If you are choosing to pursue an agency-assisted surrogacy journey (as opposed to an independent surrogacy journey), which agency to choose is probably the most important decision you have to make. Surrogacy is a complex process that involves many service providers and other individuals. You might think that all agencies are equally capable, but that is far from the truth. Some agencies are more capable of handling a surrogacy case than others. I’ve talked to many intended parents who are waiting for more than a year for a surrogate match because their agency is too slow and too incompetent in finding and screening surrogates. I’ve also talked to intended parents whose agency doesn’t provide any medical reports after a procedure was done or routinely give a wrong patient’s medical documents to them.
In this article, we’ll look at hallmarks of good agencies, common criteria intended parents use to select an agency, and how you can select the right agency for your journey.
What makes an agency good?
After reviewing a dozen agencies and talking to intended parents who belong to these agencies, I’ve come up with a list of hallmarks of agency that makes it good. A good agency is an agency that helps your journey go smoothly. It is not easy to choose an agency that ticks all the checkboxes, and how good an agency is does change over time. A good agency can turn bad when they enjoy success and become too busy because of an influx of intended parents. That being said, let’s look at the five hallmarks of a good agency.
An agency should be competent
This goes without saying, of course, but it is not true for every agency operating in Mexico. Some agencies are actually quite bad at finding and screening surrogates or providing you with accurate information. A good agency should be very knowledgeable about the whole surrogacy process in general. It should use competent service providers such as lawyers and fertility clinics. It should have a high success record and satisfaction rate for intended parents who use the agency. More specifically, you know the agency is competent if the following is true.
- An agency representative should be able to give you accurate information when you are interviewing them. If they don’t know the answer to obvious questions or give you erroneous information, it should be a red flag.
- Surrogate match time is not too long. It doesn’t have to be an immediate match, but it should not drag on for more than 6 months or 12 months.
- The average number of embryo transfers needed before a successful pregnancy should not exceed 2 or 3, especially if you are using an egg donor. Embryos created from young egg donors are generally of high quality, and average success rate of embryo transfer using high quality embryos is around 65% to 70%. If many intended parents report having to do 3 or more embryo transfers for a successful pregnancy, it could suggest a problem in surrogate screening or preparation, or other unseen problems in the agency.
- Live birth rate shouldn’t be too low and miscarriage rate shouldn’t be too high.
An agency should be dedicated to the success of your journey
Does an agency have your best interest at heart? Do you feel that the agency care about whether you will successfully have a baby that you’ve always wanted? Or, does the agency just see you as a dollar sign? While it is true that agencies are for-profit businesses that offer services in order to make money, representatives and coordinators should also feel passionate and responsible about your journey. Based on my experience, if an agency only cares about money, you will not get a good service; the agency would find a way to make you pay as much money as possible while trying to do as little work as possible. It is not pleasant working with such an agency.
It is not easy to determine whether an agency is a responsible caring agency or not even when you conduct an initial interview with them. Talk to other intended parents who are using the agency; get a feel of how the agency is treating other intended parents.
An agency should be willing to communicate with intended parents
Because most intended parents don’t live in Mexico and can’t see what’s happening with their surrogate or with the medical procedures, they rely on the agency to update them about their journey. An agency should be willing to communicate with you what the status of egg retrieval from your egg donor is, how IVF went, how surrogate matching is going, if there is any problem with surrogate’s medical screening or endometrial preparation, how embryo transfer went, how your surrogate’s pregnancy is progressing, and so on. I’ve worked with an agency coordinator who is very slow at communication. Messages to her are unanswered for hours or days, questions are unanswered, and promises for updates broken. It is frustrating to work with such a coordinator, and it makes you worry whether something is going wrong that you are not being updated with.
When you are conducting your initial interview, see if your emails are being answered in timely manner. Slow communication before you sign up with an agency might indicate that the agency is too busy or it is not good at communication. Also, note that often, an agency communicates very quickly and answers a potential client’s questions very well, but once the potential client signs up, communication becomes slower or it feels forced. Try to talk to other intended parents who are with the agency to see if they complain about lack of communication or slow communication.
An agency should be transparent and honest
In order to make informed decisions, you need accurate, factual updates for your journey from your agency representative. For example, if your surrogate is not following her doctor’s advice to take certain medications or if there is a problem with endometrial preparation before embryo transfer, the agency should honestly tell you the problem even if it leads to you deciding to change the surrogate. If the agency does not update you with results of medical procedures or issues faced by your surrogate or fertility doctor, you won’t be able to make an informed decision and more problems may arise in the future.
Many intended parents tell me that communication is very important. Often, a major complaint with an agency is lack of communication or lack of transparency in communication. Some intended parents have voiced frustration that their agency is not giving any evidence that embryo transfer has taken place, leading them to wonder whether they have been a victim of deception. Others have cited lack of update being a major source of frustration; an agency would keep on delaying egg retrieval or embryo transfer process, giving different reasons each time. Such inconsistent communication not only confuses intended parents but also lead them to distrust their agency.
An agency should be ethical
An agency should treat surrogates with respect and dignity. They should make sure that surrogates are well-informed about what’s involved in surrogacy and what their rights and responsibilities are. They should also make sure that medical procedures are safe for surrogates and that surrogates can carry pregnancy in a safe and stable environment.
An agency which prioritizes convenience by cutting corners often hurts both the intended parents and the surrogates. For example, one agency I know recruits surrogates that have not been screened properly according to ASRM guidelines. The reason they do that is to have a large number of surrogates available for fast matching. However, as a result of lack of rigor in surrogate selection, many intended parents experience multiple embryo transfer failure even when they are using high quality donated eggs.
Why you can’t just rely on your friend’s recommendation
Do you have one or more friends who have gone through surrogacy with their agency? Do they recommend their agency because they had a nice experience with them? Word-of-mouth is a very strong marketing tool. We tend to trust recommendation from our friends or someone whom we know, whether it’s about restaurants, gyms, or surrogacy agencies. If they had a nice experience with their agency and are back home with their baby already, what can go wrong? Surely, you’ll have a nice experience, too, right?
My experience
The chance of finding the right agency for you by relying on your friend’s recommendation is, I would say, about 50-50. In 2023, I signed up with my first agency because I have heard glowing recommendation from two fellow intended parents. One intended parent had already completed her journey, and she could say only good things about the agency. Another intended parent was in the middle of her journey, but she mentioned how her agency representative and doctor were responsible, how the agency treated her with respect, and how the agency was dedicated in taking care of every client. I was impressed with what they said, so I chose the agency by signing up a contract that was priced at almost $100,000 USD.
Fast forward a few months, I went down to Mexico to deposit my sperms. The agency had arranged an English-speaking driver to pick me up from airport to my hotel, a very nice gesture. Clinic appointments went smoothly. However, during my week-long stay, some small things have raised doubts about the agency in my mind. Even though hotel cost was supposed to be covered by the agency as agreed in the contract, the hotel concierge asked me to pay for the hotel stay for the whole week, telling me that they have not been paid. After telling the clerk that my company was supposed to pay for it, he agreed and let me stay in the hotel.
During the third day of stay, an agency coordinator in Mexico sent me a set of medical forms in Spanish for me to sign and send to the clinic. The form was an online form which did not allow copy and paste, so I could not translate it to English to understand it. I asked the coordinator to help me understand the form as I was not going to sign something that I didn’t understand. She promised to help me with the form at 11 am the following day in a video call. 11 am passed without any contact from her. At 11:30 am, a message came that said she was busy, and my message to her asking when she wants to do it went unanswered for 7 hours. After she finally responded that night, we started a video call at 10 pm. She wanted me to put in my personal information and sign the forms; I insisted that I had to read the whole thing and suggested that she send me another copy of the form that allows copy and paste. She sent me PDF version of the forms and I was able to copy the text into Google Translate to translate into English.
Back in Toronto, my agency coordinator told me that I had failed my sperm quality test, but I was still eligible for the guarantee program since my sperm quality was just slightly below the acceptable standard. In order to qualify for the guaranteed-birth program that I signed up for, the contract stated I had to have a certain level of sperm quality. If I didn’t have that, I could either switch to a non-guaranteed program or get half of my deposit back. Either way, according to the contract, the guaranteed birth term would be void because of my sperm quality. I was worried that if I continue with the program, the guarantee term would be invalid even if my coordinator wrote on an email that it was still valid. The contract specifically stated that any changes to the terms have to be in writing, officially signed by both parties. I asked the agency coordinator to modify the contract in writing so it validates my sperm quality and therefore the guarantee terms. They refused. During our negotiation, I was given various propositions; go with the low sperm quality and use the email communication as confirmation of agreement; take another sperm test in Toronto, and if it passes the standard, the guarantee term is still valid. My heart was no longer with the agency due to the flip-flop. I asked for half of my deposit back, and it was refused, despite the fact that the contract clearly allowed for half of the deposit back should I fail the sperm test. It took 3 months and over 20 email communications to get the deposit back.
By the time I was in Mexico, I had made friends with fellow intended parents who were using the same agency. Their stories were horrific; 6 month delay in egg retrieval, taking 12 months or more for a surrogate match, their coordinator in Mexico not answering their messages for days or even weeks. My experience was consistent with other intended parents’ experiences. That is why I was able to quickly make decision to leave the agency upon my return to Toronto. I wasn’t going to send the agency the second payment, which was more than $50,000 CAD, when I wasn’t confident about the agency’s competency or its ability or willingness to communicate with intended parents.
Life cycle of a surrogacy agency
Why did I not have the same pleasurable experience as the other two intended parents who recommended the agency to me? It has something to do with what I call the “life cycle of an agency”. By observing various agencies and listening to experiences of many intended parents, I came to understand that many surrogacy agencies in Mexico typically undergo the same kind of “life cycle”.
- Launch phase: This is when an agency has just started a surrogacy program in Mexico. The agency has no clients or a very few clients at this stage, and it is struggling to get their name recognized. At this stage, the focus of the agency is to create highly successful experiences so that these experiences can be shared on various social media platforms. The agency does many services for the few clients that they get, and they spend a lot of time to make sure these clients are satisfied. The satisfied clients, in turn, go to various social media channels to promote their agency.
- Traction phase: This is when the words get out. The few satisfied clients in stage 1 have spread the words and generated interest. The word is that the agency provides superb services and care about intended parents. Recommendations are made and sign ups happen. The agency starts to grows in size, but still able to keep up with the demands of the intended parents and still want to please their clients.
- Expansion phase: This is when the agency has acquired a large number of clients. The agency struggles to service their existing clients and service quality deteriorates. Surrogate waiting time increases, and speed and quality of communication drop. Corners are cut and intended parents start to voice their concerns and complaints. This is due to several reasons. First, the agency has matched all of their surrogates whom the agency recruited initially, and finding and screening new surrogates takes time. Also, most agencies rely on local medical and legal professionals, and there are only a few reliable professionals specializing in surrogacy in Mexico. Finally, each contract that the agency signs last at least 18 months, counting from sign up to birth. Payment from an intended parents stretch out for 18 months to 24 months, and agency doesn’t have access to all of the contract value until a journey is finished (or almost finished). This means an agency may not have enough money to hire new coordinators to deal with the growing client base.
- Stabilization phase: This is when the agency has found an equilibrium between signing up new clients and providing services to existing clients. Very few agencies are at this stage in Mexico because most agencies entered Mexico market after the 2021 Supreme Court ruling that legitimized surrogacy by foreign intended parents. An agency at this phase could be content with a small, manageable number of clients, or it has found a way to offer services to a large pool of clients (note, I’m not saying “good services”). Also, some agencies never reach this phase, closing their services during stage 2 if they couldn’t gain enough traction, or stage 3 if they couldn’t cope with a large number of new clients.
When an intended parent makes a recommendation based on his or her experience, they were typically in an earlier stage of the agency life cycle. One of the intended parents who recommended me my first agency was in the stage 2 of the agency’s life cycle when she was doing surrogacy. By the time she completed her journey, the agency has already signed up more clients than they could handle, resulting in bad communication and long service wait times. I’ve seen such phenomena over and over again as I talked to different intended parents using different agencies for the past year.
While the life cycle I described above is similar to what non-surrogacy businesses such as restaurants or tech companies experience, it is particularly apparent in surrogacy industry in Mexico. This is because the number of intended parents (potential clients to surrogacy agencies) is quite small compared to, say, people who buy electronics or cars. Also, because each contract price is large and contract term is long, many intended parents rely on word-of-mouth to decide which agency they want to use. Words travel fast; even one or two satisfied intended parents posting positive reviews and talking to other intended parents on social media is enough to attract a dozen new clients to the agency.
I am not saying recommendations and opinions of fellow intended parents are not important. I am saying, however, there are pitfalls to just relying on the good words of a few intended parents. Recommendations should be a part of your strategy in choosing the right agency, but you should be aware of the quality of each recommendation that you receive (more on this, below). In other words, just because your good friend said Agency X is good doesn’t mean that you should follow her words and sign up with that agency.
How to assess whether an agency is right for you
Let’s take a look at several strategies that you can use to choose the agency that is right for you.
Understand details of the programs offered by agencies of your choice
This should be the first step in choosing an agency. Even though programs offered by agencies look alike, the fine prints are different. Your individual circumstances may dictate that you choose a certain type of program. For example, if you have embryos already made in your home country, you’ll want to select an agency that offers the best “own embryos” program. Cost is another consideration; while you shouldn’t base your decision only on the program cost, you’ll definitely want to consider what services are included with the proposed project price and what kind of extra cost you may have to pay.
Take a look at this list for the specific details you may want to pay attention to when looking at agency programs:
- Does the program offer any guarantee terms? Some programs “guarantee” live-birth, although the specifically how they guarantee depends on how the contract is worded. Typically, guarantee programs include unlimited embryo transfer and egg donation and IVF cycles. If you must control your total cost, you may want to consider a guarantee program.
- What kind of egg donors or sperm donors are available? If you care about the ethnicity of egg donors or sperm donors, you may want to research what kind of donors the agency has access to.
- How many embryo transfer attempts are included in the program? If you are using an egg donor to make embryos, the embryo transfer success rate is about 60% to 70% per try.
- What is the extra cost per embryo transfer if you run out all the embryo transfer attempts?
- What is the cost of PGT-a / PGS test? These are the tests done on embryos to see if they have an abnormal number of chromosomes.
- How are surrogates screened? Are they screened rigorously?
- Is the legal cost included in the total program cost?
- What law firm does the agency use? Once you learn the name, do your own research to see if the law firm has a good reputation in the surrogacy sphere.
- What is the compensation for surrogate? Typically, it should be about 300,000 pesos to 450,000 pesos.
- If miscarriage occurs, what is the procedure and the additional cost?
- Which clinic do you use? Once you learn the name, do your own research to see if the clinic has a good reputation and success rate.
- What is the legal procedure that you use? Do you do legal procedures that offer pre-birth order (note, only the states of Tabasco and Sinaloa have any legal framework that allows for a pre-birth order) or help with Amparo trial (this is the trial that help intended parents get a birth certificate that shows only their name(s)).
- Where do the surrogates live during pregnancy?
Gather objective facts about the agency
Try to gather objective facts about the agency. You can do this by reading what other intended parents are saying about the agency or talking to fellow intended parents who are currently using the agency of your choice. We tend to give too much emphasis on adjectives that evoke emotional response, such as “caring”, “great”, “nice”, or “fantastic”. But, remember that different people can experience different feelings even when they are using the same agency at the same time. I recommend that, instead, you try to focus on specific objective facts about the agency when you are reading other intended parents’ experience. Try to talk to as many intended parents as possible and focus on the following:
- How quickly does the agency reply to emails and text messages?
- What is the average wait time for surrogate match?
- How many successful births have been reported by other intended parents on social media?
- How many embryo transfers do intended parents go through before getting positive pregnancy?
- Have any intended parents experienced miscarriage? If so, under what kind of circumstances?
- Have there been any issues reported by intended parents regarding program cost or payment to surrogate?
- Is the agency being transparent in terms of letting the intended parents know results of medical procedures, progress with pregnancy, and any issues the surrogate might be facing?
- Are there any severe problems experienced by other intended parents? This may include multiple embryo transfer failures without adequate explanation, abnormally long surrogate match time, and serious medical mistakes.
If you hear the same kind of comments from multiple intended parents, it is likely that the comments are valid. For example, if many intended parents are currently dissatisfied with how long surrogate match is taking, you know that the agency is having trouble with recruiting or retaining surrogates.
Assess the quality of recommendations by other intended parents
Not all recommendations are equal. This is because agencies can be in different stages of “agency life cycle” as I described above. When an intended parent who has completed a journey praises her agency, it is possible that the agency was in the “launch phase” or “traction phase” and it was doing everything it can to please its small pool of clients. When you join the same agency some time later, it’s possible that the agency is now in the “expansion phase”, and the service quality might be much lower than what you have expected.
When you listen to or read recommendations from other intended parents, use the following list to assess whether they are valid or not.
- If a recommendation is more than one or two years old, the recommendation may be out of date. You may want to find more recent recommendations that can corroborate the older recommendations.
- Pay attention to specific details of a recommendation. If an intended parent says they had a “nice” experience, find out what aspect of their experience was nice. Was the communication fast and truthful? Was the surrogate match time short? Did they have pregnancy after just one embryo transfer? Did the agency go an extra step to satisfy the client?
- Find out if the intended parent who is making recommendation has any ulterior motives. Some intended parents receive a commission or discount for future journeys when they refer a client to their agency. Some intended parents may even be working for their agency as a contractor. If any of these is the case, their recommendation should be taken with a grain of salt.
Don’t over-rely on online reviews and ratings
The first place most people go to when they try to research the reputation of a business is Google Review. The number of stars an agency has on Google Review or Facebook Page might be an easy way to see if the business is reputable, but it is not the most reliable. The reason is because a business owner typically asks their clients who have completed a journey or who are happy with their service to write a positive review for them. The same owner obviously would not ask clients who are dissatisfied with their service to write a negative review. As a result, a high rating on Google or Facebook may be the result of business strategy rather than true reflection of intended parents’ experience. Remember that most people, if they are not prompted, do not write reviews or rate a business.
On the other hand, don’t discount an agency just because it has a very low rating on Google or Facebook. Sometimes, people who are against surrogacy in general give 1 out 5 stars on an agency even though they have never had any business interactions with the business. When you are reviewing public online reviews and ratings, pay attention to the following points:
- Read the actual written reviews rather than just looking at ratings.
- Try to assess whether the content of a review is relevant. For example, if a review says “The business is not trustworthy because I didn’t get any follow-up emails after the initial meeting,” you know that the person wasn’t a client of the agency and his negative review is less relevant than a review posted by someone who has completed a journey.
- Note objective facts mentioned in the reviews. They can include specific problems faced by the reviewer and their agency’s response to the problems. They can also include what the agency did right that made the reviewer happy. Objective facts should go beyond generic description of a service using words like “good”, “nice”, “bad”, or “terrible”.
Understand where the agency is in its life cycle and how it is changing
After you have gathered all the facts you can about the agency and its programs and listened to recommendations and experiences from other intended parents, try to paint a picture of the agency in your mind. Where is it in its life cycle? Is it just starting out with few success cases, trying to woo their clients? Is it taking in too many clients, and is that affecting its service quality? Do you think it’s able to cope with added pressure of having many new clients? Is it serving every client adequately?
When you sign up with an agency, you will be with the agency for at least a year or more (unless you switch your agency, losing some money). So, you’ll want to choose an agency that is doing a good job now and will continue to do a good job at least a year into the future. Of course, nobody has a crystal ball so it is very difficult to tell how things will turn out in the future. My suggestion is to choose an agency that is in a “sweet spot”, which is the late Launch Phase or early to middle Traction Phase, since agencies in these phases have gained some experience in surrogacy in Mexico while still trying to please clients as much as possible. You can also choose an agency in the Stabilization Phase since it has already found a business model and can probably continue to offer the same kind of service as today.
What agencies are operating in Mexico?
If you want to read my unbiased review of agencies operating in Mexico, please go to this page.
Conclusion
Finding the right surrogacy agency isn’t easy, and it will take some time. There are many agencies operating in Mexico and no two surrogacy journeys are alike. One intended parent might have a really nice experience with an agency while another intended parent might have a terrible experience with them. What you can do is to try to find as much objective data as possible regarding an agency of your choice by reading program brochures and/or service contracts provided by the agency, talking to many intended parents, and critically reading online reviews. By understanding how agencies change as they grow, you can find the right agency for your surrogacy journey.