[caption id="attachment_74016" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Photo by freestocks.org[/caption]
Most people researching surrogacy expect the hard part to be finding a surrogate. It isn't. The hard part is everything that comes after — the waiting, the legal maze, the emotional whiplash that nobody includes in the brochure.
Ukraine has become one of the more serious destinations for intended parents in recent years — and for a specific reason. It's among the few countries where gestational surrogacy is explicitly legal, and where the intended parents are named on the birth certificate from day one. That's not a small detail; it eliminates an entire layer of post-birth legal exposure that families face in other jurisdictions. For anyone weighing options, working with an established surrogacy agency Ukraine means operating inside a framework that actually protects you — not around one that merely tolerates you.
What draws most families toward surrogacy in Ukraine isn't just the legal clarity, though. It's the combination of cost, medical infrastructure, and program structure that's hard to find elsewhere at the same level. That part gets covered in the research phase. What doesn't get covered — what almost nobody prepares you for — is almost everything else.
Photo by freestocks.org[/caption]
Most people researching surrogacy expect the hard part to be finding a surrogate. It isn't. The hard part is everything that comes after — the waiting, the legal maze, the emotional whiplash that nobody includes in the brochure.
Ukraine has become one of the more serious destinations for intended parents in recent years — and for a specific reason. It's among the few countries where gestational surrogacy is explicitly legal, and where the intended parents are named on the birth certificate from day one. That's not a small detail; it eliminates an entire layer of post-birth legal exposure that families face in other jurisdictions. For anyone weighing options, working with an established surrogacy agency Ukraine means operating inside a framework that actually protects you — not around one that merely tolerates you.
What draws most families toward surrogacy in Ukraine isn't just the legal clarity, though. It's the combination of cost, medical infrastructure, and program structure that's hard to find elsewhere at the same level. That part gets covered in the research phase. What doesn't get covered — what almost nobody prepares you for — is almost everything else.
Dr. Dayan[/caption]
Natalie Dayan MD MSc FRCPC
General Internal Medicine and Obstetric Medicine,
Clinician-Scientist, Research Institute
Centre for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE)
McGill University Health Centre
Montréal QC
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Infertility treatment is rising in use and has been linked with maternal and perinatal complications in pregnancy, but the extent to which it is associated with severe maternal morbidity (SMM), a composite outcome of public health importance, has been less well studied. In addition, whether the effect is due to treatment or to maternal factors is unclear.
We conducted a propensity matched cohort study in Ontario between 2006 and 2012. We included 11 546 women who had an infertility-treated pregnancy and a singleton live or stillborn delivery beyond 20 weeks. Each woman exposed to infertility treatment was then matched using a propensity score to approximately 5 untreated pregnancies (n=47 553) in order to address confounding by indication. Poisson regression revealed on overall 40% increase in the risk of a composite of SMM (one of 44 previously validated indicators using ICD-10CA codes and CCI procedure codes) (30.3 per 1000 births vs. 22.8 per 1000 births, adjusted relative risk 1.39, 95% CI 1.23-1.56). When stratified according to invasive (eg., IVF) and non-invasive treatments (eg. IUI or pharmacological ovulation induction), women who were treated with IVF had an elevated risk of having any severe maternal morbidity, and of having 3 or more SMM indicators (adjusted odds ratio 2.28, 95% CI 1.56 – 3.33), when compared with untreated women, whereas women who were treated with non-invasive treatments had no increase in these risks.
