Adoptions/Surrogacy

A consent form is required to be signed by the biological mother or the adoptive family, depending on who is legally responsible for the baby at that time. 

• Always seek guidance from the nurse before approaching adoption cases to determine the situation, whether pictures should be offered, and to whom. 

• Ask the nurse who needs to sign the consent form.

• When in the room, ask the legal guardian (who signed the consent) if they would like photos with the baby and if they would like the baby's photos taken with anyone else in the room.

• If both biological mom and adoptive parents each sign a separate consent, the baby is treated as two different babies on the Dashboard

  1. 1. Mark the biological mom is 'adoption' in the dashboard, but do not mark the adoptive family as 'adoption' in Dashboard

     2. When Clients are marked as 'adoption' they do not receive any emails from us (meaning they will not get a link to view their online account). 

     3. For the biological family, mark them as an 'adoption' so they do not get any further 'Congrats' emails, etc from us. 

• We mustn't provide the birth mother's private information to the adoptive family, and vice versa, even in an open adoption situation. 

• For adoption situations, you can use the song Fragile for the gallery. 

Surrogate

• A surrogate mother is a woman who bears a child on behalf of another woman, either from her egg fertilized by the other woman's partner or from the implantation in her uterus of a fertilized egg from the other woman. 

• While a surrogate has rights, the right to keep the child is not one of them. Once legal parenthood is established, the surrogate has no legal rights to the child, and she cannot claim to be the legal mother. 

• When you have a surrogate situation in the hospital, you will only approach the parents of the baby concerning photography, not the surrogate mother.