When an Embryo Transfer Fails During Surrogacy: Coping as an Intended Parent

You did everything you were supposed to do.

You found a gestational carrier. You completed the appointments, contracts, medications, and planning. The embryo was transferred.

And then it didn't work.

A failed embryo transfer during surrogacy can feel uniquely devastating because surrogacy may have already represented hope after an extraordinarily difficult road.

Maybe part of you believed: Once we get to surrogacy, things will finally be different.

Then you're grieving again.

When Your First Instinct Is to Do Something

After a failed embryo transfer, intended parents often move quickly into problem-solving.

Why didn't it work? Should we change protocols? What happens to our remaining embryos? When can we try again?

There are legitimate decisions to make.

But action can also give you somewhere to put the helplessness.

Underneath all that doing may be grief, anger, fear, or exhaustion.

You may be angry at your body, the process, your fertility clinic, or simply that becoming a parent has required this much from you.

And then you may feel guilty because your gestational carrier is hurting, too.

You Don't Have to Decide Whose Loss Matters More

A failed surrogacy transfer can affect everyone involved. But you don't need to minimize your grief because someone else is also disappointed.

You may care deeply about your gestational carrier while needing somewhere you aren't responsible for taking care of anyone else's emotions.

Therapy can be that place.

Therapy after a failed embryo transfer doesn't have to immediately focus on trying again, finding the positive, or deciding what comes next.

Sometimes the work is allowing yourself to experience what happened before turning it into another problem to solve.

There will be time to decide what comes next.

For now, you're allowed to acknowledge that you desperately wanted this transfer to work—and that it hurts that it didn't.

Looking for Support Before, During and After Surrogacy?

Joanna Haydon, JD, LCSW, is a psychotherapist who works with intended parents navigating the emotional complexities of infertility, surrogacy, pregnancy loss, and third-party reproduction. She supports clients experiencing anxiety, depression, grief, uncertainty, and the complicated emotions that can arise while building a family through a gestational carrier.

Joanna provides telehealth therapy throughout Missouri and Illinois. Learn more about Surrogacy and Third-Party Reproduction Therapy, explore Infertility & Pregnancy Loss Therapy, or contact Joanna to learn more about working together.