The pandemic is not just impacting parents and pregnant people — all prospective parents are facing new challenges.
By
April 1, 2020
As coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, we’re working to answer the questions on many parents’ minds. For the latest updates, read The New York Times’s live coronavirus coverage here.
Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has upended life for those who are or hope to become pregnant in the United States. Fertility doctors have indefinitely postponed all advanced fertility treatments, and some major hospitals in hard-hit areas are trying to ban partners and doulas from delivery rooms.
But the pandemic is affecting expectant parents forming families through surrogacy, foster care and adoption as well.
Surrogacy
Global travel restrictions have left surrogacy agencies in the United States scrambling for exemptions for their international clients — particularly for those whose surrogates are scheduled to give birth in the next month or two.
Circle Surrogacy, an agency based in Boston, has 15 international clients with due dates before May 1. “We’ve had our legal team prepare letters for each of these families, which has gotten many of them into the country despite travel bans,” said Sam Hyde, the agency’s president. Still, he said, his foreign clients were at the mercy of individual immigration officials. “Some have been sympathetic to the plight of our clients, others have not — it’s really been a case-by-case basis.”
