What carriers want is not always what intended fathers think.

Status

Pre-fieldwork. Nothing on this page is a result. Fieldwork opens in August 2026, and findings publish only after data collection closes, exclusions are frozen, and the analysis is complete.

Why this study exists

The information runs one way.

The surrogacy field is rich in information about what intended parents want and poor in equivalent, structured information about the carrier’s decision. Intake forms ask intended parents about geography, compensation, termination, vaccination, communication and desired relationship. The carrier is often presented through a detailed profile, while the intended parents appear to her through a short letter, a call and the agency’s assurances.

A match is not a purchase decision made by one side. A gestational carrier is deciding whether she trusts these particular people with her body, her household and a year of her life. That asymmetry creates three failure modes, and this study measures each one directly.

What we ask

Five questions.

1. Which intended-parent qualities matter most to gestational carriers?
2. How accurately do intended fathers predict those priorities?
3. Where do carriers and intended fathers expect different levels of communication, involvement and post-birth contact?
4. Which operational signals — financial preparation, embryo readiness, response reliability, agency support and respect for autonomy — create or destroy trust?
5. Can better intended-parent profiles and structured pre-match conversations reduce avoidable mismatch?

What is already known

The evidence baseline.

The existing literature does not support the stereotype that surrogacy relationships are either purely commercial or automatically intimate. A 2022 systematic review covering 47 studies across 12 countries found experiences were largely satisfactory and frequently involved positive relationships that participants hoped to continue, while also identifying cross-border legal problems and harms to autonomy in some settings.

Longitudinal work suggests contact can stay meaningful for years, though desired frequency and closeness vary widely and can change over time. Those studies use small samples in particular countries and lose participants over the follow-up period, so they describe what has been observed rather than what is typical everywhere.

Research on motivation cautions against a false choice between compassion and compensation. Helping others is frequently described as central, and financial considerations can still be legitimate and important. Professional ethics guidance treats carrier autonomy, informed consent, independent advice and psychological support as foundational rather than as relationship preferences.

What the literature does not provide is a structured, two-sided measurement of where each group’s expectations of the other are wrong. That is the gap this study addresses.

Preregistered

Twelve hypotheses.

These are statements to test, not findings. Publishing them before fieldwork is what makes it possible to tell later which ones survived and which the data contradicted.

Definitions

The terms we measure.

Gestational carrier

A person who carries a pregnancy for intended parents and does not provide the egg used to create the embryo.

Intended father

An adult man pursuing, currently in, or having completed a gestational-surrogacy journey as a gay, bisexual, queer, same-sex-partnered or single intended parent. Eligibility wording allows self-description.

Mutual match

A match in which both sides receive sufficient, truthful information, independently choose to proceed, agree on material values and expectations, and keep the right to decline before contractual or medical commitment.

Prediction gap

The difference between one group’s estimate of the other group’s priorities and that group’s own reported priorities.

Expectation gap

The difference between what the two groups say should happen in a shared relationship or operational scenario.

Match-breaker

An issue a respondent says would cause them to decline or end a potential match, not merely lower their enthusiasm.

Methodology

A mixed-method, preregistered design.

Four components. The surveys share mirrored constructs in role-appropriate language; the qualitative work explains why a gap exists and keeps the report from reducing relationships to rankings.

Sample targets and the publication threshold

The preferred target is 300 qualified current or former gestational carriers and 300 intended fathers, with 20 to 25 qualitative interviews per group. At 300 responses a proportion near 50% carries an approximate 95% margin of sampling error of about 5.7 percentage points under a random-sample assumption — and this will not be a random population sample, so that figure is not evidence of representativeness.

The minimum credible launch threshold is 150 responses per group after quality exclusions, at least three independent recruitment channels per group, and no single agency supplying more than half of either primary sample. If fieldwork does not reach that minimum, the results publish as an exploratory pulse rather than as a definitive study.

Results are reported separately for carriers who were screened but never matched, first-time and current carriers, former carriers and repeat carriers. Intended fathers at the exploratory stage are reported separately from those with journey experience.

Independence

How we keep a sponsored study honest.

This protocol and instrument were prepared in-house by Patriot Conceptions. No external methodologist has reviewed this version, and no advisory panel has been appointed yet — so rather than ask you to trust a review that has not happened, we publish the full questionnaire and the analysis plan before fieldwork and invite you to judge them yourself. If an item is leading or an answer option is loaded, we would rather hear it now than defend it later. We intend to seat an advisory panel including experienced gestational carriers, gay fathers through surrogacy, clinical and mental-health professionals, and reproductive-law counsel; members will be named here only once they have actually agreed. The study commits to the following in the meantime.

• Preregister hypotheses, primary outcomes and exclusions before anyone views results.
• Publish the complete instrument before fieldwork so it can be criticised and corrected.
• Field the survey through a system separated from the Patriot Conceptions CRM.
• Publish sponsorship and commercial interest prominently.
• Publish the full questionnaire and the analysis plan.
• Publish recruitment-source composition and limitations.
• Keep research consent separate from marketing consent.
• Retain deidentified analytic data only as long as stated.

Participant protection

• The research response collects no names, emails, exact addresses, full dates of birth, clinic chart data, bank data or identifiable case narratives.
• Incentive fulfilment, interview opt-in and any request for results use a separate, unlinked form.
• Tables use a minimum subgroup cell size of ten, and twenty for sensitive cross-tabs where feasible.
• Rare countries, states and medical attributes are suppressed or combined.
• Direct identifiers are removed from open-text quotations, and distinctive stories require re-consent.
• No provider ever sees a respondent-level answer.
• Survey answers are never used in matching without a second, explicit consent.

Limitations

What this study will and will not show.

This study uses a nonprobability sample recruited through agencies, community organisations, professional networks and event channels. Respondents may differ from carriers or intended fathers who did not participate, and the results should not be read as population prevalence estimates. Some subgroups will be small, and subgroup analyses are exploratory unless otherwise stated. Survey responses describe preferences, predictions and reported experiences; vignette responses do not prove how participants behave in real situations. Patriot Conceptions sponsored the study and has a commercial interest in surrogacy services. To reduce bias, the instrument and primary analysis plan were reviewed before fieldwork, research consent was separated from marketing, multiple recruitment sources were used, and the questionnaire and methods are published.