Perhaps you've reached the point in your quest to become a parent where you're considering surrogacy. Perhaps you have a friend who is about to embark on the journey.
Perhaps you became interested in it after watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians (both Kim and Khloe have welcomed babies via surrogate).
Whatever your experience, you may have some misconceptions about how and why surrogacy works.
As a result, we asked Stephanie Levich, celebrity surrogacy consultant and founder of Family Match Consulting, to dispel some of the most common surrogacy myths and shed some light on the subject.
It's natural to wonder why someone would willingly give up their body for nine months to carry the child of a stranger, but don't jump to the most cynical conclusion. Surrogates are compensated for their pregnancy, but Levich emphasises that this is not the primary motivation for women to participate in the process.
It's tempting to assume that a woman would choose a surrogate to preserve her physique, especially in some of the more high-profile surrogacy cases. But, friends, it's time to silence your inner cynic once more, because the expert can't emphasise how far this myth is from the truth.
Forget what you've seen in the movies; surrogacy isn't usually a borderline incestuous arrangement. According to Levich, most surrogacy programmes across the country only facilitate "gestational surrogacy," which means the surrogate is not biologically related to the baby they are carrying.
If you're thinking about surrogacy, you can be confident that the woman carrying your child will not decide to keep the baby for herself, because surrogates have no parental rights to the child.
This has been mentioned before, but it bears repeating: Surrogates, while compensated for their efforts, are first and foremost providing an extraordinary gift to parents in need.