in February 2026, and we were in Stockholm for the 3rd transfer last week.
None of them stuck.
We are sad. While we are most sad about not being pregnant, we are also terribly sad about not being able to go on this journey with our surrogate. We have been talking/texting almost daily for 9 months. Besides my husband, she was the person I texted the most. It’s a huge loss to not be able to continue together, but it was not meant to be. There is so much gratitude and appreciation for her, that I am sure we will stay in touch and in each other's lives, just not in the way we had imagined.
Also, we are starting over, but we are not starting from scratch.
We have done this before. We know what we want. We also know what we will do differently.
While I have loved the approach to our journey thus far, I don’t think we indexed high enough on the fertility criteria for the egg donor and surrogate. Don’t get me wrong, these were hugely important, but we didn’t ask enough questions of our reproductive endocrinologist and team to see if these aspects were optimized.
Our egg donor did not produce as many eggs as anticipated, and there were issues obtaining all our surrogate’s previous medical records. I’m not saying anything was missed, but it was not top of mind for us. We have navigated this journey from a more emotional perspective. As a doctor, I didn’t want to ‘doctor’ my own IVF and surrogacy journey. I’m not going to over rotate and do that now, but all the medical aspects will be something we are more thorough and definitive on going forward.
We are also going to maximize our own health and sperm. Besides avoiding saunas, we didn’t do anything differently before our first sperm deposit. Our sperm were not significantly abnormal, and ICSI was used for the fertilization, but this time, we want to push for all medical optimization. We will do everything to make the most embryos and have the highest probability of transfer success.
Stay tuned as we become sperm influencers (spermfluencers…is that a word?) and join the spermmaxxing universe.
All kidding aside, the saving grace of this is our guarantee program with our clinic and agency. Without this, we would not be able to afford to make more embryos. I know such programs come with extra upfront costs that not everyone needs, but in our case, we desperately needed it.
My advice to all gay intended dads: Get the guarantee program.
The assurance of a guarantee program will literally give you peace of mind for when things go wrong, and things will almost almost certainly go wrong.
But at the end of your journey, the last thing you want to be is childless and penniless. At least we won’t be both of those things when we finally have our child.
