Anonymous IP from China.
“Several months have passed since our baby was born under a surrogacy program in US, yet we still find it challenging to express our feelings and gratitude to the team of Genesis Group, just in one single letter like this. But we definitely want to share as much as we can to encourage the team of Genesis Group to move on helping more and more intended parents in the future. Before considering surrogacy, we had been trying to have baby for years in our home country. Having been through several rounds of failure for IVF, we were in a desperately suffering from hopelessness and the pressure of being childless in our community. For many reasons (culture, civilization, technology etc.), surrogacy is something forbidden or even biased in our home country, which makes our life even tougher than the intended parents living in the US. To seek for a surrogacy program in US was like a gambling for us in terms of energy, time and cost, which could be an extremely emotional investment that we couldn’t afford to lose. We said to each other if we lose this journey, we will have to face the reality to live without a kid for the rest of our life... We still remember the first day we visited Genesis office in Pasadena, it was not a large office but clean and cozy with pics of babies (hope) on the wall. It was that day we met with Ms. La Vonna (program director) for the first time. We tried to calm down ourselves, but my wife couldn't help weeping while I was with a heavy heart. The most emotional customer in the world, wasn’t it? However, La Vonna was patient enough to listen attentively to our sorrow and kept taking notes throughout our conversation. She also entered into very detailed questions with us like our preference of surrogate mother's background, expected delivery dates and affordable budget etc., which made us feel more concrete about the journey we were going to take. We were also introduced to one Chinese colleague in her team, which was a great comfort to international intended parents like us. We had a very good impression of La Vonna and her team and we believe this company shows great care to both the intended parents and the surrogate mother. In the next couple of days, we interacted with Genesis team quite intensively to wipe out our remaining concerns and they were quite responsive by replying our mails within one working day while it took 3-5 days for other surrogacy companies we visited in parallel. One week later, we made our mind to go with Genesis as we definitely want to place our destiny in the most reliable hands. In a timely manner, we were asked by La Vonna to prepare a letter plus some pics of our daily life for potential surrogate mothers explaining our backgrounds and expectations because she believes it helps a lot for matching us with the right profile. Just one week following our meeting with La Vonna, we received a profile from Genesis. It was a young surrogate mother at her 20's. We had a video conference with her and we both found each other an ideal partner to start the journey at the end of the call. We were so happy that Genesis team really knew their job well and made everything happen so soon. With the help of Genesis, we even managed to contact the surrogate mother directly through the local Chinese app called "Wechat"! After that, Ms Erica was assigned for our coordinator. We got updates from her as how the surrogate mother was doing on weekly basis. She actually gave a call to the surrogate mother on weekly basis and that really made our surrogate mother feel so sweet. We also got update of our escrow account on monthly basis from Genesis and all spending were transparently presented. With the help of Genesis team, we also got easily connected to the proper lawyers, insurance companies and clinics which to us would be a big challenge without Erica's guidance. Although Genesis was coordinating everything perfectly, we sometimes still got anxious for being far away from our surrogate mother as well as our baby, and you can't imagine what a long and emotional journey it was until the day you really enter into a surrogacy program. It gave us great relief to see in a picture that Genesis team was accompanying our surrogate mother in the clinic for the implantation day as we couldn't make our presence there due to the long distance between China and US. Sometimes the surrogate mother was busy with her own housework and would not reply our message timely. But as soon as we expressed our concerns to Ms Erica each time, she would call the surrogate mother immediately and came back to us quickly to confirm everything was just fine. We really appreciate her responsiveness and consideration to us, without it we would have been suffering from many sleepless nights. Being the intended parents, normally we would prefer the surrogate mother to travel as less as possible because we were too fragile to take any unnecessary risks. However, the surrogate mothers have their personal life and family events, which makes it difficult for anybody to commit no traveling throughout the entire pregnancy period. Genesis was proactive and experienced dealing with such matters by offering us the detailed traveling plan that the surrogate mother required during the pregnancy period and all the long distance travel seemed to be in a relevant safe period which was reasonably acceptable to us, and all of this was aligned before we start the surrogate program. This approach actually worked out quite well most of the time except for one occasion that embarrassed us and the surrogate mother a bit. It was quite late one day in the night time that we received an urgent message from our surrogate mother, quite early in the morning US time actually, asking for our approval for her travel to another state to attend a funeral of her husband's grandpa which was of course not in the pre-agreed plan. Given that it was in the very late stage of pregnancy and the sorrowful atmosphere you can expect from a funeral, we were reluctant and not supportive this time. While being speechless and having no clue as how to come back to our surrogate mother, we decided to call Genesis. Ms Erica took action on behalf of us and talked to the surrogate mother immediately explaining both our concern and condolences. Although it was a bit disappointing message to the surrogate mother, she completely understood our concern with the help from Erica and decided to stay at home for the safety of our baby. Obviously, Genesis was playing such an important role to balance the benefits and duties of both parties. Several weeks before the delivery date, we called the hospital trying to get a cost forecast of our medical bill, but again we had a culture shock when talking to the hospital and we ended up feeling more confused. The good thing was that Genesis was eager and capable to help as always by finding the right person and talking on behalf of us. The reliable forecast we got from Genesis saved us lots of money by helping us to make the right decisions on the insurance plans. By the day we came back to the hospital to settle the bill, we were a bit surprised that the finance person at the hospital still remember us so well following the call from Genesis to them couple of weeks ago and offered us a good discount knowing our special situation as international intended parents. All in all, we can’t exhaust all the stories out of such a long journey in one letter and the above is obviously just a tip of the iceberg of all the sweet memories and gratitude we shall hold forever towards Genesis. We sincerely hope the Genesis team can stick to their high class of professionalism with all the upcoming intended parents from all over the world in future. Lastly but not least, we want to express our special thankfulness to Ms. La Vonna and Ms. Erica that walked side by side with us to achieve our baby dream! We sincerely wish the whole Genesis team a very pleasant Christmas that comes in couple of days.”
