Analysis of gestational surrogates’ birthing experiences and relationships with intended parents during pregnancy and post‐birth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This study investigated the surrogates' birth experiences, their levels of emotional struggle at relinquishment, how often they thought about the surrogacy children, and the surrogate-parent relationship dynamics during pregnancy and post-birth. METHODS: Data were collected from 06/2016 to 02/2017 using an anonymous questionnaire. Participants were Canadian gestational surrogates who had completed the process with or without a successful live birth, and who were at various stages of an ongoing surrogacy. For this paper, only a subgroup of cases with a successful live birth was selected for analysis. RESULTS: The data set included 131 births involving 90 surrogates who delivered 157 babies (105 singletons and 26 sets of twins). Their mean age at the time of surrogacy was 31.7 ± 5 years (range: 21-47y). More than one-third (37.4%) of the cases were for intended parents who were same-sex male couples and single men. Surrogates assisting Canadian-resident intended parents had an overall better birthing experience compared with those assisting nonresidents. There was none or very little struggle with the relinquishment of the baby in 96.9% of cases. Continued contact with parents after the births was reported in 93.0% of cases. Surrogates were significantly more likely to have frequent post-birth contact with same-sex and single fathers compared with heterosexual parents and single mothers (76.6% vs 54.3%). CONCLUSIONS: Same-sex male couples and single men can develop a long-lasting relationship with their surrogates even when no intended female partners are involved. The development of institutional practice guidelines in standardizing surrogacy birth practice is paramount in optimizing surrogates' care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".