Fertility 2020 Conference, Edingburgh, January 2020

Our founders Helen Prosser and Natalie Gamble were delighted to speak to the Fertility 2020 conference in Edinburgh – the joint national conference of the British Fertility Society, Association of Clinical Embryologists and the Society for Reproduction and Fertility, attended by more than 800 delegates from fertility clinics across the UK.

What We Spoke About

Giving a ‘surrogacy update’, Natalie and Helen shared a platform with leading surrogacy nurses Sarah Templeman from Herts and Essex and Francesca Steyn from CRGH. We updated the conference about how surrogacy works on the ground for fertility patients including:

• Surrogacy options in the U.K. including friends and family, independent surrogacy (via Facebook groups and online), surrogacy organisations COTS and Surrogacy UK (which offer structure, guidance and peer support) and surrogacy agency Brilliant Beginnings (which provides matching and a fully-managed professional service)
• Options for parents going overseas and the pros and cons of different destinations including the US, Canada, Ukraine and Georgia
• Surrogacy law including surrogacy agreements, regulation, parenthood, parental orders and immigration for babies born abroad
• The campaign to change UK surrogacy law 

With surrogacy on the rise, more fertility clinics are seeing parents and surrogates approach them for help, and we hope our talk was useful. A big thank you to the conference organisers for inviting us to speak.