Focus on IVF Providers: The Third-Party Team at Main Line Fertility Are Committed to Helping LGBTQ+ Families Grow

The providers at the 90+ clinics comprising The Prelude Network – North America's largest and fastest-growing network of IVF providers – are committed to helping families realize their parenting dreams, and that commitment extends with absolute equality to LGBTQ+ families.

What's more, that commitment and respect to all families is shared by the entire staff. For the third-party team at Main Line Fertility in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, led by Nurse Practitioner Katie Gavern, the challenges and possibilities presented by the queer community's many possible family configurations are part of the job, whether they are working with LGBTQ+ men, LGBTQ+ women, transgender prospective parents, bisexual, nonbinary, or intersex patients, intentionally solo parents, or multi-parent families.

"Honestly, we are extremely welcoming to any patient that comes in here," Nurse Gavern says. "The majority of our patients are queer, and they're cared for and guided through the process from start to finish with every detail. We listen to everything that they want."

It's not a surprise that a majority of the patients the third-party team work with would be queer. IVF is an effective, and increasingly common, avenue for LGBTQ+ people to build their families. Though the process can be fairly involved, the science is essentially simple: Pregnancy requires sperm, ova, and a uterus. Any of those elements... or all of them... can come from a third party such as a donor or a gestational surrogate, and that's where the clinic's third-party team shines – a team that's ready to bring their expertise and their empathy to the joyful task of helping LGBTQ+ patients achieve parenthood.

"It definitely seems to be on the rise," Nurse Jennifer Rightley of the third-party team notes of the IVF trend among queer families. "We're able to help any sexual orientation, any gender, anyone who wants to become a family." At the end of the day, Rightley points out, "It's just someone who wants to be a mom or a dad."

Nurse Maryanne Boyle, who has worked in third-party for more than a decade, explains the role of the third-party team, saying, "We do the monitoring for the surrogates and the intended parents," with Nurse Boyle also working specifically with "known sperm donors".

The job isn't simply a kind of matchmaking, though. "In third-party, there's a lot of nuts and bolts," Nurse Rightley explains. "There's a lot of specifics and requirements that need to be met."

But there's another interesting aspect to Nurse Boyle's job: She also works, she says, with "any patients who are transitioning."

The freezing of sperm or ova before a transgender patient undergoes gender affirmation is part of a service known as fertility preservation. Once focused on allowing cisgender female patients to extend their peak fertility years by preserving ova during their youth, fertility preservation can also enable transgender men and women to become biological parents at a post-transition time of their choosing.

"Preserving eggs or sperm is pretty routine from patient to patient; we just have a few extra FDA guidelines that have to be followed with fertility preservation, which we do ahead of time for patients that will be transitioning," Nurse Gavern says. "If a patient plans to use a gestational carrier in the future, we need to ensure that the embryos are prepped, or that the eggs being frozen are prepped properly to create embryos that can be transferred into a gestational carrier." For "younger individuals that are going through gender-affirming care," she adds, "it's one of the first referrals if that person knows they want... or isn't sure if they want... children."

Educated and intentional efforts at inclusion extend beyond the scientific side of things and into the person-to-person interactions between providers and patients. With the addition to the Main Line staff of Dr. Allison Bloom, who herself is part of the LGBTQ+ community, the culture at the clinic has become more consciously informed, such that even the paperwork is free of exclusionary terminology.

"Dr Bloom has worked really hard with revamping all of our consent forms and new patient medical forms," Nurse Gavern details. "They're not labeled as 'female' or 'male.' Even our donor physical exam sheets used to say 'female,' and now they say, 'egg source.' It's the biologic terms when they're necessary, but otherwise it's very open-ended."

Inclusion and respectfulness are synonyms for community and care, and those things are rooted in the providers' collegiality. Saying that the team is "very close-knit," Nurse Rightley explains, "We are more than coworkers; we treat each other as family. Actually," she reveals, "Maryanne and myself are family – we're sisters."

Sisterly bonds play into the team's work on more than the professional level. For Nurse Gavern, the possibilities presented by IVF are also personal. "I'm actually currently going through egg retrieval," she discloses. "Some of my friends had different fertility journeys. One wasn't able to have any viable embryos formed, so she ended up using a donor embryo, which also gave me some interest into third-party reproduction.

"We think third-party is pretty cool, because we don't think genes make a family."

"A lot of us are moms," Nurse Boyle puts in. "As a mom, I know what it is to have a child and love my child. That's all we want to do: Be able to give the gift of being a parent to whoever walks through the door. Our goal is for you to be holding a little bundle in your arms."

"We want patients to know we were taking this ride with you," Nurse Rightley adds. "We're on this journey with you. We're on your team, and just trust us – we got you."

"Everybody's journey is their own journey, no matter what their sexual orientation is, or who they're attracted to, or who they decide to make a family with," Nurse Gavern summarizes. "Their individualized plan will come into play, no matter how the family is made, and they get a lot of individualized care with our clinic, pretty much from start to finish. It doesn't matter your orientation – it's a human being who wants to become a parent, and we just want to help them get there."