You have two options for surrogacy in Florida, both of which are permissible and legal and have been on the books in Florida since 1992. The first option, which we don’t do very often, is traditional surrogacy, which involves using the eggs of the surrogate and artificially inseminating the surrogate with the sperm of the father. The big difference between that and gestational surrogacy is that the surrogate is just the incubator in gestational surrogacy. In other words, you’re renting the womb.
From a legal standpoint, the really big difference is that the surrogate can keep the child when it’s born in a traditional surrogacy. That’s why most of the cases we do are gestational; people feel more comfortable knowing that they are going to have their child at the end of the process. Another reason that gestational surrogacy is more popular is due to the difficulty of finding women who are willing (for money) to volunteer basically to have their eggs used for traditional surrogacy. When their own eggs are used, it’s genetically their child.