Creative Family Connections (CFC) was founded by attorney and Harvard Law graduate Diane Hinson in 2001. We are a team led by amazing women and surrogates, many of whom have personally experienced the challenges and the joys of building a family through assisted reproduction. We all deeply believe in CFC’s founding principle that “everyone can build a family.” We meticulously vet surrogates as part of our pre-screening process. We also support independent journeys when intended parents and a surrogate have already connected. We provide you with surrogate matching services, concierge-level support, and top-notch surrogacy legal services. You, the intended parent and client, gain extra protections by working with a surrogacy law team.
Intended parents come from all over the world for our hands-on surrogacy support, top surrogate matching skills, and creative legal expertise. Our incredible testimonials truly speak for themselves.
As our legal client, we have your best interests at heart. This is a fundamental precept of the Canon of Ethics that applies to attorneys. Consequently, we facilitate our surrogates’ journeys and help find solutions to conflicts as they arise, but our surrogates are not our legal clients. Additionally, your finances is protected in a regulated trust fund. This means that when you pay us in advance, your money is held in a trust for you. Until we earn it, it is still your money, so you will never read a clause in one of our contracts that says that none of your money is refundable. Everything you tell us is confidential and protected by attorney/client privilege. We represent you – and only you — and will prepare and negotiate your surrogacy contract and coordinate a court strategy to ensure that you are declared the legal parent(s).
We go the extra mile. For example, after you have a parentage order, we work closely with your surrogate’s delivery hospital to coordinate a detailed birth plan. We work hard on your behalf to ensure that you are recognized as the legal parents with full medical decision-making rights when it comes to your child or children, in the case of a twin surrogacy journey. We will even ask for a separate room in the hospital so that you can start to bond with your baby! Our overarching goal is to make your surrogacy journey as happy and as stress-free as possible, while still keeping everything legal and ethical. You deserve no less.
We gear our surrogate matches to meet the criteria and preferences that our intended parents seek. We find our gestational surrogates from surrogacy-friendly states, where we can protect your legal rights as the parent(s) of your child.
As surrogate candidates are identified, we undertake an extensive pre-screening process. Less than 2% of surrogate applicants make it through our extensive vetting process. If application responses indicates that a surrogate candidate may be viable, our screening process moves on to the important steps of obtaining a completed form from her obstetrician, conducting at least two detailed interviews of references, having her written application and OBGYN form reviewed by a Reproductive Endocrinologist, and interviewing the surrogate candidate and her family for an in-home visit.
Once a candidate has satisfied all required components of our screening process, she becomes eligible for matching to like-minded intended parents based on your and her preferences.
When we have identified a tentative surrogate match, one of our journey coordinators will be assigned as the designated support person for both you and your surrogate throughout the rest of your surrogacy journey. Your journey coordinator will assist and guide you from screening, through cycling, to embryo transfer, and throughout the pregnancy. Although it is important that you have a designated point person, our entire team remains available to support you at any time.
At Creative Family Connections, we pride ourselves on our individualized and personal attention to each surrogacy journey. While there are some things that each surrogacy journey will have in common, it is our way of recognizing that every intended parent’s journey will be unique. We manage and support each of our surrogacy cases in a way that caters to the individual needs of every intended parent and surrogate. To that end, we understand that every intended parent and surrogate requires personalized support and care.
We support you every step of the way from coordinating screening appointments for your surrogate, to providing financial snapshots of your funds, to providing concierge services and assisting with “little things” that mean a lot, like arranging for flowers or gifts for your surrogate, and coordinating all travel and ground transportation. Your journey coordinator will be there for you from when you first meet your surrogate via videoconference all the way to after delivery.
As a top surrogacy agency, we are also comprised of a highly educated surrogacy law team. Our surrogacy attorneys Diane Hinson and Jennifer McGill served as co-chairs on the Standards Committee of SEEDS, helping advocate and creating the best practices for surrogacy agencies in the US. Best practices extend to not only making great surrogate matches, but also in ensuring finances are managed transparently and ethically throughout the process. The fees that are payable to Creative Family Connections remain in an IOLTA (Interest On Lawyers’ Trust Account) until we earn them. If you decide to terminate our services, all funds that we have not yet earned are returned to you. (We recommend that when you are doing your research on surrogacy, ask other surrogacy agencies if any of your money is refundable!) Our handling of your funds is highly regulated. In fact, the interest earned on the IOLTA account automatically goes to the Maryland Bar for the funding of pro bono cases.
You can rest assured that Creative Family Connections has no affiliation with any other business entity. That includes any IVF clinic or surrogacy physician. You will pay your IVF clinic directly for all surrogacy-related fees. Similarly, we have no affiliation with any insurance company or financial institution. As you get started on this journey, we want you to think of us not just as your advocates and lawyers, but as your partners. We are here to guide you, to inform you, and to facilitate the entire surrogacy process. Remember, your best interest is always paramount. Our clients often say that they feel like a weight is lifted from their shoulders when they make the decision to work with us. That is how we want every intended parent and surrogate to feel!
