Law hampers gay couple’s surrogate search
• Ryan Dignan and his husband are looking for someone to have their baby.
They never knew it would be this hard.
“I equate it to an onion. You see this thing on the outside, but once you start peeling back the layers, there are all these different aspects to it,” Dignan said.
He and his husband, Ryan Prafke, hope to find a surrogate to carry their child to term. In their plan, the woman would be a gestational surrogate — meaning eggs harvested from one donor would be implanted in the surrogate through in vitro fertilization with sperm from one of the fathers.
What they didn’t know is that because of strict Canadian laws, finding a surrogate is easier said than done.
“You have all these wonderful people saying, ‘yes, it’s a possibility,’ but then when you get down to the nitty gritty, will you?” Dignan said.
Canadian laws prohibit anyone from being paid to be a surrogate. No intermediary can be paid to arrange a surrogacy, either, so matchmaker organizations such as those that operate overseas and in certain U.S. states are outlawed in Canada.
Dignan has an egg donor lined up. The couple also had a friend willing to become their surrogate, but she backed out.
“It just seems like it would be easier if there was an organization where I could say, ‘This is what I am looking for and I have the money and am willing to do it,’ ” he said.
Karen Busby, a law professor at the University of Manitoba and one of Canada’s leading experts on surrogacy, agrees.
“You are working in a total grey zone when it comes to surrogacy. What a lot of people do is leave Canada,” she said.
Because someone can pay for a surrogate’s “expenses” during pregnancy — maternity clothes and medications and sometimes even work leave — surrogates here do get some compensation. On average it’s up to $3,000 a month, but it’s a precarious process that can end up exploiting surrogate women, she said.
Busby is an advocate for decriminalizing commercial surrogacy in Canada; essentially, she wants to make it legal for people to pay women to have their babies, but under a heavily regulated system.
She said concerns about exploitation of women are unfounded in Canada and that the current laws that force people to go abroad are far more exploitative.
“They are off- loading the issue on to vulnerable women in other countries.”