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Surrogacy. Buying eggs and wombs. Gay couples. Throwing these words together, is apocalyptic  for some evangelicals, but, a new Associated Free Press article, asserts that these words make happy homes for many gay men and lots of money for some fertility companies. 

From The AFP:

An ever-growing number of gay couples are paying tens of thousands of dollars to have surrogate mothers carry their babies, turning America’s concept of traditional family on its head.

It took two women and two men for two-year-old twins Katherine and Connor to come to life. Their fathers, Michael Eidelman and A.J. Vincent, who have lived together for years, invested love, time and all their savings to build their family in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The eggs were donated by a woman in Washington state and fertilized in vitro with sperm from both men. The fertilized egg was then inserted in the uterus of a woman from Ohio. Each man is the biological father of one of the twins, who were born in Los Angeles, where the laws are less stringent for same-sex couples.

“I am so glad that we chose that pathway,” said Eidelman, a 40-year-old dermatologist.

To fulfill their dream of parenthood, the couple turned to Circle Surrogacy, a company that helps people find egg donors and host mothers and navigate through the legal and medical insurance process.

“It is a very successful business,” said Circle Surrogacy President John Weltman. ”In 12 years we have grown 6,000 percent with no borrowing whatsoever and profit made every month,” he said. “We expect to double in the next two and half years.” 

When the company was launched, 10 percent of its clients were gay couples. Today, 80 percent are same-sex couples from 29 countries. ”Actually, of the 250 or so couples we have helped, all but about four are still together, a less than two percent break up rate, as opposed to the national average of 50 percent,” he said.

The “gay baby boom” has made families with two fathers a common sight in New York City’s daycare centers and parks, although gay couples legally marry only in one US state, Massachusetts.

“It is not looked at anymore as something so weird or strange,” said Sanford Benardo, president of the Northeast Assisted Fertility Group from Boston, Massachusetts. ”More and more people are doing it,” said Bernardo, whose company has clients from Asia to the Middle East and Europe. “It is not for celebrities anymore.”

The process costs at least 100,000 dollars, with 25,000 dollars going to the surrogate mother and between 4,000 and 10,000 dollars of the egg donor. The rest goes to the agency, medical costs and legal fees.
Coupled with adoption, the number of families with gay parents is growing. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, between one million and nine million children under the age of 18 have same-sex parents today.

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