It Takes a Village To Have a Child
Our surrogacy journey so far
For the past couple of years, my husband and I have been working on becoming parents.
No, this isn’t the “good news” post. In fact, I hadn’t wanted to write this post just yet.
It’s not the sort of thing that can stay private forever, of course. Not when you make the decision to write and speak and act in public. But in a path that is fraught and full of uncertainty, it’s unwise to announce anything too early.
So why am I saying anything now?
In short:
We’re at a stage where we need help, and if you know someone who is interested in becoming a surrogate1, we would love to meet them. Please message me privately here or by email at tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com.
That’s the reason I’m posting about this now. But while I’m here, I should do it right. I expect people will have a lot of questions about what remains a pretty rare, obscure, and sensitive process, so I want to answer them in a centralized location.
The Story So Far
Of the things I am grateful for in life, one of the deepest-running is this: I have incredible parents. Growing up, I never had to question whether they loved me, never had to question whether they loved each other, never for a moment worried that they had anything other than my best interests at heart.
Some combination of that and my Mormon upbringing—say what one will about Mormons, they are serious about their focus on families—left me certain from an early age that I wanted to become a father. I kept waiting, as a teenager, to notice what everyone other teenage boy noticed about girls, and could never quite figure out what they all meant. But I knew I wanted to marry well down the line, and I knew I wanted to have kids.
In some ways, it feels like much of philosophy is rationalizing these deep-felt instincts our personalities and upbringings leave us. When I was young, I wanted to become a father because that’s what God commanded and because I wanted to be like my parents. As I grew older and the element of religious faith fell apart, I was left to rationalize the same instincts in (mostly) secular terms: It is good that I am alive, good that life exists. There is something sacred, something vital, about bringing new life into the world and committing oneself to parenting: an act of hope, raging against the inevitability of death, lifelessness, and decay, bringing a new generation to continue the grand human project, continuing a tradition older than humanity.
More importantly than that, though—kids are great. In many ways, my favorite job I ever had was my few months as a substitute teacher to fill a gap between my LDS mission and university. Some of the second graders would do things like spontaneously draw little pictures as thanks even when I was only there a day; even by the time they became rather less enthusiastic teenagers, it was always rewarding. Most of my cousins are much younger than I am, and I’ve lived away from most of them for a while, so every time I had a chance to visit family I could put on a burst of energy for a few days, be the Fun Older Cousin who would scramble over rocks and climb trees and go exploring with them, then return to my quiet adult world.
But of course, my path was never going to be purely traditional. I did not come home from my mission and meet someone within three months and get engaged within another three and get married within another three before having four kids all spaced two years apart from there. When I came back, in my early twenties, I still wasn’t sure whether I was capable of falling in love. The feelings I’d anticipated showing up sometime had never quite come.
It was only after leaving Mormonism that that began to change. I started noticing hints of attraction—just not to women. I slowly gained an interest in dating. It came as a relief to me more than anything, that attraction. There was a rush of reassurance, a sense that maybe I could love someone after all. The only downside was the question rattling around my mind: Can I still become a father?
I talked about it with friends, thought about it, weighed my options. After some time, I became satisfied that the path was narrow, but possible. Military enlistment made it easy to save money, Obergefell gave legal reassurance, and for the first time, I thought seriously of that strange word: surrogacy.
So I started dating in earnest. And each first date, I would ask my two dealbreaker questions: Do you plan to stay in Nebraska long-term? What do you think of having kids? More than almost anything else, when I was dating, I was looking for someone I could trust to be a parent alongside me.
Now I have him. And now we are ready to have kids.
Or that was our story a couple of years ago, anyway. And it felt like a storybook, in its own way, everything falling just into place, step by step.
Since in-vitro gametogenesis2 is still a few years out, my husband and I had serious conversations about who would become a biological father when, ultimately deciding that it would be best to have at least one biological child each. From there, I raised the possibility of egg donation to my sister, to be used with my husband’s sperm in order to create our embryos. She and I have always been close3, so it wasn’t as strange of a conversation as it might sound, and she was enthusiastic about the idea. After that, in a Neopets chat online, I happened to become friends with a woman who mentioned she wanted to act as a surrogate. You know how these things go.4
With everyone in place, we began the long, winding process of having a baby.
The Birds and the Bees
How does it—y’know—work? How are babies made?
The first thing you notice is that it’s expensive. The second thing you notice is that it’s more expensive, and
The process goes something like this:
Find a fertility clinic. The doctor and medical staff there will be your (loose) guides through everything else.
Choose a sperm donor among yourselves.
Light medical screening for the sperm donor to test sperm quality.
Sperm donor donates sperm and freeze it for a monthly fee.
Find an egg donor, either via personal contact or through an agency.
Psychological and medical screening for the egg donor. The psych screening is both individual and in a group with you. Most of this can be done locally around the location of the donor or (for the group psych screening) via video.
Legal contract with the egg donor. You get your lawyers, you pay for the donor’s lawyers at a separate firm, they work the contract out with your input.
Schedule donation.
About a month before the donation, the egg donor gets a whole pile of medications.
In the weeks and days leading up to the donation, the egg donor goes in for regular check-ups to make sure everything is progressing smoothly. Depending on whether the donor lives near you or the clinic, this may involve several weeks of travel.
Egg donor donates eggs. Doctors count and report the number retrieved.
Unless you want to freeze eggs and wait, immediately after egg donation, the clinic unfreezes the sperm and fertilizes the eggs. You hear how many embryos you have and how many eggs were lost.
A few days later (between five and seven days after conception), they freeze the embryos (now blastocysts). You hear how many reached that stage and how many were lost.
Preimplantation genetic testing of blastocysts: are they healthy and reasonable to implant? You hear how many are healthy. These are your potential children. They sit there frozen, waiting. You finally have some space for hope.
Find a surrogate the same way you find egg donors. These days, this is very rarely the same person as the donor. Typical requirements from clinics are age 21-40, having given birth to at least one healthy child you're raising, stable living situation and finances, healthy BMI (usually 19-33), no smoking/drugs/excessive alcohol, no major mental health issues requiring medication.
Psychological and medical screening for the surrogate. The psych screening is both individual and in a group with you. You hear whether they’re cleared to proceed.
Legal contract with the surrogate, same as with the egg donor but substantially more involved.
Schedule implantation.
About a month before implantation, the surrogate gets a whole pile of medications.
In the weeks and days leading up to implantation, the surrogate goes in for regular check-ups to make sure everything is progressing smoothly. Depending on whether they live near you or the clinic, this may involve several weeks of travel. Depending on how things look (thickness of uterine lining, hormones cooperating, etc), implantation timing may shift on short notice.
Doctors implant one blastocyst in the surrogate.
Everyone waits for about a week.
The surrogate takes a pregnancy test. Everyone holds their breath. Odds of a successful implantation are maybe 60% if you’re lucky and the doctors are skilled.
If you got lucky, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. You’re past the hard part. You continue. If you did not, it’s a different sort of sigh. Return to step 18 (if any blastocysts remain), step 8 (if they don’t), or step 1 (if you need a new clinic or are working with a new donor).
Nine months later, if all goes well, your baby is born.
Simple.
We’ve made it through most of the list a couple of times now. Biology is unforgiving, though, and chance is what it is. All one can do is continue to try.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why not just use an agency?
The simple answer is that I am a romantic, and agencies are businesses. I have nothing against them per se, just like I have nothing against the clinics and psychologists and lawyers and hospitals through which the path to raising a child must run for me. That romanticism is tempered by pragmatism, sure—in the classic style of modern romance, my husband and I met on Tinder—but all else being equal, when it comes to the most personal and vital parts of life, I prefer to rely on human connections.
Asking somebody to carry our child is an enormous request, and it’s something we want to do right: to find someone who can trust us; to ensure the woman we meet shares our values on the topic and is in a good position; to speak together directly and thoroughly about goals, expectations, and the path forward. While all of that is possible through an agency, it can be done better directly when the option is available.
What about adoption?
In the United States, adoption proceeds via two distinct, non-overlapping paths. The first, and the image most prospective adoptive parents have in mind, is infant adoption: an arrangement planned in advance between birth parents and adoptive parents when the birth parents are not in a position to raise their children, in which babies are adopted immediately after being born. Adoption in this case is the goal from the beginning. Around 25,000 infants are adopted by this approach annually, with another 1,000 or so via now-rare international adoptions.5
The second route is foster care, for which adoption is a failure state. The goal of foster care is not to match kids with new families, but to reunite children with their birth families whenever possible. Rob Henderson is worth reading on this topic:
[F]or many foster kids—probably most—the reason they end up in the system in the first place is because one of their parents was dealing with problems like drug addiction, mental illness, or getting arrested. And often, after the child is placed in care, a parent will sober up for a while, get a job, or otherwise start to pull things together. Or a relative, like a grandmother, will step in and say, “I’ll take care of the kid.”
From the system’s point of view, this means they might have to move the child back. But if the kid stays with the same foster family for too long, they can form strong attachments. Then, if their biological parent reappears and says, “You can come live with me now,” the child might resist, saying, “I’ve been living here for a year or two, I don’t want to go.” So the system’s way of “solving” this is to move the child every few months so they never form an attachment with any of their foster families.
In the case of infant adoption, there are functionally zero babies who wind up without adoptive parents. None go from infant adoption to foster care, and while estimates are unreliable, some indicate double-digit couples waiting to adopt each baby. The Atlantic is informative here. When considering adopting from foster care, prospective adoptive parents tend to hope to adopt younger kids. As a result, few young children, usually ones with serious medical needs and in difficult positions, are in a position to be adopted from foster care.
I find each path admirable and have not ruled any out. It’s good for people to become parents, whichever route they take. Each route is very different, though, and they are complementary, not replacements for each other. Prospective parents who are in a position to bring children into the world and raise them well should not be pushed into one path or another—it is good to have kids, good to adopt kids, good to foster kids. My husband and I want to have biological children whether or not we also adopt in the future.
What are your thoughts on the ethics of surrogacy?
I outline my full thoughts here. For an overview of the research base on the topic if you prefer a quantitative case rather than a philosophical one, I recommend the following post from
:
Many people defend surrogacy on libertarian grounds, as a willing interaction between competent adults in which others have no business intervening. I appreciate those willing to defend something I value, but I strongly prefer a more affirmative case. Surrogacy, like most other ways of bringing children into the world, is good. Perhaps my most fundamental philosophical conviction is this: life is good, human life especially so. The most natural things in the universe are death, decay, and emptiness. Growth, life, and creation are fragile anomalies. We belong to an eons-long heritage of those who have committed to building and maintaining life in the face of inevitable decay. It is good for us to do the same—good to bring life into the world, good to become a parent, good to commit your time and effort to raising children in a loving family.
The only thing that changes when a couple is gay or infertile is that nature makes the process more complicated. To live in a society where something as complex and multifaceted as IVF and surrogacy is possible is not a right, inevitable and inalienable. It is a privilege that requires the active work of many to sustain. The doctors and scientists who work on fertility research and in clinics, the teams who help with the process, and particularly women who carry children on behalf of others who cannot have their own, are providing a gift to kids who would otherwise not exist, to prospective parents who would otherwise remain childless, and to a world that would be less for the absence of those families. It's certainly not something that could or should ever be demanded of someone. It's a selfless choice both on behalf of the child who would otherwise not be born and the prospective parents who would otherwise have no children. I am grateful to live in a world where some feel strongly enough about the value of families to help others build them, and I believe what they do is good.
There are margins at which some of these arguments shift. There are exploitative and tragic environments that should be understood and called out. There are settings into which it's not appropriate to bring a child, and edge cases to analyze and discuss. My aim here is not to address all edge cases, but to assess the central case, and in particular, the case for an educated, well-off prospective parent in a society with lower-than-replacement fertility and increasing dismissiveness towards the value of parenthood. Life is worth pursuing and preserving to such a degree that you can get very far from the true ideal case before nonexistence is better than existence, or choosing not to become a parent is better than choosing to become one.
Parenting should be celebrated. Making sacrifices to bring kids into the world and raise them well should be celebrated. That is no less true for complex paths requiring many people than it is for simple ones requiring only the parents.
Are you comfortable raising a child with two fathers?
Yes. As above, for those who prefer a quantitative look, you can get a good overview of the standard research base here. But I’ll speak in personal terms:
When looking for someone to marry, I hoped to find not someone identical to me, but complementary—someone grounded to temper my romanticism, someone organized to temper my chaos, someone hard-working and committed. As much as anything, though, I wanted someone I trusted to be an extraordinary father. I am very lucky to have found the man I did.
It’s appropriate for parents to take distinct, complementary roles in the lives of their children, and gay couples have fewer templates for those roles than straight ones, but I am grateful for the couples—gay and straight—who blazed trails and showed the path to raising children well before us.
I think researchers like Brad Wilcox are absolutely correct about the importance and the value of stable, married, two-parent households for kids. I look forward to the not-too-distant day when couples like my husband and I can have and raise biological children in simpler and more direct ways. And I also think that among my age and social class, people are far more likely to wait too long for perfect circumstances than to commit too early. I would rather work to parent kids than to come up with excuses not to do so.
Inasmuch as I have a test, it is this: would I have been happy to be raised as I intend to raise my future children? I would. They will have the best aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and grandfathers kids could ask for, and as good of an upbringing as we can provide, having come into the world as a result of many who love them coming together to make it happen. I can’t imagine we’ll be perfect. But it’s worth doing.
Conclusion
There’s a peculiar liminal space familiar to every prospective parent working on having kids: hope, uncertainty, endless small victories and small tragedies. My husband and I have spent years in that space now—fortunate to be in a position where hope is possible, still uncertain how or when it will be fulfilled. The next time I write about this topic, I hope to have good news to share. For now, though, all we can do is gather our village, in the hope that one day we will have a child.
Typically, surrogacy agencies restrict eligibility to women who are in good health, have had at least one successful pregnancy, have stable finances, and are currently raising kids. The screening process with our clinic is pretty intensive, and we can work with people on other details.
In-vitro gametogenesis is a promising near- to mid-term future technology in development, a process by which non-reproductive cells are turned into sperm or egg cells. The technology has already successfully been used in mice, but clinical use in humans unfortunately remains a good few years out.
Paid subscribers to Tracing Woodgrains will already be familiar with her.
To protect her privacy, that is the first and the last thing you will hear about her. While I am public about my own stories, that does not extend to the stories of others.
I hope your family finds success and happiness. As a parent myself it's joyful to see new families forming. It's also a peverse delight knowing that you will encounter the most mind boggling situations with your child(ren) and find yourself questioning your sanity. At 3am I was just having this fun conversation with my daughter. " You're very smart and capable. I'm very proud of you. Go get your own water. I love you very much. Leave me alone."
I wanted to add something about adoption and foster care. I don't want to disuade people from helping those children but I do want people to go into the situation clear eyed. I used to teach children with emotional disturbance and I have seen foster parents and adoptive parents unprepared for the reality of potential challenges their child will have. Children may have been exposed to illegal drug use in the womb, their early life may have been abusive, they may have genetic predisposition to learning, mental, emotional disabilities. Agencies don't hide these things but you can't really prepare someone for this.
Good luck! You'll need it! One day in the darkest part of a pandemic you'll see your child move their mask to put their tongue on a shopping cart handle and be convinced your not going to make it.