Two employees, one policy?
In the same week, two people from your company ask HR about the fertility benefit.
The first is starting IVF with her husband. Your policy was written for her, and the clinic will guide her through every step.
The second wants to start a family with his husband. He will need an egg donor, a surrogate who may live in another country, and a lawyer to make sure he is legally recognised as his child’s parent. Your policy says it “covers IVF”. He reads it twice and still doesn’t know if any of it applies to him.
Both are building a family. Only one of them fits the policy.
If you have read our earlier articles on what HR should know when an employee is going through IVF and how an IVF cycle fits into a work calendar, you already know the first employee’s journey.
This article is about the second one, and about the other employees like him: LGBTQ+ couples, single parents by choice, and people who need donor eggs, sperm or embryos. These paths are becoming more common every year. In the UK alone, the number of single patients having IVF rose by 83% between 2019 and 2023, and female same-sex couples by 45%.
You don’t need to become an expert to support these employees. You need to recognise their situation when it reaches your desk, and know what helps.
Four employees you may already have
The people below are composites, not real employees. Their situations, though, are the ones HR teams meet, usually without knowing it.
Anna and Mia: a female couple, both in treatment
Anna works for you. She and her wife Mia are having a baby through reciprocal IVF: Anna’s eggs are used to create embryos, and Mia carries the pregnancy. That means Anna goes through hormone injections, monitoring scans and egg collection, just like any IVF patient, even though she will not be pregnant.
Before treatment, they had to choose between a sperm bank and a friend who offered to donate. They learned that using a known donor, or inseminating at home, can affect who the law treats as a parent, a risk we explain in our guide to conceiving with donor sperm. Depending on the country and on whether a couple is married, the parent who does not give birth may also need legal steps to be recognised as a parent.
What HR sees: Anna asks for a day off for “a procedure” and is vague about the rest. A few months later, she asks whether she counts as a parent under your leave policy, because the policy talks about “the mother” and “the partner”, and she is not sure which one she is.
What helps: Treat Anna’s treatment like any medical treatment, whoever will carry the pregnancy. Check that your parental leave policy talks about parents, not only about birth mothers. If she is unsure about her legal position, the most useful thing you can do is point her to reliable information, such as our Building LGBTQ+ Families courses, and to a family lawyer.
Daniel: becoming a father through surrogacy abroad
Daniel and his husband have spent nearly two years preparing for their first child. They chose a country where surrogacy is legal for them, selected an egg donor, created embryos and waited months to be matched with a surrogate. Then came the surrogacy agreement, with separate lawyers for them and for the surrogate. Most of this happened in the evenings, on video calls across time zones.
What HR sees: Almost nothing for a long time. One week abroad for embryo creation. Then, one morning, a message: the surrogate has gone into labour three weeks early, Daniel is flying out today, and he may be away for several weeks while the baby’s birth certificate, legal parentage and passport are sorted out. He asks what leave he is entitled to. Your policy covers maternity leave and paternity leave “after the birth of a child to the employee or their partner”. Nobody is sure if that includes him.
What helps: Decide how your leave policy treats intended parents through surrogacy before someone needs it, not on the morning of the birth. Rules differ by country: in the UK, for example, intended parents who plan to apply for a parental order may be entitled to statutory adoption leave and pay. Allow for sudden travel and a longer stay abroad. And never ask “so who is the mother?”
Sophie: a single mother by choice
Sophie is 37 and has decided not to wait for a partner to have a child. She is using donor sperm and intrauterine insemination (IUI), and she is now on her third cycle. Each cycle means monitoring scans at short notice and a procedure timed to the day she ovulates. She goes to every appointment alone, makes every decision alone, and gets every result alone.
What HR sees: Late arrivals two or three mornings in a row, every few weeks. She seems tired and quieter than usual. When she finally tells her manager, his first question is “and what about the father?”
What helps: Flexible start times without a medical explanation. A way to ask for support without going through her line manager. And managers who know what not to ask: the donor, the “father” and the reasons she is doing this alone are not their business. Our Single Parent Journey courses are written for employees like Sophie.
Laura and James: when IVF turns into donor eggs
Laura and James have been through three IVF cycles. Their doctor now recommends using donor eggs. Medically, the next steps look a lot like IVF, as our guide to IVF with donor eggs explains. Emotionally, they are very different. Laura is grieving the genetic link she hoped for. They have to choose a donor, decide whether to use one who can be identified later, and think about how and when to tell their child.
The clinic explains the medical side. The rest they work out alone, often late at night, on forums. Professional bodies such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommend counselling for people using donor eggs, sperm or embryos, precisely because these decisions reach so far beyond the treatment itself.
What HR sees: A colleague who seemed relieved that treatment can continue, but who now seems withdrawn. She may need a few days off, and she may not want to say why.
What helps: Understand that “good news” in fertility treatment is not always simple. Make sure your employee assistance programme or counselling offer covers fertility and donor conception. Our egg, sperm and embryo donation courses help people like Laura and James work through these decisions with clear, expert-led information.
Why your policy may not catch them
Most fertility policies were written with one picture in mind: a heterosexual couple who have tried to get pregnant for a year and now need IVF. Anna, Daniel, Sophie, and Laura and James don’t fit that picture, and the gaps usually show up in three places.
The eligibility rule. Many benefits only apply after “12 months of trying to conceive”. A single woman or a same-sex couple can never meet that rule, however much they need treatment. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine changed its definition of infertility in 2023 to include people who need donor eggs, donor sperm or a surrogate because they are single or because of who their partner is. Your policy can do the same.
What the benefit pays for. On these paths, IVF is often the smallest part of the cost. Donor eggs or sperm, agency fees, legal fees and the surrogate’s expenses usually sit outside a standard fertility benefit. An employee like Daniel can have “fertility coverage” and still pay for almost everything himself.
The leave policy. Leave is often written around giving birth. Intended parents through surrogacy, the non-birth mother in a female couple, and adoptive parents can all fall between the lines, and nobody notices until someone needs it.
There is a fourth reason, and it is the one HR can least see: these employees rarely ask. In a survey of 5,000 people in five countries, 79% said they feel, or might feel, uncomfortable talking about fertility at work. For Anna or Daniel, asking about the benefit can also mean coming out to HR. For Sophie, it means explaining why she is doing this alone. So most of them stay quiet, and the policy is never tested.
The part no one explains to them
Even a perfect policy leaves one problem unsolved. Look again at the four stories: most of the hardest moments did not happen in a clinic.
Daniel had to choose a country, judge whether an agency could be trusted, and understand a contract before any doctor saw him. Anna and Mia had to work out what a known donor would mean legally. Sophie had to choose a donor from hundreds of profiles, and decide whether to reserve sperm from the same donor for a future sibling. Laura and James had to decide what to tell a child who does not exist yet.
A doctor’s job is the medical treatment, and a consultation is rarely long enough for anything else. A lawyer covers part of the rest, usually after the big choices are already made. HR pays for the benefit but cannot advise on any of it. Between the doctor and the employee as a patient, there is a gap, and most people fill it with forums, social media and agency marketing. In a field with high costs, cross-border legal risk and, sadly, some scams, that is a risky way to make decisions that can’t be undone.
This is also why money alone doesn’t solve the problem. In Maven’s 2026 benefits research, employers had increased their family health benefits by 39% on average in a year, yet fewer employees said their fertility benefits supported them “very well”: 49%, down from 55%. Coverage helps people pay. It doesn’t help them understand what they are paying for.
What HR can do, starting this month?
You don’t need a new budget to start. You need to look at your policy through these employees’ eyes, and prepare your managers.
- Test your policy with the four stories. Sit down with your benefits documents and walk Anna, Daniel, Sophie, and Laura and James through them. Where does each one get stuck, pay everything themselves, or need an exception? That short list is your starting point.
- Change the words. Small wording changes make a policy usable for everyone. For example:
- instead of “after 12 months of trying to conceive”, write “for any employee who needs medical help to build a family, alone or with a partner”
- instead of “the mother” and “the father”, write “parents” or “intended parents”
- name the paths: donor eggs and sperm, reciprocal IVF, surrogacy, adoption and fostering. If one isn’t covered, say so clearly, so nobody has to guess
- Decide on leave for intended parents now. Agree how much leave parents through surrogacy and adoption get, and add flexibility for sudden travel and paperwork after the birth. Daniel’s manager should not be reading the policy for the first time on the morning the baby arrives.
- Give managers words to use, and words to avoid. A short briefing goes a long way.
- Helpful: “Thank you for telling me. What would make the next few months easier for you?” or “You don’t need to explain each appointment.”
- Not helpful: “Who’s the real mother?”, “Why didn’t you just adopt?”, “What about the father?” or “Have you tried relaxing?”
- Make privacy the default. Let employees take short-notice appointments without a medical reason, and give them a route to ask for support that doesn’t depend on their line manager.
- Give employees somewhere reliable to learn. Coverage pays for treatment. It doesn’t tell Daniel how to check an agency or tell Sophie what the law says about her donor. Independent, expert-led education fills that space, and employees can use it privately, long before they are ready to tell anyone at work.
Where Family By Choice fits?
That space between the doctor and the employee is the reason Family By Choice exists.
We are an online education platform for every path to parenthood: IVF, donor conception, surrogacy, LGBTQ+ family building and single parenthood. Family By Choice was founded by Sanja Jovanović, a fertility advocate who went through infertility herself, and Olga Pysana, an independent international surrogacy consultant who has guided intended parents through cross-border journeys for more than seven years. We built it because we saw, again and again, how much people struggle with scattered information, confusing jargon, stigma and, sometimes, scams.
What an employee gets? Structured, step-by-step courses for the research and planning stage, before they sign with an agency, choose a donor or sit down with a clinic. Daniel would find a surrogacy guide for gay couples and a course on the law of international surrogacy. Anna, Sophie, and Laura and James would each find courses for their own path, along with support for the emotional side of the journey. Employees learn privately, at their own pace, in our app, in six languages.
Who is behind the content? Our courses are built with practising specialists from many countries, together with parents who have been through these journeys. They include Australian fertility lawyer Stephen Page, who has practised family law since 1988 and written books on surrogacy and international assisted reproduction; UK barrister and surrogacy consultant Maz Adam Iqbal; IVF laboratory director and senior embryologist Zafer Atayurt; and reproductive medicine specialist Dr Aliona Burmistrova. You can meet the whole team of experts on our website.
What we don’t do? We don’t sell surrogacy or fertility packages, we are not tied to any clinic or agency, and we take no referral fees. That independence is what lets us explain options honestly, across countries and providers. Our courses are education, not medical or legal advice. They help employees understand their options and ask better questions, so their time with doctors and lawyers counts for more.
What HR gets? Alongside the employee courses, we offer short guides and training that help HR teams and managers understand these journeys and respond well when an employee shares one.
A policy that sees every family
Somewhere in your organisation, there is probably an Anna, a Daniel, a Sophie or a Laura right now. Most of them haven’t told you, and they may never ask. What they will notice is whether the policy, and the people around them, were ready when they needed it.
Want to see how your policy reads for every kind of family? Book a free consultation with us. We’ll show you how Family By Choice works for HR teams, managers and employees, and why it can make these journeys easier for your people. No obligation, just a conversation.
This article is for information and education. It is not medical or legal advice. Laws on donor conception, surrogacy and parental leave differ by country and change over time; the legal points above reflect the situation as of October 2026.
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