What If I Accidentally Give Birth out of my Home State?
If you’ve already done your legal agreement for your surrogacy journey, you will see that the contract has restrictions on where you can travel during the pregnancy. The reason for this is that there are a lot of legalities and logistics that must be in place for a surrogacy birth to go smoothly. All this is thrown out the window when the birth doesn’t happen in the planned location. Here’s a list of a few of the things that can be impacted by an accidental birth in a different state:
Birth Certificate: The goal in any surrogacy birth is to make sure the intended parents’ names-and only their names-end up listed on the birth certificate. How this will happen in each match varies quite a bit based on factors such as the residence of the intended parents, the residence of the surrogate, the planned location of the birth, the citizenship of the intended parents, the marital status of the intended parents, whether any donor eggs or sperm were used, and so on. The lawyers will plan this all out very carefully for your specific circumstances. If you give birth in the wrong state, this can all go awry. This means the intended parents’ names may not go on the initial birth certificate and instead, your name as the surrogate goes on it. In some cases, this can be fixed but it’s going to cost the intended parents a lot of money (we’re talking thousands of dollars which most intended parents don’t just have lying around). In other cases, this cannot be fixed and the child will end up with a birth certificate listing the surrogate and one intended parent. It’s a legal disaster and one of the most important reasons to make sure you give birth in the right state!
Birth Plans: A surrogate birth requires a lot of advanced coordination. After all, you are going to have two extra people involved. These two extra people have rights as legal parents, such as the right to make health care decisions for the baby after birth. When you give birth in a state other than planned, the hospital has had no chance to prepare for your gestational carrier delivery. The hospital may not even be surrogacy friendly and used to handling surrogacy births. The nurses may keep referring to the surrogate as “the mom”. The doctors may turn to the surrogate for consent to vaccines, eye ointment, and other treatment of the baby. The hospital may not know what the legal rights of the intended parents are (and if the state law is not surrogacy friendly, the answer may be that they have “none”). The hospital may not have a second room prepared for the baby and his/her parents to move to after the birth. The birth certificate clerk may not know how to do the surrogacy birth worksheet properly, or may not even have those forms handy. All these things are made extra complicated by giving birth in an unplanned location.
Insurance: The out-of-state hospital may not be in-network with the surrogate’s health insurance, meaning that someone (the intended parents?) has to pay the extra out-of-pocket costs. And if the baby goes to the NICU, the costs can quickly skyrocket if the baby’s medical care is also out-of-network. Most intended parents are cash-strapped after spending $120,000+ just to get to this point in the surrogacy journey. They cannot afford the tens of thousands of extra dollars involved with an out-of-network birth.
Going Home: The intended parents may have a much longer trip home with a baby than anticipated if you give birth outside of your home state. Whether you go by air or car or bus or train, newborns are hard to travel with. And public transportation can expose the newborn baby to all kinds of diseases. Your choices may have made the trip home much more complicated than the intended parents had counted on.
Surrogate Compensation: If the birth is in breach of your contract, say because you made the choice to leave your home state despite what’s written into your contract, then you may be looking at forfeiting part of your compensation. You may even have to reimburse the intended parents for all the extra expenses incurred in the unauthorized change of delivery location. So, this kind of thing can also end up costing you a lot of money.
These are just a few of the things that can crop up with an unplanned out-of-state birth. Bottom line is that giving birth outside of your home state is a big giant DON’T unless planned well in advance with your agency coordinator and the lawyers.
Thinking about becoming a surrogate in New England, the Southwest, Colorado, Montana, or the Pacific Cascade region? We’d love to connect with you!