We had a negative experience with CFC. I have never had to write a negative review for any business before, but hope this is useful to other families.

We are two dads looking to expand our family. So we hired CFC, Diane was charming, we signed the various documents they provided, and then waited.

Very early on, before we even signed with our surrogate, we became alarmed by two issues. 1. We felt the surrogate’s behavior would have put the health of our child at risk. And 2. Concern over the quality of the legal work (and weirdly the demeanor) of CFC’s lawyer working with us.

Our concerns were serious enough that we felt we had no choice but to fire CFC.

CFC’s agreement that you sign is structured such that you pay only those fees that CFC has “earned”. That sounds great. CFC proudly bills this feature on their website. The problem is, CFC has aggressively front-loaded those fees such that even before you sign an agreement with your matched surrogate, CFC claims it has “earned” over 30,000 dollars.

This means that once you sign with CFC, even before you sign with your surrogate, CFC can walk away with over 30,000 dollars – no matter how bad a job they do, no matter how careless they are, no matter how unsuitable you discover your matched surrogate is.

What value did CFC actually provide? In our case, they generated a partially negotiated contract that nobody signed, and they matched us with a surrogate who we fear was a health risk.

Given our negative experience with CFC, we asked for a full refund. Instead, CFC sent back an 8-page termination contract, where they offered to refund a small portion of the fees in exchange for essentially a gag order or NDA where we would be legally blocked indefinitely from ever discussing our experience with CFC. We rejected it. It made us wonder how many other parents have also had negative experiences with CFC, but signed this sort of silence agreement such that parents like us never got to hear the warning signs.

We hope this information helps other families decide whether to work with this company, and we wish you the best of luck building your family.

PS: This was the second time we worked with CFC. The first time went better, not without some frustration, but certainly not bad enough that we felt we had to complain or fire them. When it was all over, CFC asked us multiple times to post perfect scoring reviews. (It also appears at least one 5-star review listed here on this site is from a CFC employee.) A few years later, we decided to try for a sibling. When discussing whether to hire CFC again, we decided we were already familiar with their process and “how bad could it be”. So we went for it. The rest you can read above. We wish you and other families well, and hope this information is of some use.