The Most Wanted Surrogates in the World
Surrogacy, after all, can be an expensive choice for couples. Clients typically pay $100,000 to $120,000, which covers costs for procedures like IVF, agency and legal fees, and the surrogate's compensation. And if the surrogate's insurance doesn't cover the medical expenses, the couple generally purchases a policy for her, which can add another $25,000 or more to the tab.
And here's where military wives are different. Many insurance companies in this country explicitly state that they will not provide pregnancy coverage if a woman is having a baby for someone else. In some cases, companies have even been known to investigate births; if they learn a baby was born to a surrogate, they may bill her for costs incurred. But Glamour's investigation found that it often doesn't work that way for the military's insurance provider, Tricare. According to industry insiders, the company has a history of paying for a surrogate's medical expenses.
Officially, Tricare says it doesn't cover surrogacy, and "if [a military spouse] is serving as a surrogate parent [using Tricare insurance], then we have a legal obligation to recoup the cost of health care," says Austin Camacho, Tricare's chief of public affairs. And indeed it sometimes does. In one case, after a military wife spoke to the media about being a surrogate, she said Tricare billed her $100,000 for the costs of her pregnancy and resulting medical complications.
Yet many military families aren't aware of this—the surrogacy policy is not specifically mentioned in the Tricare handbook they receive. And Camacho admits that it is extremely difficult to ferret out which pregnancies are the result of surrogacy. "We have 9.5 million beneficiaries, and our beneficiaries will have roughly 2,100 births every week. We have to be focused on making sure everybody gets their care," he says. "We can't be a big police force."
Tricare's relative leniency is an open secret in the surrogacy industry. An agency may even offer special incentives for military wives because of the savings they bring; one California-based agency had agreed to pay any military spouse who used her Tricare policy for surrogacy an extra $5,000.
At her agency, Synesiou says surrogates have used their Tricare insurance to pay for doctor's visits and hospital stays. She adds, though, that some military surrogates choose not to use Tricare coverage, because private insurance often offers more flexibility and choice of doctors. Others prefer to leave Tricare out of their surrogacy jobs: Emily Jackson of Stillwater, Oklahoma, whose husband is in the Navy, has been a surrogate mother to five babies in the past 10 years and refused to use Tricare to pay for any of those pregnancies. "I don't want to risk getting a huge bill," Jackson says, "or even losing my health insurance." But she may be an exception.
Is there anything wrong with would-be parents taking advantage of this insurance loophole to reduce the costs of surrogacy? Many surrogates say no. Mary Thompson, 30, carried another couple's child in 2009 while her husband was deployed in Iraq for the third time, and used Tricare to cover her health care costs. "I was happy I could save my couple some money," she says. "My husband is over there possibly giving his life for this country, and if that means I get some really good health care, well, gee darn." Her surrogate gig allowed her to achieve a dream that once seemed unattainable: meaningfully contributing to her family's income. With her husband's unpredictable schedule, she'd found it difficult even to hold down a part-time job at Target. Because of the surrogacy, "we were able to pay off our debt," Thompson says. "Then we put a new driveway in, which we needed really bad."
