From the survey it would appear that most Ip's get information about surrogacy in India through Blogs, personal contacts and forums, rather than the services themselves.
We all want to know about the ages & tests done on the surrogates, and our primary concern regarding our Egg Donor remain age and education. Most of us also want to know if our Egg Donor has donated to another IP in our country.
We tend to assume that our doctors are experienced in IVF & surrogacy (70%)and don't ask about qualifications and Cost is the most significant factor in our choice of service, although many refer to the experiences of previous IP's as a indicating factor as well.
NB: I am sorry to have caused offence to those at SI, that was not my intent. Even though the survey had been up for a week, and i had just taken the opportunity to post the results,SI has reported that:
We have been asked by many couples if these surveys have been conducted by us and about their authenticity. These may be helpful surveys, but we would request these surveys aren't conducted on this forum, to avoid any confusions and queries raised
Concerns over IP's 'confusion and queries raised' must be high if the thread needed to be deleted. I have always thought it was good thing to ask questions and for the record Survey monkey is a well recognised survey tool used by universities and research institutes around the world including WHO.
Wow - very interesting results. I am amazed how few people go through medical tourism companies and how many people rely on blogs for information. I guess that's why the SI doctors read the blogs and make legal threats against anyone who says anything that could be construed as negative, even if it is true. While I am very grateful for this opportunity to have children - our last option ever - collectively we are forking over a lot of money to these clinics and they do owe us a duty of care.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your continued efforts to help provide context to those embarking on this process. After all the research you've done and shared, this is truly a nice 'extra credit' project that's interesting and informative.
ReplyDeleteCharliecat
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that people would choose cost over success rate or "live birth rate" as the #1 criteria for their choice of clinic. What's the point of saving a few shekels if your chances for success are diminished (or unknown) and you have to repeat the process again. Interesting how some people rationalize things and make their final decisions with their hard-earned money.
Jon, I think the graph you refer to shows that cost is the most common selection...not necessarily the most important criteria. I think the ‘perception’ of the cost is the real appeal for many IPs for an Indian route. I have an estimate for our cost but won't know what it really costs for quite some time. From my POV (maybe obviously), live birth rate is clearly the most important but also hardest to quantify because the integrity of that rate can vary greatly depending upon the source of information…or often misinformation. Do you know if anyone has created a matrix of clinic-published live birth rates?
ReplyDeleteHi there, I am just in the process of getting everything together to start on this journey and while i have tons of questions i was hoping you guys or someone else reading this could help me out with. i have been in contact with surrogacy india, rotunday, and BecomeParents. I am leaning toward becomeparents because they have been so responsive to all my questions and concerns and the communication has been really great. with surrogacy india and rotunda its been pretty slow and hard to get info from them. While these two are the more popular, I was wondering if anyone has heard anything about becomeparents? any info or people you can get me into contact with would be GREATLY appreciated. thanks for this BLOG by the way... its been great to read!
ReplyDeleteHi Sean,
ReplyDeletei did email becoming parents, but didn't hear anything from them -from memory. Anyway email me at bbwoz@bigpond.net.au. cheers
I am wondering why you were allowed to post the survey at the Si forum, but when you posted a brief summary of results, your post and survey were deleted.
ReplyDeleteMakes no sense to me.
I suspect they have something to hide.
Just my opinion.
Keep the surveys coming.
From Peter at http://www.globaldoctoroptions.com/story/peter
ReplyDeleteI also started by focusing on cost and success rate - thinking I could take cost divided by success rate to get cost per success, and select the clinic with the lowest cost per success. Unfortunately, reality and theory were miles apart. Here's why:
On the success side:
1) Success rates are not defined the same way by each clinic. Clinical pregnancy? Successful delivery? Do twins count as two or one? And many other issues.
2) Definitions are inconsistent, resulting in massaged data: "Of clients that went through our full program (of 3 cycles)..." or "within the past 6 months..."
3) I did get success rates from Rotunda and Dr. Patel - Rotunda with 33% for self cycles and 50% for egg donor cycles and Dr. Patel of 44% overall (both self cycles and egg donor cycles) the last time I looked.
4) There is no third party certification of any of these numbers - they can easily be massaged or even made up.
5) In asking a large number of other clinics their success rates via email, they invariably said 50% or even 60%. I started asking how many surrogate babies they had delivered, I don't recall any others in India that were in the double digits (when I was asking). Rotunda and Dr. Patel have each delivered over 100 babies.
On the cost side:
1) Surprisingly, this was also difficult, as some people have pointed out. Some clinics bundle charges in, some charge everything ala-carte, some charge everything ala-carte but tell you about it along the way. Not all of them do this on purpose - they just haven't formalized the process. For instance, is life insurance for the surrogate included? Are delivery charges included in the cost estimate? How about post-delivery medical check-ups for the surrogate? Surrogate housing? Surrogate food/nutrition/diet supplements? Surrogate caretaker?
As a result, it was virtually impossible to make a decision based on cost per success.
Our research seemed to suggest that the medical procedure itself is pretty straight forward. It's like IVF, but with the egg implanted into another woman. Medically, this is not terribly complicated with many proficient doctors. Although Rotunda and Dr. Patel have admitedly demonstrated this proficiency with surrogates more than most other clinics.
So, for us, the differentation was in the rest of the process. For us, this mainly revolved around how experienced the clinic was with the end-to-end process (the proxy is total number of babies delivered successfully), the level and quality of care the surrogate receives during the process, and the hospital that would be used for delivery. Communication was also a factor, as we ruled out several clinics that hadn't responded.