Your health history provides an insight to ensure intended parents — who have put their complete trust and hopes in surrogacy — that you are physically and emotionally healthy to start your journey with them.
Continue reading to know more about the importance of your health history as part of your surrogacy application.
Why Is My Health History Necessary to Become a Surrogate?
Love and Kindness Surrogacy wants to provide full transparency for both the intended parents and surrogates.
To achieve transparency and avoid legal issues, we must collect evidence (from your health history) that proves that our surrogates are physically and emotionally capable of having a healthy pregnancy and delivery.
How Does My Health History May Have an Impact in My Surrogacy Journey?
As a surrogate mother, your health history must meet certain medical conditions. Through this information, we can determine if you are most likely to have a low-risk surrogacy journey.
Here is how your health history is used to evaluate your surrogacy application:
Evaluating Your Overall Physical Health State
Your health history allows us to know the overall state of your health. Your medical records provide information regarding:
- Reproductive health issues. Your reproductive system needs to meet certain criteria if you want to become a gestational carrier. For example, women with preterm labor, placenta previa, or who have had miscarriages are unlikely to qualify for surrogacy. However, in gestational surrogacy you won’t need your ovaries because you won’t share a genetic link with the intended parents’ baby.
- Infectious diseases. Through your medical records, we can confirm that you are in good health and that you are not a carrier of chronic infectious diseases that could be transmitted to the baby or affect its gestational development.
Preventing a High-Risk Pregnancy During Surrogacy
Your prenatal and delivery records from all of your previous pregnancies — regardless of whether you had a successful delivery or not — are necessary to assess the probability that you are not likely to experience a high-risk pregnancy.
A high-risk pregnancy involves health conditions that could lead to pregnancy and delivery complications. These complications could put the surrogate mother and babies’ health at risk.
Some examples of health conditions associated with high-risk pregnancies include high blood pressure, diabetes and being over 35 years of age, among others.
Preventing Postpartum Complications After Surrogacy
Your family health history plays a big role in predicting future postpartum complications, such as postpartum depression (PPD).
According to studies, women with an extensive family history of PPD are over 50% more likely to develop it. Unfortunately, the same study showed that the use of psychiatric medications during pregnancy does not assure protection against developing PPD.
Reassuring Emotional Stability
Surrogacy is a wholesome but deeply emotional journey, which is the main reason why agencies need to collect information about your mental health background.
Your well-being needs to be a priority before your commitment to surrogacy.
Unfortunately, if you take prescribed medications to treat anxiety or depression, you must postpone your surrogacy application. Otherwise, you could put the baby, the intended parents, or even yourself at risk.
Nevertheless, if you have a history of depression or anxiety but are recovered, you can still qualify to become a surrogate.
Love and Kindness Surrogacy wants you to have a safe surrogacy journey. We take pride in being a responsible agency that will not jeopardize the health of our surrogates.
Contact one of our surrogate coordinators today if you have any concerns about your health history as part of your surrogacy application. They all have been surrogates themselves and are open to answer any of your questions. We are here for you!