Surrogates are more likely to face health complications than women pregnant for themselves

Does carrying a baby for someone else entail greater medical risk than carrying for yourself? Yes, says a team of researchers in Canada.

Knowing a thing or two about surrogacy makes some people sceptical that carrying a child for someone else is really the same, riskwise, as carrying for oneself.

To start with, surrogacy usually (though not always) involves conception via IVF, and that carries its own risks.

Then there's the matter of the embryo. Very often it's made using an egg that is not the surrogate's own, so it's genetically not related to her. Almost always the sperm is sperm that her body has never encountered before. Evidence increasingly suggests that this is a factor in health issues like preeclampsia, a serious blood pressure condition that can develop during pregnancy.

Also, maybe surrogates as a group are a little different from the average pregnant woman and maybe those small differences impact the physical experience too. For instance, a woman may feel extra pressure to perform well for the intended parents, because she knows how much it means to them, or she may feel extra pressure to do what the intended parents want her to do, even if she feels she ought to do something else (example: exercise). Or she might be undertaking the surrogacy for complicated reasons.

But a hunch that surrogacy may be different is not the same as evidence that it is. So I was especially excited to see a new paper out in Annals of Internal Medicine that investigates this very question. And it investigates it in my own province, Ontario, here in Canada.