Natural Parents’ Embryo Living in Surrogate Mother

The so-far successful pregnancy of a woman believed to be the West Coast’s first surrogate mother for a “test-tube” baby was announced Friday at Century Hospital in Century City.

In a procedure not widely developed around the country, someone other than the biological mother has been successfully implanted with a test-tube baby conceived in a laboratory from the parents’ sperm and egg, according to Dr. Jirair Konialian, an obstetrician-gynecologist and member of a seven-member in-vitro fertilization team at the hospital.

The resulting baby will be the genetic offspring of both parents, a departure from regular surrogate situations, in which the surrogate’s egg is impregnated with the father’s sperm, Konialian said.

“I think this will alleviate a lot of the psychological and social problems now related to regular surrogate parenting,” he added, both for mothers who heretofore had no physical or genetic role and surrogates who have at times later tried to keep the babies as their own.

“We used the donor couple’s (genetic parents) egg and sperm. In the regular surrogate (procedure) you only use the donor husband’s sperm,” Konialian noted, adding that with this procedure: “The surrogate mother does not feel she is giving away her own baby anymore. She is only seeding the baby for nine months. It is 100% genetically the donor couple’s.”

Earlier this year, a surrogate mother gave birth to a test-tube baby in Cleveland, and while Konialian described the procedure as “experimental,” he said he believes it could prove “very important” in helping couples with infertility problems or for women suffering from illnesses, such as severe cardiac disease, diabetes or hypertension, for whom pregnancy would be a severe health risk.

The surrogate mother in this case is in her second trimester of pregnancy, with the baby due in the spring, Konialian said. He declined to disclose the names of the parents, who are Californians, or the surrogate, a married woman with children who lives in the Los Angeles area. The genetic mother is fertile, but is unable to carry a child because of a diseased uterus, he said.

While test-tube babies have become increasingly common since 1978, when the first infant was born in England, one of the biggest difficulties with the procedure is the process of implanting the fertilized egg on the uterine wall. The process requires a delicate synchronization between the stage of the egg’s development and appropriate changes in the lining of the uterus.

In this case, the difficulty was compounded by the fact that two women were involved. “I synchronized both women, so that their ovulations occurred at the same time,” Konialian said. He added that after he obtained multiple eggs from the genetic mother and fertilized them with sperm from the father, “I transferred the embryos into the surrogate uterus.”

The first American test-tube baby was born in 1981 in Virginia, and the numbers of successful births have climbed to an estimated 1,000 in the United States, Konialian said, and approximately 7,000 around the world.