How do I explain surrogacy to friends and family?
Learn the answer to this week's user-submitted question about surrogacy in this week's installment of Ask a Surrogacy Expert! Have a question about surrogacy that you'd like answered? Submit it at https://www.brightfuturesfamilies.com/ask
Surrogacy Communication Strategy
The main approach to explaining surrogacy is tailoring the message to the audience while maintaining consistent core information. Audience-specific messaging is essential to effectively explain surrogacy. Conversations differ for close friends, elderly relatives, or children based on their knowledge level. Meeting people where they are ensures better understanding and comfort in discussing surrogacy. The core message remains that gestational carriers choose to carry pregnancies for those who cannot.
Prepare for follow-up questions after an overview to manage expectations in conversations. Common questions include relation to the carrier, duration of the surrogacy, and ongoing contact post-birth. Deciding how much detail to share depends on personal comfort and perceived necessity. Additional topics can include legal contracts, medical procedures, psychological screening, and genetic relationships
Use of supportive materials enhances communication for children as part of audience-specific methods. Bright Futures Families offers children’s books to explain surrogacy at an age-appropriate level. These resources are promoted via their social media channels for easy access. Contacting Bright Futures Families directly or visiting their website provides further detailed guidance
Digital content supplements direct conversations to provide accessible, consistent information. The website hosts blogs and other content answering common surrogacy questions. Social media serves as a platform to share educational materials and updates. This multi-channel approach supports a wide audience with varying informational needs
Audience-specific messaging is crucial for explaining surrogacy, adapting to different knowledge levels and comfort zones.
Prepare for follow-up questions about the carrier's relation, surrogacy duration, and post-birth contact to set clear expectations.
Supportive materials, like children's books from Bright Futures Families Surrogacy (your surrogacy BFF), help explain surrogacy in an age-appropriate way.
Digital content enhances communication, with blogs and social media providing consistent information on surrogacy details.
Ready to change lives as a gestational carrier?
Transcript:
Hi, it's Janelle Ibarra with Bright Futures Families. I'm their social media person. Today I'm answering our Ask a Surrogacy Expert question, which is “How do I explain surrogacy to friends and family?” So there are a lot of ways to do this. I think knowing your audience is the best way to go about it. So your conversation that you have with your best friend is going to be different than your elderly relative or your child. And so kind of meeting them where they are in their level of knowledge is going to factor in, but the message itself is the same and that's that gestational carriers, GCs, are choosing to carry a pregnancy for someone who can't do it themselves. One thing to expect is that if you give a broad overview of surrogacy and what that means, expect follow up questions: “Is it related to you?” “How long are you doing this?” “Do you keep in contact with them after?” things like that. You can choose to go into further detail for that or not. You can explain that there are legal contracts involved. You can explain that there's no genetic relationship between the gestational carrier and the baby. You can explain the psychological screening, matching process, medical procedures and things like that if you choose. However, that's going to depend on your level of comfortability and whether you think that's necessary. There are a number of children's books, if you're explaining to a child, we have featured those previously on our social media. So if you check out Bright Futures Families on our social media, you can find those. Otherwise you can contact us directly. You can check out our website www.brightfuturesfamilies.com where we have answered this question before in blog form or in other forms where you can still get that same information.