Statistics about Surrogacy

Surrogacy has come a long way since the first successful pregnancy by a surrogate in 1985. That baby, known as Baby M was born in 1986. A lot of you probably know the story of Baby M since the media ate up that surrogacy nightmare story. Long story short, the surrogate had a change of heart after the birth and fought to keep the baby. In the end, the intended parents won custody of their baby. It wasn't until 1997 that the CDC submitted their first report to congress titled: “Assisted Reproductive Technology Success Rates: National Summary and Fertility Clinic Reports”. 

Thanks to the CDC's National ART Surveillance System we know that "of 2,071,984 assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles performed during 1999–2013, 30,927 (1.9%) used a gestational carrier. The number of gestational carrier cycles increased from 727 (1.0%) in 1999 to 3,432 (2.5%) in 2013. Among gestational carrier cycles, the proportion with non-U.S. residents declined during 1999–2005 (9.5% to 3.0%) but increased during 2006–2013 (6.3% to 18.5%). Gestational carrier cycles using non-donor oocytes had higher rates of implantation (adjusted risk ratio [aRR], 1.22; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.17–1.26), clinical pregnancy (aRR, 1.14; 95% CI, 1.10–1.19), live birth (aRR, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.12–1.21), and preterm delivery (aRR, 1.14; 95% CI, 1.05–1.23) compared with non-gestational carrier cycles. When using donor oocytes, multiple birth rates were higher among gestational carrier compared with non-gestational carrier cycles (aRR, 1.13; 95% CI, 1.08–1.19)." This information was taken directly from their study.

The National Summary ART data from 2015 has stats on fresh vs. frozen embryos, ages of the surrogate/mother, how many embryos were transferred. Instead of retyping it all in this post and overwhelming everyone who doesn't love stats I'll leave it up to you to look at the study here.

This post took me longer than any other post to research because there are tons of statistics quoted in articles out there but no references to back them up. So, I stuck to the trusted NAAS studies. When in doubt, turn to NAAS.