For Gay Parents, Deciding Between Adoption and Surrogacy Raises Tough Moral Questions

When my husband David and I became new parents, we thought it would be fun and perhaps even affirming to get involved with a gay dads group.

As far as I could tell, the only regular event was a brunch that took place every few months. That sounded promising, a throwback to idle Sundays before the babies made it all about them. The food was always great—these are gay men, after all. But as it turned out, the event was neither fun nor affirming.

The gatherings mostly took place in wealthy suburban redoubts and were marked by a weird social division between two teams: Surrogacy Dads and Adoptive Dads. Some of this division was to be expected. Each group had war stories to share, and it was natural to break the ice with those who had lived through similar experiences. But after one or two brunches, I came to see that this kind of informal division reflected something much deeper: a philosophical debate about how we should form our families. The annoyingly named “gayby boom” has created a knot of moral questions that are impossible to avoid.Child health outcomes

Should is a weird word to use in this context, of course. For gay men especially, bringing children into the family is difficult and challenging no matter which route one chooses. Our first instinct should be support for all families, regardless of what route each of us took to realize our dreams. Both surrogacy and adoption present daunting legal obstacles—even now that marriage equality has been achieved.

As I learned when researching a book I co-authored, surrogacy is a state-by-state legal minefield. Some states won’t recognize these contracts at all, while the law in other states is unsettled. And there is the ever-present danger that the woman carrying the child will try to renege on her commitment. Adoption is hardly more secure. The countries offering this choice to gay men are constantly changing. Domestic adoption can be fraught as well either because birth mothers change their minds, or as in our case of adoption through the child welfare system, because the process has no certain outcome.

Beyond the legal hurdles, though, there’s an undeniable moral component to whatever decision we make. Those who can pony up the money for surrogacy—which frequently exceeds $100,000, all in—are faced with the cold fact that they’re selecting an egg donor based on objective calculations of positive attributes. Lesbians do the same with sperm donors, although of course at a much lower cost since no surrogate is needed.

When a case surfaces that draws the uncomfortable selection process into the open, people are left tongue-tied trying to figure out the proper response. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for Slate about the case of a lesbian couplethat sued a sperm bank for providing the “wrong” material—from a black, rather than a white, donor. As I said at the time, outraged gasps at the couple were “easy, but not completely fair. Because everyone who transacts business with companies that offer sperm and egg donation is looking for a bespoke baby.”

When it comes to the gestational surrogate, there’s the additional issue of contributing to an industry that commodifies the body in an obvious way. The ethical issues multiply when the surrogate is from a developing country, often India, where women are paid much less for their services; but such “surrogacy tourism” just highlights the uncomfortable exchange going on in all these cases.

Those thinking of adopting face internal battles, too. As required by law, case workers confronted David and me with an unsettling battery of questions about the race, age, and sex of the kids we were willing to adopt, as well as delicately phrased inquiries about whether we’d be comfortable dealing with disabled kids—and, if so, they needed to know, what kinds of disabilities did we think we could handle? Really, who knows?

By John Culhane, slate.com

Hey, Daddy! is a monthly column exploring the joys and struggles of parenting from a gay father’s perspective. Got a topic idea or question for Daddy? Send your letter along to johnculhane@comcast.net.

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in Adoption / Personal Stories / Recently Added / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The Children of Gay Parents Speak for Themselves

For the past five years, Gabriela Herman has been photographing and interviewing people from all over the country with one or more LGBTQ parent.

“My mom is gay,” she explained. “But it took me a long time to say those words out loud.” For Herman, coming to terms with her mother’s identity was a “raw and difficult time.” She had never met another person who was raised by a gay parent. “The topic was taboo even within our otherwise tight-knit family,” she said. “My younger siblings were dealing with the same emotions, but meaningful conversation eluded us.” Eventually she connected with COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) and found a community of people who shared a similar childhood: the juggling of silence and isolation, the defending of parents on the playground. In many ways, the images and interviews in Herman’s essay The Kids seeks to fill that silence. The children of gay parents aren’t “hypothetical”: They’re real and they’re ok.gay parents adoption

  1.  Hope, raised in New York City by her two dads: “I would see my friend’s families and my aunts and uncles and I knew that people had something called a mother that I didn’t necessarily have, but I didn’t really think that I was so much in the minority. I wondered about my birth family and my birth mother in particular, but in terms of my own development, I don’t feel like I suffered because of it. I think that my parents did a fantastic job of helping to raise me to be a strong woman, but in terms of that question piece about where did I come from—sometimes I still wonder that, and then other times it just kinda disappears in terms of its importance.”
  2. Allison, raised in Connecticut and Vermont by her mom and her mom’s partner: “As soon as I found out [my new school] had a gay-straight alliance I just—it was amazing, to know that there are other kids my age—to realize that they were supportive of LGBT people. I wasn’t the only one who knew gay people and it wasn’t this dark secret that I had to hide.”
  3. Kerry, raised in New Jersey by her dad and mom, who came out when she was 11: “I remember a conversation with my mom where she was talking about how she would like to marry another woman. When I was really little I wanted to marry my best friend so I was like, ‘Oh, it’s like me and Sarah?’ She was like, ‘No, not like you and Sarah.’”
  4. Zack, raised in upstate New York by his two moms: “Everyone in my family is adopted. I had less trouble with two moms and more issues with finding myself, you know, with race and ethnicity.”

by Emily Ann Epstein, The Atlantic – March 6, 2017

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‘The both of us are his daddies’: Three surrogacy stories in Ireland

Legal uncertainty in Ireland has not stopped couples going abroad to create longed-for families

Three families in Ireland, three very different stories but one common thread – each couple has used a surrogate mother to give birth to their children.

Surrogacy is neither legal nor illegal in Ireland because it is not yet addressed in legislation. But that has not deterred an increasing number of couples who see it as the only way to create their longed-for family. While lawmakers here have deliberated for at least 10 years over the ramifications of surrogacy, these couples can’t wait and mostly go abroad to a country that has legislated for it.more gay couples are embracing surrogacy

There are undoubtedly legal and moral issues to be debated around surrogacy. But here, in the run-up to a Dublin conference hosted by the international not-for-profit Families Through Surrogacy, three couples tell how they moved beyond the abstract to make surrogacy part of their life story.

Neil McDonagh (28), Andrew Millar (27) and 14-week-old Oisín Millar-McDonagh live in Belfast

Partners for nine years, Neil McDonagh and Andrew Millar used to imagine what it would be like to raise a child – “like as if it was never going to happen”, says McDonagh.

But five years ago they began to think seriously about the “what if”. At the time, as a gay couple, adoption was not an option for them in the North so they looked into the possibility of being assessed in England for approval to adopt.

Not only was the process daunting but they were also keen to adopt a baby, and it was mostly older children who were being placed. They started to consider surrogacy.

They had just settled on doing it in Thailand when that country closed its programme to foreigners. That is the thing with international surrogacy, says McDonagh, “it is so fluid – one minute it’s okay and the next minute it’s not”. They considered Cambodia and Nepal but no sooner had they decided on the latter than the Himalayan country abruptly shut its surrogacy programme in September 2015.

“That really did set us back – it is an emotional roller coaster,” says McDonagh, originally from Dublin. They began to ask themselves should they accept that surrogacy wasn’t for them. However, their thoughts turned back to the UK where altruistic surrogacy is permitted.

When researching the possibility, they became part of an online network of parents and surrogates. They got to know a woman who had carried a baby for another couple and asked her if she was intending to do it again, would she consider them as parents? Three months later she said she was open to the idea and suggested the three of them meet.

The Irish Times by Sheila Wayman, February 25, 2016

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No One Is Safe From the Gender Binary—Even Gay Families

Guess what I got for Christmas from my kids?  A T-shirt that reads “The Daddy of all Daddies.” This was sweet, and I’m glad to win any competition, no matter how imaginary. But it was also weird in a way. If I’m the “Daddy of all Daddies,” where does that leave their other father?

The easy answer, and likely the one that animated my daughters’ purchase, is that I’m “Daddy” and David is “Papa.” (How we arrived at who’d have which title is a matter for another column.) But there’s a more complex one, too, which I’m guessing was in the back of their minds: I’m the dad, and David is the mom.

I don’t even have to imagine this as their thinking, really, because one of the kids said as much out loud a few weeks ago. David had just given her medication to help her deal with a cold, and, quite abruptly, she announced that he was “more like the mom” and I was “the dad.” Wait, what? How can our kids (of all people!) be hypnotized by the rigid gender dichotomy that our family undermines by our very existence?2nd parent adoption, second parent adoption, second parent adoptions, second parent adoption new york

It’s not even as though we follow roles that break down in quite the way of “traditional” mom/dad couples. My job’s hours are pretty flexible, so I have lots of time to spend with the family. I do my share of the laundry and generally clean up after dinner. David does the cooking. And when it comes to caring for them when they’re sick—which, after all, triggered the mom/dad comment—it’s a pretty even deal. In fact, I had to interrupt writing this column to mop up some vomit.

I admit the home workload isn’t strictly a 50/50 proposition. David’s design business is part-time at this point, and he does more around the house than I do. But our roles are flexible and nongendered enough that calling us Mom and Dad is just weird.

It’s also true that our neighborhood is very gender-progressive. Our next door neighbors both work full-time, but the dad’s home a lot more, does more than half the cooking, and is forever busy around the house. On the next block is a dad who mainly works from home while mom goes off to her full-time engineering job. Another mom is a high-level nurse practitioner whose husband is an ice sculptor. And so on. In sum, there is no shortage of gender-role busting all around us. Why isn’t all that enough to steer our kids away from such reductive ways of thinking?

Because even those important, living examples of role flexibility are still overwhelmed by the morass of gender traditionalism swirling around them.

Let’s go back to 2007, when the kids were just 2 years old. We’d just completed the adoption process and wanted to have their Social Security cards re-issued with their new last names and with David and me listed as their legal parents. What ensued, though, was homophobic hilarity of both the internal and external types. The Social Security forms had spaces for two parents: “mother” and “father.” The nice-enough guy who processed the form advised that there had been a few other same-sex couples in this situation, and the solution was simply to choose one parent to do an on-the-spot, limited-time gender change. In other words, he was asking me to lie to the government by designating one of us as “mother” although the application itself was the bigger liar. Then he said: “And since you’re the one standing here, you get to be the father.” I muttered something now lost to the ages and did as he’d suggested.

Not 30 seconds later, of course, I had second thoughts: Why was he making anysuggestion besides “fill in whichever blank you wanted.” And why did I accede to this absurdity rather than doing the only respectable queer thing—signing myself in as “mother,” and then turning on my heel and striding imperiously away, perhaps while quoting Mommie Dearest?

I understand that the forms have been changed since 2007, but the essentializing assumptions that underlay them are much tougher to drive out of our collective mental beehive. Just this past weekend, I heard a trailer for some NPR show featuring a lesbian comedian who declared, to forced laughter, that having two sons was the ultimate joke on her and her wife. I’m sure that if I’d searched out the actual show from which this inanity was plucked, I’d have heard the requisite disclaimers (“Oh, our children are our lives … ”), but I’d already had enough. I thought we LGBTQ parents were supposed to be knocking down these pegs rather than mining them for cheap laughs. Yeah, there’s this “lesbians hate men” trope, but really? And the “joke” feeds into intractable stereotypes about how boys need dads, and girls need moms—even though the comedian was probably trying to make a different point.

Before I work myself into hysterics, though, it’s worth acknowledging the more benign take on all this. Maybe my daughter was just expressing, in the terms available to her, that David’s more likely to express his feminine side, or is more comfortable doing so. But I have trouble with that explanation when gender division is made normative from birth. Retail establishments still divide clothing and toys by gender, and the advertising that parades in front of kids’ eyes almost invariably features moms doing mom things, and dads doing dad things. That I don’t even have to tell you what they’re doing makes the point well enough. Our daughters have managed to develop their own gender styles despite all this hounding, but as they reach adolescence, that’s only going to get harder to maintain. The “Papa is the mom” comment could be an early sign of what’s to come despite our tiresome reminders otherwise.

By John Culhane – slate.com, January 24, 2017

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Gabriel and Dylan’s Story – Our Families Matter

Gabriel and Dylan’s Story – via LoveComesFirst.com

Gabriel and Dylan – Love Comes First: Creating LGBT Families is an ongoing transmedia project designed to inspire, inform and document a community on the brink of tremendous societal and cultural change. As legal bans to marriage and adoption are lifted and reproductive technology advances, new possibilities for building families have arisen. At the same time, LGBT characters and stories have become more prevalent in entertainment and the media—bringing awareness and creative influence to the world at large.  Enjoy!

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I Got Gay Married. I Got Gay Divorced. I Regret Both.

In 2008, gay marriage was so new, my wife and I had a hard time finding a lawyer to help us legally join our lives together.

In 2013, gay divorce was so new, I had a hard time finding a lawyer to take our marriage apart.

We fell in love in the ’90s, when getting legally married wasn’t something two women could do. We danced in the streets on May 15, 2008, when the California Supreme Court ruled that “an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

And we decided to tie the knot ourselves the day before Election Day that year, when it suddenly seemed that California Proposition 8 was going to pass, banning same-sex marriage again.gay marriage

Beneath an arbor of grimy plastic ivy at the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder’s Office, we wept grateful tears as we swore to “love, honor, and keep each other, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.”

Twenty-four hours later, Prop 8 did pass, changing the marital status of 18,000 same-sex California couples from “married” to “who knows?”

Also unknown: why the happiest day of our life together was one of our last happy days. Why nothing we tried — individual and marriage therapy, romantic vacations, trial separations — could fix us.

In 2013 I Googled “gay divorce lawyer” and found only “gay family law” attorneys. I called the one with the best Yelp reviews.

“I need to file for d — ” The word caught in my throat.

In many cities over many years, my wife and I had marched for marriage equality. We’d argued with the haters and we’d argued with the gay people who said that legal marriage would co-opt us, diminish us, turn us into a caricature of “normal” married people. We swore we could enjoy the rights only marriage conferred and still have our gender-fluid commitment ceremonies, our chosen-family configurations, our dexterity at turning friends into lovers and vice versa.

Divorce felt like more than a betrayal of my wedding vows. It was a betrayal of my people and our cause.

“Yours won’t be my first gay divorce,” the lawyer told me, “and I guarantee you, it won’t be my last.”

I asked how long it would take, and what it would cost. He couldn’t give me even a ballpark estimate. The laws were in such flux, he said, that both gay people who wanted to marry and gay people who wanted to divorce were twisting in the shifting winds.

When the lawyer and I had our first, $350-an-hour conversation, same-sex marriage was outlawed in 37 states and legal in 13 (and the District of Columbia). Change was the only constant, and each change increased the time (his) and money (mine) it cost to research its implications.

gay divorceMy case had a bonus complication. In 1999, before real marriage was available to us, my wife and I had registered as California domestic partners. Did we need a separate legal process to end that partnership? No one was sure.

I mailed the lawyer a big deposit. He emailed me a big stack of documents. On the first page, there it was: my wife’s name, right next to mine. The thrill of that triumph, of being a gay person with the legal recognition of a straight person, ran through me as it always had. Then I remembered that I was seeing it for the last time.

As the process unfolded over the next several months, I couldn’t help comparing my second divorce with my first, in 1983, from the father of my kids. That’s the one that should have been complicated. Like most straight married couples, my husband and I owned our stuff jointly — one bank account, two cars, one ranch house and everything in it. Most wrenchingly, we had two little boys whom neither of us could imagine living without for even a day. Yet our divorce, our property division and our custody agreement were all ironed out in a few meetings with a paralegal, whose services cost less than $1,000.

Like most early same-sex-marriage adopters, my wife and I had intermingled our hearts and lives but kept our finances and property separate. And yet I was in for a much longer, costlier contest.

On June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court nullified the Defense of Marriage Act, granting federal benefits to all current same-sex marriages. Six months, dozens of notarized documents and many thousands of dollars into the process of getting divorced, because we hadn’t yet officially filed, my soon-to-be ex-wife and I were more married than ever.

New York Times – January 7, 2017 – by Meredith Maran

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in Family Stories / Legal / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Teen Panel 2016: Surrogacy children of gay dads share their stories

Teen Panel 2016: Surrogacy children of gay dads share their stories.
In this part the panelists speak about two defining moments in their recent pasts: the June 2015 decision by the Supreme Court on Marriage Equality, and the election of Donald Trump. As children with LGBTQ parents, how did they feel on these historic occasions, and how were their lives affected?

This panel was part of the 2016 Men Having Babies NY Conference. It was offered in cooperation with the Outspoken Generation program of Family Equality Council, and was moderated by the organization’s executive director, Stan Sloan.

 

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A surrogacy fairy tale

Anthony Brown and his husband Gary Spino’s neighbor in their West Village apartment building in New York City wore all black, only went out at night and had a frequent cough.

She was, “the type of woman you’d see coming down the street and you might cross the street,” Brown says. Now and then the couple would see her coming home at night from grocery shopping and would help carry her groceries upstairs. One day after falling in her apartment the woman, named Janet, called the couple to help. The result was a seven-year friendship and the gift of Brown and Spino’s son, Nicholas.

Brown and Spino came to learn she suffered from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, had lived all over the world and that she was also wealthy from family money. When she died, they discovered she had been so touched by their kindness that she left them half her estate. Because of her, the couple were able to afford surrogacy with Spino as their son’s biological father in what Brown calls, “a New York fairytale.”adoption new york,new york adoption,new york state adoption, stepparent adoption process,adopting step children,co parent adoption,2nd parent adoption,second parent adoptions,gay adoption new york,gay couple adoption, gay couples adopting

“It was a gift from God, truly. Or at least a gift from Janet,” Brown says. “We still have her picture and a heart-shaped urn that has some of her ashes. We sprinkled her ashes all over the world. We took her ashes to all the places where she had lived and tried to do her justice.”

As they embarked on their surrogacy journey, the couple went to a Men Having Babies meeting at the Gay and Lesbian Center and began gathering information. Brown, an attorney, would eventually go on to become chairman on the board for the organization.

While working with Men Having Babies, the group became a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and started a grant. The grant used money from events the organization produced to help with its gay parenting assistance program.

The program now offers qualifying individuals and couples discounted services, donated free services and cash grants. So far the organization is in its fourth class of recipients and 13 babies have been born to parents who have utilized the gay parenting assistance program.

“It’s one of the greatest things in the world to be able to talk to the recipients and see myself in them and to know I would never have been able to have afforded the surrogacy route had it not been for the grace of a kind woman who lived in my building. So it’s a full circle moment for me personally,” Brown says.

Brown is also no stranger to the other side of surrogacy. Before having their son, Brown worked for a marriage equality organization in the early ‘00s. Brown and Spino met a lesbian couple through the organization who wanted to have a family with a known donor. Brown and Spino agreed to help and the partner Brown was working with became pregnant first. Through her, Brown has an 11-year-old biological daughter. The experience led Brown and Spino not only on their own journey to welcome their son into their family, but for Brown to embark on a passion project to help other gay couples expand their families.

In 2012 Brown went deeper on his mission to help others and started TimeforFamilies.com, a website filled with information for LGBT families to learn how to start families.

Brown covers topics such as surrogacy, estate planning, co-parenting and specific topics like having a known donor versus an anonymous donor. While Brown notes the majority of website visitors are from the New York area, people from Africa, Asia and Europe have also accessed the site. Gay families can also send in their personal stories and photos to be featured on the website.

By Mariah Cooper, 10/6/2016, WashingtonBlade.com

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in Assisted Reproductive Technology / Egg Donation / Legal / Parenting / Personal Stories / Recently Added / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 2 comments

New Kids’ Book – The Great Big Body Book – Is Trans-Inclusive

A new children’s picture book  – The Great Big Body Book – about human bodies includes transgender and gender nonconforming people as well as same-sex parents. That’s a rare and wonderful thing, making this a welcome book, despite a few caveats.

 

The Great Big Body Book, by English author Mary Hoffman, is the fourth in her Great Big Books series for preschool and early elementary school kids. An earlier book in the series, The Great Big Book of Families, showed families with same-sex parents, among others, and Hoffman brings the same inclusive sensibility to her new work. The Body book begins by asking “What is a body?” and goes on to explore, in a fun and lighthearted way, how our bodies grow and develop over our lifetimes and the many things our bodies help us do.the great big body book, transgender, trans inclusive, trans kids, trans

Lively illustrations by Ros Asquith highlight both the main text and the humorous side vignettes that show short dialogs between characters. The characters show a great range of racial and ethnic diversity. Several wear headscarves and one wears a turban. We see two-dad, two-mom, and single-parent families. There are characters with a variety of physical disabilities, too, including ones in wheelchairs, one using a walker, and one with a short arm. To Asquith and Hoffman’s credit, they are always shown doing active things—they are not there as examples of harm or limitations to bodies.

In one spread, titled “Boy or Girl,” Hoffman gently pokes fun at the obsession with babies’ genders. One mom on the page, when asked “What is it?” responds simply “A baby.” A dad is asked “What’s her name?” and answers, “Fred.” Hoffman notes that pink doesn’t have to be for girls, nor blue for boys.

She then observes, “Some bits of your body are different, according to whether you are male or female.” That stays the same for most people, she says: “If you are born a boy you become a man and if a girl, you grow up to be a woman.” A few people, however, “don’t feel completely comfortable in the body they were born in and not everyone fits neatly into a ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ box. That’s OK—just be yourself.”

Overall, it’s a positive, simple explanation of being transgender or gender nonconforming. Hoffman doesn’t use those terms, however, which could be seen as a negative. At the same time, she never uses the word “puberty” despite discussing the changes teens go through, so this may be part of an overall decision to focus on concepts more than terminology—or perhaps a praiseworthy desire to avoid labels.

This brings us to the section on teens, in which Hoffman notes that “Boys’ voices get deeper and they start growing hair on their faces and private parts. Girls grow breasts and their hips get wider. They get hair in private places too.” That’s not true for all trans teens, of course, especially if they are not using hormones. I would have preferred a more nuanced view, perhaps simply by adding “most” before “boys’” and “girls.”

I also have concerns with a spread explaining that having a baby bump is not the same as being fat. Several pregnant women are shown at the top of the page. One of the side vignettes, which usually contain funny comments about the topic at hand, shows a boy pointing to a person with a beard and a large belly and saying, “Look! He’s having a baby!” The message seems to be that if a male-appearing person looks pregnant, it’s funny—a mistaken assumption. The humor is vague enough, however, that the image could also be interpreted as an actual trans dad, if desired (and alternatively, the character has gray hair, so maybe age is the intended butt of the joke, not gender), but a different vignette might have been better.

Via Mombian,com, October 5, 2016

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Meet the Soon-to-Be 1st Trans Parents in South America

LGBT activist Diane Rodriguez and her boyfriend Fernando Machado are an Ecuadorian couple who are set to become South America’s first-known transgender parents. They recently announced their pregnancy which has received much support for the couple.trans couple

Rodriguez wrote in a Facebook post: “I’m going to be a mum, my boyfriend Fernando Machado is pregnant with me. After having spoken with my family, people who are very close to my life and social environment, I wish to make public one of the news that I think is the most important in my life and that of my partner, Fernando Machado.”

She added that she understood that the announcement would receive comments in favor and against the happy news, however, she believes the news is important for society to change and is something wonderful for her and her boyfriend to celebrate: “But as an activist and transsexual woman committed to a process of profound social transformation , I believe that public opinion must know this wonderful news : Fernando Machado and Diane Rodriguez will be mom and dad.”

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thenextfamily.com By Alex Temblador

in Family Stories / International / Parenting / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 2 comments