Infertile Couples Find New Hope on Internet Beginning Mother's Day

Business Wire, May 6, 1996

ATLANTA--(bUSINESS WIRE)--May 6, 1996--Beginning this Mother's Day, May 12, couples who despair that they might never have a baby can find new hope via the Internet.

A web site created by The American Surrogacy Center Inc. (TASC) -- www.surrogacy.com -- will be launched. The site will offer comprehensive and current information from some of the nation's leading experts on surrogacy as a means of building families for infertile couples.

"The rate of fertility problems among couples is rising dramatically due to increasingly advanced maternal age, as well as physiological factors," said TASC President Joan Barnes. "Experts have found that one in every five couples trying to conceive encounter some fertility problems."

The site will feature articles and resources authored and contributed by physicians, legal counsel, and other specialists in the field of surrogacy, as well as personal experiences of both couples and surrogates.

For many couples, surrogacy -- when a woman other than the wife carries the child to term -- holds great promise, since the embryo carried by the surrogate has the genetic makeup of one or both parents. Also, surrogacy may avoid many of the legal entanglements that complicate adoptions. Less than 1% of surrogacy arrangements have resulted in litigation, while over 15% or more adoption arrangements fail.

The www.surrogacy.com site will provide a private and confidential avenue for couples to explore surrogacy issues such as medical and psychological information and procedures, the legal status of surrogacy by state, opinions of surrogate parents and surrogacy advocates.

It also will include The Surrogacy Store, an area from which site visitors can order books, tapes, article reprints, and other materials about surrogacy. "There's a lot of misinformation regarding surrogacy. With an issue as personal and emotional as infertility, it's important that people have private access to accurate information," said Barnes, mother of two children born through gestational surrogacy.

"With the Web site, we're really centralizing information from many national experts and resources so that anyone can access it from the privacy of their personal computer," said Barnes. "We're hoping that some of the people who visit our site this Mother's Day will be parents by this time next year."

The American Surrogacy Center promotes the exchange of information via the Internet at www.surrogacy.com on medical and pharmaceutical treatments, surrogacy alternatives, current legal status, counseling, medical and legal practitioners, agencies and similar societies, as well as providing a forum for those requesting and providing information. TASC is headquartered in Marietta, Ga.

CONTACT: American Surrogacy Center

Kyle Young, 770/426-1107