Couples ‘lining up’ to avail of surrogate pregnancy service

IRISH couples are “lining up” to avail of surrogacy pregnancies after it emerged that two sets of twins were born to surrogate mothers after fertility treatment at a well-known Dublin clinic.

It’s believed that these are the first surrogate pregnancies initiated at a clinic in this country — with large numbers of Irish couples previously travelling to Britain and the United States for help and paying up to e100,000 for the service.

One woman is now the proud mother of twin girls after her older sister offered to carry her babies. The 31-year-old woman couldn’t get pregnant as a rare syndrome meant she had no womb at birth. The babies, born last September, are now five months old. The clinic used the 31-year-old’s eggs and her husband’s sperm to create the embryos.

The second woman, a 29-year-old, had her eggs frozen prior to radiation treatment for cancer of the cervix and womb. Unfortunately, the eggs did not survive after they were thawed and could not be transferred to her sister’s womb. However, her younger sister offered to provide some of her eggs and these were fertilised using sperm from the woman’s partner. The twins were born in 2007.

“Healthy twins, a boy and a girl, were delivered at 36 weeks gestation by Caesarean and were discharged from hospital to the commissioning mother and father after four days,” said the report in this month’s Irish Medical Journal.

SIMS Clinic medical director Dr David Walsh was out of the country yesterday and couldn’t comment on the surrogacy. The clinic, however, has said that the service is available for e8,000-e10,000.