Don’t blame gay men for the surrogacy industry’s troubles

By Avi Rose, July 2, 2015 – haaretz.com

Two-thirds of Israelis who use foreign surrogates are women, so why is the vitriol focused on gay fathers?

The U.S. gay community scored a major victory last week with the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Such a move is unlikely here in Israel, partly due to the fact that the community has placed a greater emphasis on parenting, and less on lobbying for marriage rights. This makes sense in a country that practically makes child-rearing a citizenship requirement.

Though gay men are putting much of their time, money and emotion into fulfilling this duty, they are hardly being praised for it. Following the earthquakes in Nepal, and the subsequent rescue of Israeli babies born to local surrogate mothers, critics from various sectors of Israeli society unleashed especially vitriolic criticism of gay men who engage in fertility commerce. Statements by media figures such as Irit Linor and Keren Noibach, leaders of the LGBT community such as former Jerusalem Open House director Elinor Sidi and politicians such as Moshe Feglin and Merav Michaeli, left the public with the impression that gay men are the primary consumers of reproductive services that exploit (mostly third-world) women.

For most Israelis unable to gestate a child on their own, surrogacy, often coupled with sperm and egg donation, are the best — if not only — way to become parents. As a gay parent of twins born though this process, I am open to critical discussion about surrogacy but unwilling to disproportionally shoulder the blame for a national fertility program that is deeply flawed and unbalanced, and an international trade that is ethically questionable, especially when I represent a minority of those who use these services.

Israel’s desire to increase its Jewish population at any cost has created a tangle of legal and medical practices that are contradictory and often counterproductive. We spend more on IVF than any other country, yet rates of success are relatively low. Our adoption policies are antiquated; racially and religiously biased in such a way as to be practically ineffective. Co-parenting arrangements – where unmarried individuals create a child – are based on contracts that are essentially unenforceable, leaving the father vulnerable to the loss of custody rights. Surrogacy has been legal here for almost two decades, but is so limited – to a few heterosexual married couples – that most potential parents are forced to seek services outside our borders. There, in the hands of the private sector, both the providers (mostly poor women) and the purchasers of surrogacy services are exploited, with little real support from government at home or abroad.

Though people from all segments of society are involved in these activities, for women and non-gay couples, the process is often cheaper and involves almost no public judgment. At home in Israel, women are given almost endless, low-cost conception assistance, including anonymous sperm and egg donation. If they need a surrogate, they can first seek domestic arrangements, and if they must go abroad, they face little public scrutiny afterward – society turns a blind eye, as if they gestated their children on their own.

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Surrogate children can now claim French citizenship, top court rules

RT.com/news July 3, 2015

France’s top court has ruled that two surrogate children born abroad will now have legal status in the country. They can obtain birth certificates and claim citizenship despite a ban on surrogacy in France.

“Surrogate motherhood alone cannot justify the refusal to transcribe into French birth registers the foreign birth certificate of a child who has one French parent,” saysa statement from the Court of Cassation, one of France’s courts of last resort which has jurisdiction over all matters.

The court said in its press release that it was asked to consider two cases. In each of them, a French citizen claimed to be father to a child born by a surrogate mother in Russia.

The court said that the plaintiff “asked for the transcription of the Russian birth certificate into the French birth registers.”

“…the rules pertaining to transcription into French civil status registers, construed in the light of Article 8 of the European Human Rights Convention, should apply to this case. Therefore the theory of a fraud cannot hinder the transcription of a birth certificate,” the court said in the statement.

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Gay couple unable to leave Thailand with daughter

Washington Blade, by Michael Lavers – June 24, 2015

A Florida man claims he and his husband are unable to leave Thailand with their infant daughter because the woman who gave birth to her objects to the fact they are a same-sex couple.

Gordon “Bud” Lake told the Washington Blade during a Skype interview on June 9 that he met the surrogate mother in person for the first time the day before his daughter, Carmen Santos Lake, was born in a Bangkok hospital on Jan. 17.

He said he visited her in the subsequent days, and brought his son Álvaro, who was born through a surrogate in India in August 2013, with him. Lake told the Blade that his husband, who is from Spain, did not accompany him. Lake said the surrogate — who is not the baby’s biological mother — agreed to list him on their daughter’s birth certificate as her father.

He told the Blade the surrogate also signed a consent form that allowed him to take her from the hospital. “All seemed to be going well,” wrote Lake in an email to the Blade earlier this month. “Carmen was beautiful, happy and healthy. The surrogate was fully cooperating and I was looking forward to heading home with my family in a matter of weeks, once all the remaining paperwork was finalized.”

Lake told the Blade he first became aware that the surrogate had an issue with the fact that he and his husband are a same-sex couple a few weeks after she gave birth to their daughter. “She had stated to our lawyer [that] she was fine helping out a couple that had problems that couldn’t have a child on their own and that we weren’t an ordinary family,” Lake told the Blade, recalling the surrogate’s objections. “That’s when I first found out about it. I don’t know if the agency told her before hand.” Lake told the Blade the surrogate — represented by the Women’s Lawyers Association of Thailand — did not show up for a scheduled meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok where he said she was to have provided him with the necessary paperwork that would have allowed him to leave the country with his daughter.

He said the surrogate was also supposed to sign for her American passport. The surrogate made the first of several appearances in the Thai media on March 3. Lake told the Blade that the surrogate on March 19 arrived at the Bangkok apartment building in which he and his husband had previously lived. He said they had already moved because their original lawyer told them “she could come and try to take the baby from us.” Lake said the surrogate and her teenage daughter waited in the lobby for eight hours.

“She asked me to come downstairs and bring the baby,” he said, recalling a conversation he said he had with the surrogate over a Thai social media network. “She wanted to see the baby.”

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Overview of surrogacy and adoption options in the USA / 2015 Brussels MHB

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BABY LOVE: HOW AMBER MADE A GAY COUPLE’S DREAMS COME TRUE

Gayswithkids.com, by Asaf Rosenheim, June 13, 2015

babybumpThis is the story of Baby Love. Baby Love isn’t her real name; it is the name we chose for the purposes of this story. One reason we are going to call her Baby Love is that her parents would like to give her a choice when she grows up to keep this story to herself. More to the point, we are calling her Baby Love because three people took every ounce of their love, from the far corners of New York to the depths of Texas, to bring Baby Love into this world.  If you stick with the story, you will hear about the moment Baby Love was born.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Amber, the surrogate who carried Baby Love. Amber will be the guest at the Men Having Babies (“MHB”) Pride meeting this week in New York. This is a real cause for celebration for anyone who cares about our gay families. MHB has grown from a program that ran at the NYC LGBT Center starting in 2005 to an independent nonprofit organization that provides valuable invaluable support to prospective gay fathers, including online resources, ratings of surrogacy agencies and fertility clinics, seminars, exhibits and workshops worldwide.

Most importantly, MHB provides prospective fathers who cannot afford the expenses involved with parenting through surrogacy with over a million dollars’ worth of cash grants, discounts and free services from about forty leading service providers through the Gay Parenting Assistance Program (“GPAP”). To date GPAP has already provided almost 200 couples with access to substantial discounts, and more than two dozen couples and singles received full support, including grants and free service. These prospective parents, who otherwise may have not been able to complete this journey, were chosen by a grant committee. As of today, about 10 babies are already expected to be born later this year, with many more to come. Applications for stage I of the program is open year round, and stage II applications for 2016 are received from eligible stage I recipients until August 1.

The celebratory Pride meeting of the organization will take place at 6:30pm on Wednesday June 17 at the JCC Manhattan. It will start with a networking reception, with a short briefing by the organization’s board about recent developments, future plans and opportunities to get involved. Following the reception Amber and the parents she helped will tell their stories. Tissues and light refreshments will be provided.

This story began ten years ago when Amber, pregnant with her first son, decided that she would be a surrogate one day. Amber doesn’t remember where she heard about this option, but what she does remember is that, from that moment on, for ten whole years, she knew she would one day carry a child for another family. For the most part Amber’s pregnancies were easy: she enjoyed them, and she even said that she felt like she “could be pregnant forever.” Despite her amazing outlook and good pregnancies, there were moments that weren’t easy, but none of these hardships came close to stopping Amber from pursuing her dream.

When I asked Amber what pushed her all this time, she said that, as a mother, she couldn’t imagine someone not being able to start a family because they couldn’t have a child on their own. She knew she wanted to give this gift, not only to them, but also to herself.

Five years ago, Amber, by then a mother of three, moved to Texas, where surrogacy is legal; and the moment she and her family unpacked, she started exploring it. For a long time she was a fly on the wall on Facebook groups dedicated to surrogates and their networks, and she recommended that any women considering surrogacy do the same: hear the stories, the lovely with the ugly, the good with the bad. Amber, in a way that is typical for her personality, spent a long time researching agencies, clinics and speaking with surrogates who had gone through this journey. So it was hardly surprising that, three days after she submitted her application to her preferred agency, she got matched with a gay couple from New York. Two days later she had her first phone call with the intended parents. I asked Amber about the moment before she hit “send” on her application. She remembered that she had butterflies because she had put so much of herself into it. She felt very vulnerable.

It had been a while since everyone on that phone call had been on a first date , but that’s exactly what it felt like. Excitement mixed with anxiety is how they all described that call. Amber remembers the exact date: January 8. Will she like us? Will they like me? Can I make sure I make a good impression while being completely honest? Is this the right person for us?

Amber says that she got some very good advice from an experienced surrogate before the call, who told her not to say “yes” just because she felt excited to start the process. But after an hour-long conversation, which had no awkward silences, it took both parties less than two minutes to write back to the agency and say: YES YES YES.

Amber told me that a few days ago while going through some documents she re-read the couple’s application. She said that everything they wrote in that application was spot-on, and that everything they had hoped for happened. She attributes this to both parties being emotionally ready and being in the right place at the right time.

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Italian surrogacy case goes to ECHR Grand Chamber

By Susan Gately – 05 June, 2015 – CatholicIreland.Net (The implications of this case are huge for European surrogacy but please keep in mind that the tone of the reporting reflects the source.)

The European Court of Human Rights decided earlier this week to refer an Italian surrogacy case on appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Court.

The case Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy was originally heard in the European Court of Human Rights in January this year.

The case involved a couple who obtained a child from a Russian company specialising in surrogacy.

Paradiso and Campanelli paid €49,000 for the baby boy who was produced through in vitro fertilisation and surrogacy. He had no biological connection with them.

Surrogacy is illegal in Italy, so the purchase of the baby was illegal, and passing him off as their own child, was seen as an act of fraud and a breach of public order. The Italian courts prosecuted the couple and the baby was placed with a foster family.

Paradiso and Campanelli appealed to the European Court of Human Rights maintaining that the interference was a breach of their right to “respect for private and family life” which is protected under the European Convention of Human Rights.

In its judgment on 27 January 2015, the Section of the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of the couple and ordered the Italian government to pay them €20,000 in damages and costs.

The Court considered that the Italian authorities had not given sufficient weight to the best interests of the child when balancing them against public-policy considerations.

The authorities had decided to remove the child and to place him under guardianship on the grounds that he had no biological relationship with the applicants and that the applicants had been in an unlawful situation (by contacting a Russian agency in order to become parents and subsequently bringing a child to Italy whom they passed off as their child, they had circumvented the prohibition in Italy on surrogacy and the rules on international adoption).

The Court said in particular, the authorities had not recognised the de facto relationship between the applicants and the child and had imposed an extreme measure, reserved for cases where children were in danger.

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What’s It Like to Be a Surrogate Mom?

by Anna Medaris Miller – May 6, 2015 – US News and World Report Health

Jodie Hayes had something on her mind. For four years, it tugged. For four years, she let it simmer.

Finally, the time was right – or at least as right as it ever would be – to bring it up with her husband, a U.S. Army soldier who was training in another state.

babybump“Do you remember when you were a kid getting asked what you wanted to be when you grew-up?”Hayes, a 38-year-old who lives near Savannah, Georgia, ​wrote to him in an email during the summer of 2013. “I really wanted to be a mom. I didn’t care about a fancy career or getting rich. I just wanted to be the best mom I could be.”

“Fortunately, you and I were able to conceive and become parents pretty easy,” continued Hayes, whose daughters are now 14 and 17. “I can’t imagine how it would feel to not be able to do the most natural thing in the world, experience pregnancy and having a child. Can you imagine life without our girls?”

Then Hayes cut to the chase​:​ “This is why I want to become a surrogate.”

Hayes was talking about becoming a gestational carrier, or woman who carries another couple’s embryo to term. The process involves using assisted reproductive technology to fertilize a woman’s egg with a man’s​ sperm in a lab and then transferring the resulting embryo into the carrier’s uterus. (In the other type of surrogacy, called traditional surrogacy, the woman is the child’s biological mother but became pregnant via artificial insemination.) In a sense, Hayes was telling her husband she wanted to rent out her uterus to another family.

“I wanted to be the answer to someone’s pain or frustration [by helping them] get the family that they wanted,” Hayes said in an interview with U.S. News. “I wanted the pride of being able to do that – being able to get them to smile again – and be able to hold the child that they wanted to hold.”

The Goal: A Healthy Baby

Some women hate being pregnant – they get morning sickness, feel sluggish and tired and wish they could fast-forward to the good part: a baby. Other women love being pregnant – they glow, feel energized and at peace, and enjoy the journey and the destination. It’s the latter group that makes up the vast majority of gestational carriers, says Michele Purcell​, a registered nurse who directs the egg freezing, donor egg and gestational carrier programs at Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, Maryland​.

“Most women have good pregnancies, but I would say [gestational carriers] have exceptional pregnancies, where they really just feel great the whole time,” she says. “And if they don’t at the beginning, it’s so worth it at the end that they don’t mind it.”

There are other, less altruistic reasons, why a woman might want to become a gestational carrier. Namely, the money. Surrogate​ moms are compensated anywhere from $15,000 to $60,000, depending on various factors such as the agency, location, agreement between the parents and the surrogate and how many babies the woman carries. ​(All medical care, travel and other costs related to the pregnancy and birth are reimbursed as well.)

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Brussels conference offers European gay men hope of parenting through surrogacy and adoption in the USA and Canada

MenHavingBabies.org – 5/28/2015

The “Parenting Options for European Gay Men” conference, hosted by the NY based organization “Men Having Babies”, attracted more than 200 prospective gay fathers from 10 countries, and also garnered intense media attention. The conference served to raise awareness of limited domestic parenting options for European gay men, amid increasing political debates across Belgium, France, and the Netherlands regarding surrogacy and assisted reproduction legislation.

With over 2000 gay couples and singles worldwide, including 700 in Europe, the nonprofit organization Men Having Babies (MHB) is dedicated to easing the path to surrogacy parenting for its members. For several years MHB has been providing unbiased guidance and financial assistance to prospective parents in the USA, the UK and Israel. On May 2-3, 2015, the organization held its first conference in continental Europe, in collaboration with the LGBT parenting organizations “Meer dan Gewenst” from the Netherlands and “Gay Surrogacy UK”.

The “Brussels Conference on Parenting Options for European Gay Men” attracted more than 200 prospective gay dads from 10 countries, well above original estimates. The high demand forced the organizers to add an overflow room where dozens of attendees watched the presentations via live video feed. “We were overwhelmed and moved by the large attendance and intense desire for parenting expressed by men who came from not just neighboring France and the Netherlands, but also from as far as Ireland, Portugal and Bulgaria,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, MHB’s executive director.

The conference brought together community activists, medical and legal experts, parents and surrogate mothers. Several workshops and panels offered peer advice on surrogacy and adoption of children from the USA, finding and picking professionals to help in the process, and information about MHB’s Gay Parenting Assistance Program (GPAP), a program designed to make parenting more affordable to those in financial need. “Even with the easing of legal obstacles to adoption by gay men, the reality is that across continental Europe there are very few domestic adoption opportunities,” said Anthony Brown, MHB’s board chairman. “Meanwhile, domestic surrogacy is either illegal or unavailable, and societal attitudes are much more hostile to surrogacy compared with those in the USA and England.” To help prospective parents navigate the precarious legal landscape vis-à-vis gestational surrogacy, the conference offered country-specific panels with leading European legal experts.

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The 2015 MHB Brussels conference on Parenting Options for European Gay Men – highlights

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Changing The Way We Think About Mother’s Day

May 7, 2015 by Asaf Rosenheim via Gays With Kids

changing

Our family belongs to a gay synagogue, so most of the parents who attend the children’s services with their kids are gay. One Yom Kippur our rabbi asked for a show of hands. “Who has two moms?” she asked. “Who has two dads? Who lives with a grandparent or an aunt or uncle? Who has only one mom? One dad?” And so on. The kids kept on raising their hands, one group after another, sometimes giggling, sometimes saying something proud like “ME!” Finally, rabbi Weiss asked: “Who has a mom and a dad?” All the (mostly gay and lesbian) parents in the room raised their hands. And then it hit me: while we are trying to provide our children with alternative views of families, the families we grew up in are almost always the traditional nuclear mom-and-dad model; for most of us, this was and still is our parenting experience.

In our family there are two dads, and a daughter and son (twins) who turned 3 just a few months ago. When I’m asked, it is very easy for me to affirmatively state: Our kids have two dads or, as we say at home, an aba and a daddy. But people always wonder, and people sometimes (especially kids) are brave enough to ask: Do they have a mom?

Technically they don’t, our kids were born with the help of a gestational surrogate, which means that we received an anonymous egg donation which together with our sperms was used to create embryos, which were subsequently carried by our friend, who served as the children’s surrogate. Over the years, friends, family and many strangers have suggested that one of these two women must be “the mother.” We answered politely that we call one the egg donor and the other the surrogate, but mostly they seemed unsatisfied by these answers. Usually I think this is just a matter of educating them on our family structure, but sometimes I do attributed it to being insensitive, homophobic, dad-phobic, or mother-centric depending on the person asking and his or her tone. Many people think it is just fine for a same-sex couple to have kids but still believe that a mother is necessary for the healthy development of a child. Others have pointed out that children born using anonymous sperm or egg donation will always wonder about their genetic parent, and that we are depriving them of a right to know their biological mother.

My friends in similar family settings have tried to address these issues in many admirable ways: I have seen fathers asking their children, “Do you have a mom?” just to demonstrate how the kids answer so clearly, “No, I do not; I have two dads!” Others have created strong bonds with women in their lives that the children could identify with as the equivalent of a mother figure: an aunt, grandmother, the surrogate herself, or sometimes a caregiver. When asked, many of us will gladly point you to solid research indicating that children of same-sex couples are just as happy and healthy as children who grow up with a mother and dad. I would be grateful if someone could show this information to my 3-year-old, who was at that moment extremely unhappy about a variety of things: from not being able to play on my iPhone to having to take a bath.

For example, in her book “Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms,” Dr Susan Golombok says that children of same-sex couples do just as well as children in traditional families. The problems some children face come from outside the family rather than within it and depend very much on where they live. She argues that schools should make an active effort to combat the stigmatization of children in different families. Dr Golombok is currently carrying out a study of children with gay dads who were born with the help of a surrogate. The study should be completed this summer, and the very much anticipated findings will be available shortly after.

In spite of these positive research results, it’s hard not to wonder about the effects of growing up without a mom, and not only that, but with no mother ever having existed. My husband Eric sometimes points out that women used to die in childbirth with terrible frequency, and that even his grandmother never knew her own mother because of this common tragedy. While she was raised by her father and grandmother, she still knew that a woman who was her mother had at least lived at one time and had been known by the people in her life. Our kids wouldn’t be able to imagine a mother. The idea of our kids having nothing but a void where a mother would normally be sometimes kept me up at night.

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