Language and Culture barrier in surrogacy and other fertility services

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Surrogacy services sound fine as it really bring happiness to both the intending parents and the surrogate mother. The intending parents get a child they were longing for and the surrogate gets a substantial financial earning for her services. The clinic involved in the entire program does the business in an organized manner. Since surrogacy services are not confined to geographical boundaries or localized within a region, major issues relating to culture and language often crop up.

The world of surrogacy is identified with the following features:
– Often it is quite difficult to find egg donors, a reputed infertility treatment clinic, quality infertility specialist and a young healthy surrogate mother within the confines of a particular region.
– In search of a gratifying infertility treatment, the intending parents may need to travel to a distant land where the cultural, social and linguistic scenario could be way apart from what it had been in their native soil.
– The doctors and embryologists are supposed to be educated and quite conversant in English and this will not pose any language barrier between the intending parents and the clinic. But what if the intending parents themselves are not comfortable with English?
– Surrogacy services are highly technical services, and the intending parents need to follow the instructions very carefully. Any communication gap in this area could lead to disastrous results.  Both way interaction is the only way to bridge this gap and language barrier would certainly increase it.
– It is quite likely a language barrier would arise in communication between the egg donor, the surrogate mother and the intending parents. It would be a mistake to assume all of them could be bound by a common language. In this situation, there will be serious difficulties in understanding the instructions and following them.

– Cultural differences between interactive groups in a fertility treatment could pose obstacles as well.
– In certain cultures surrogacy is a taboo. Earning money by lending wombs is considered highly unethical. Intending parents coming from such cultural background have no other option than to move out into an alien land supportive of surrogacy.
– In a few countries, the local culture permits only unmarried women to serve as surrogates as because allowing married women in surrogacy would go against norms having high social values like kinship, status of the child born and the family of the surrogate would likely to get hurt. This poses an issue for the intending parents as their hunt for surrogate mothers would be limited only to unmarried women.
– Still in certain other countries the social and cultural attitude towards surrogacy is quite the reverse. Here the surrogate mothers need to be either married or committed. The surrogate mothers should have at least one child of their own. This has both medical and psychological implications. Here again the search of the intending parents for surrogate mothers would be narrowed down to married or committed women only, limiting the option of treatment.