Here’s how one single father spent a decade planning for his dream family via surrogacy

Planning dream family

Planning for your dream family via surrogacy

There are many paths to parenthood, and the journey is often a lot more costly for parents who rely on surrogacy

For Jon, 41, the road to becoming a father to 5-month-old Theo involved a patchwork of financial moves: a career change, years of saving, employee benefits, family help and a grant for discounted services. Jon asked to use his first name only for privacy.planning dream family

“I worked for a decade to make this family happen,” the Atlanta-based single father said.

In total, the cost of surrogacy can vary widely, ranging from $150,000 to well over $200,000, depending on several factors, according to Rebecca Willman, chief community engagement and programs officer with Family Equality, a nonprofit dedicated to LGBTQ+ families. “If someone is quoting you a really low number, you may end up with a lot of additional costs,” she said.

‘People get really creative’ to pay for surrogacy

Jon saved around $80,000 over 10 years before starting the egg donor process in 2019. “I assumed I’d pair up with someone and they’d help pay for surrogacy,” he said. “But that never happened.”

His company didn’t initially offer fertility benefits for men. But a group of employees, mostly women, successfully pushed for expanded benefits for in vitro fertilization, adoption and gestational carriers. The enhanced coverage, which reimbursed employees for out-of-pocket expenses, reimbursed Jon $40,000 from his $170,000 total. His total included the cost of an egg donor, in vitro fertilization and gestational carrier.

“The tech sector and the financial services sector have been very proactive in offering fertility benefits,” said Anthony Brown, an attorney and manager of client services at Circle Surrogacy. “And some of them have become creative so that they get around the technical definition of infertility,” extending the benefit to same-sex couples, he added.

By Kate Dore, CNBC.com July 9, 2023

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Here’s how one single father spent a decade planning for his dream family via surrogacy appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Deb Price, a First as a Columnist on Gay Life, Dies at 62

Deb Price

If Deb Price wrote for mainstream Americans about same-sex couples in everyday situations, she thought, society would have a harder time denying them equal rights.

Deb Price

Photo courtesy of NYTimes.com

As the nation’s first nationally syndicated lesbian columnist who wrote regularly about gay life, Deb Price certainly covered pointed issues, like the debate over gay people in the military.

But she also turned to small matters of everyday domesticity, telling readers, for instance, that she and her partner, Joyce Murdoch, had bickered over whether to get air conditioning in their new convertible. She wrote about gardening together. She described attending Ms. Murdoch’s high school reunion.

She wanted to convey that being in a committed same-sex relationship wasn’t all that different from being in a heterosexual one — except maybe for the presents.

“We watch our siblings get eight silver trays, 12 pickle forks, a fondue pot and a trip to Hawaii for settling down,” she wrote. “And then our relatives give us a hard time or nothing at all.”

Ms. Price sought to demystify gay life for Middle America. If her readers could see same-sex couples in ordinary situations, she reasoned, they would find them less foreign and less frightening — and would have a harder time denying them equal rights.

She wrote 900 columns over 18 years and believed that they might have had something to do with the reversal in cultural attitudes that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.

www.nytimes.com by Katherine Q. Seelye, December 10,2020

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Deb Price, a First as a Columnist on Gay Life, Dies at 62 appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Overlooked No More: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneering Gay Activist

overlooked

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Before the word “homosexuality” existed, he argued that same-sex attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else.Overlooked

By the time the overlooked lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs took the podium at a meeting of the Association of German Jurists in 1867, rumors about his same-sex love affairs — and the subsequent threat of arrest and prosecution — had already cost him his legal career and forced him to flee his homeland.

Standing in Munich before more than 500 lawyers, officials and academics — many of whom jeered as he spoke — Ulrichs argued for the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized sex between men in several of the German-speaking kingdoms and duchies that existed in the years before the creation of a unified German state.

“Gentlemen, my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law,” he said, according to the historian Robert Beachy in the 2014 book “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.”

Ulrichs described a “class of persons” who faced persecution simply because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual.”

Same-sex attraction was a deeply taboo topic at the time; the word “homosexuality” would not even exist for another two years, when it was coined by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny. So the ideas in Ulrichs’s speech — that such attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else — were revolutionary.

His remarks preceded by more than 100 years the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, which are widely seen as the start of the modern L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement.

They helped inspire the rise of the world’s first gay rights movement, 30 years later in Berlin.

They foreshadowed the imposition of a sodomy law across the German Empire that would later be used by the Nazis to target gay men, thousands of whom were killed in concentration camps.

Although overlooked they made history: Ulrichs is believed to have been the first person to publicly “come out,” in the modern sense of the term.

“I think it is reasonable to describe him as the first gay person to publicly out himself,” Robert Beachy said in an interview. “There is nothing comparable in the historical record. There is just nothing else like this out there.”

His speech was also deeply unwelcome at the 1867 meeting, where the audience erupted in shouts of “Stop!” and “Crucify!” that ultimately forced Ulrichs off the stage.

For much of Ulrichs’s life, same-sex relations were widely seen as a pathology or as a sin to which any person could succumb if seized by wickedness. These views still exist in some parts of the world.

Ulrichs helped forge the concepts of gay people as a distinct group and of sexual identity as an innate human characteristic in a series of pamphlets he wrote from 1864 to 1879 — at first under a pseudonym, but under his own name after he gave his speech at the 1867 conference.

“By publishing these writings I have initiated a scientific discussion based on facts,” he wrote in a letter published in 1864 in Deutsche Allgemeine, a pan-German newspaper.

NYTimes.com by Liam Stack, July 1, 2020

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Overlooked No More: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneering Gay Activist appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Korean Adoptee Wins Landmark Case in Search for Birth Parents

Korean adoptee

In the first verdict of its kind, a South Korean court has ruled that Kara Bos, an American who is a Korean adoptee, is a daughter of an 85-year-old man in Seoul.

A court in Seoul ruled Friday that a Korean adoptee, adopted by an American couple almost four decades ago must be recognized as a daughter of an 85-year-old South Korean man, providing hope for the thousands of Korean-born adoptees who want to know the identities of their birth parents.adopted kids, adoption new york, new york adoption, new york state adoption

On Nov. 18, exactly 36 years after she was found abandoned in a parking lot in a city in central South Korea, Kara Bos, now an American citizen, filed her paternity lawsuit, the first in South Korea by an overseas adoptee. After winning the lawsuit, Ms. Bos now hopes to confront her father to ask him who her mother was.

Ms. Bos was flown to the United States 10 months after she was found abandoned, becoming one of thousands of South Korean babies and toddlers shipped annually out of their birth country for overseas adoption in the 1970s and ’80s.

In recent years, Ms. Bos has been making trips to South Korea in search of her birth mother. She wanted to meet her biological father not only to press him on her mother’s identity, but to find out why she was abandoned. But three women she believed to be her half sisters have blocked her from meeting the elderly man, claiming that she was not family. As a last resort, she filed the paternity lawsuit.

“Because of the lawsuit, I actually now have a right to register as his daughter,” Ms. Bos told reporters outside the Seoul Family Court following its ruling on Friday. The ruling followed DNA test results that showed a 99.9981 percent probability that the man and Ms. Bos were father and daughter.

Ms. Bos flew from Amsterdam to attend the court ruling on Friday. She has lived in Amsterdam since 2009 with her Dutch husband, a son and a daughter, running a drowning-prevention program for children.

If she is included in his father’s family registry, Ms. Bos by South Korean law will become entitled to split his inheritance with her other siblings. And her half sisters cannot stop her from meeting her father.

nytimes.com, June 12, 2020 by Choe Sang-Hun

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Korean Adoptee Wins Landmark Case in Search for Birth Parents appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Planned Parenthood – In a divorce, who gets custody of the embryos?

divorce embryos

In a divorce, who gets custody of the embryos?

In a divorce, who gets the embryos? In the summer of 2014, a newly minted Phoenix lawyer named Ruby Torres had a whirlwind few weeks that would end up determining the course of her life. After being diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer in the late spring, Torres, then 33, met with a fertility specialist in early July to see if she could preserve her ability to have children before chemotherapy-induced menopause. She was told she had just one chance—just one fertility cycle—to extract eggs ahead of her urgently needed treatment.divorce embryos

At the time, egg freezing was an iffy science; even after the advent of a flash-freezing process called vitrification, many unfertilized frozen eggs never survived the thawing process. Torres was advised to freeze embryos instead. Which meant she needed to find sperm. Immediately.

She had been dating a man named John Terrell for several years. They had a “good relationship”—at least in her eyes. Terrell initially declined to be Torres’ sperm donor (jacking off into a cup at a doctor’s office didn’t appeal to him, she recalled), but he eventually agreed after he learned that Torres’ ex-boyfriend had volunteered first. On a Friday in July, they signed a contract at a fertility clinic, which said that neither of them could use the embryos without the other’s consent. At lunch a few days later, they made the “rash decision” to get married. At the Bloom Reproductive Institute in Scottsdale soon after, Torres’ eggs were extracted and they made seven embryos together.

“I was happy that he had changed his mind,” Torres told me on the phone in February. “He was the man I was in love with. He was the one I wanted to be with and wanted to be the father of my children.”

In a divorce, who gets the embryos? Fast-forward two years later: The couple’s relationship had collapsed. The split was not amicable. According to Torres, the tail end was marred by infidelity and domestic violence (a charge that Terrell denies). Even though she remembers Terrell verbally giving her the embryos, the fate of their genetic material became the center of their divorce trial in family court. The judge eventually ruled against Torres, deciding that they must be donated to a third party. When Torres appealed, the court came down in her favor, ruling that her right to procreate outweighed her ex-husband’s desire not to. Then Terrell appealed the decision to the Arizona Supreme Court, which reversed the appeals court decision in late January: Torres cannot use the embryos without the consent of her ex-husband, and must donate them instead. Her hopes of having a biological child were permanently crushed.

Torres sees this as a simple issue, the right to have a baby: By denying her ownership of her embryos, she said, “you are taking my child from me.”

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is through Terrell’s eyes: He believes his right not to become a parent trumps her desire to become one. His relationship with Torres was never serious, he claimed; they only dated “on and off.” According to family court testimony and a March phone call I had with his lead counsel at the Arizona Supreme Court, Eric M. Fraser, he married Torres to give her health insurance. He provided the sperm not because he saw a future with her, but because it was the “honorable thing,” especially since her cancer diagnosis seemed like “basically a death sentence.”

By the time their relationship ended, Fraser told me, Terrell was sure he did not want to create a baby with Torres. There was “no realistic way” he could have stayed out of that child’s life; they had overlapping friends and lived in a small community where everyone knew each other. Plus, the courts could not waive child support responsibility. No matter how many times Torres requested a preemptive child support waiver for Terrell in the event that she used the embryos—and she did request that—there was no way he could be off the hook for payments in case she died or got sick or went to jail. Unlike sperm donation or many adoptions, this wasn’t anonymous. Everyone would know he was the father.

According to estimates by reproductive endocrinologists, there may be about a million frozen embryos in the United States. There have been court battles over the fate of frozen embryos since the 1990s. But if the last few years are any indication, many more will become mired in divorce court. Torres and Terrell’s case is one of a handful of similar ones that have continued to pop up around the country, all involving the fate of embryos created by a couple who were once together and now are not. Many of them hinge on whether the right to be a parent is more important than the right not to be. There have been judges in Connecticut, MassachusettsTennesseeNew Jersey, and California who were swayed by arguments similar to Fraser’s, and therefore ruled against the spouse seeking to use the embryos. Most publicly, last October a judge in Louisiana dismissed a lawsuit filed against the actor Sofia Vergara by her ex-fiancé, Nick Loeb, for possession of their embryos. These cases sometimes go the other way: Courts in Illinois and Pennsylvania awarded embryos to women because they had no other chance of having a biological child. Legal experts suspect that one of these embryo cases will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, having huge implications for abortion, stem cell research, and in vitro fertilization.

vice.com, June 1, 2020 by Nona Willis Aronowitz

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Planned Parenthood – In a divorce, who gets custody of the embryos? appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

How Pixar’s ‘Out’ tells a universal gay story

Pixar's Out

Pixar’s OUT – Cartoons have always been queer — if you knew where to look, says animator Steven Clay Hunter.

“Just think about the number of times Bugs Bunny was in drag,” Hunter jokes.

He has a point. As a kid, I was always looking for queer signals between the lines in cartoons. I found them in places ranging from the same-sex marriage dynamic between chipmunks Chip and Dale to the lesbian-empowerment undertones in “Josie and the Pussycats.” Most of the time I had to search very hard.

“That was all about subtext then,” Hunter says. “Now, it’s on the surface.”

The 51-year-old animator made a gay coming-out story the core of “Out,” a nine-minute Pixar Sparkshorts film that is the first by the studio to feature an openly gay main character and story line. Pixar previously included a character voiced by queer actor Lena Waithe in 2020’s “Onward” who mentions her girlfriend in a scene, and there was a blink-and-you-miss-it possible lesbian couple in 2016’s “Finding Dory.” But “Out,” released May 22 on Disney Plus, quickly became a much-discussed topic in the LGBTQ community because we had never seen anything like it intended for a mainstream audience.

“I wanted to make something my 7-year-old self could look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s me,’ and not play those guessing games,” says Hunter, “to not have to fill in the blanks in your head.”

Datebook.com, by Tony Bravo May 30, 2020

Click here to read the entire article.

The post How Pixar’s ‘Out’ tells a universal gay story appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Anderson Cooper Welcomes Baby Boy Via Surrogate: ‘I Am Beyond Happy’

Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper is a dad — surprise!

Anderson Cooper, the longtime news anchor, 52, revealed the happy news on Instagram Thursday alongside a slideshow of photos of his son, Wyatt Morgan Cooper.Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper welcomed Wyatt — who is named after the journalist’s father — on Monday via surrogate, he said. The host also revealed his big news on his show Anderson Cooper 360°.

Wyatt weighed 7.2 lbs. at birth, “and he is sweet, and soft, and healthy and I am beyond happy,” the proud new dad said in his emotional announcement on CNN

“He is named after my father, who died when I was ten,” Cooper explained. “I hope I can be as good a dad as he was. My son’s middle name is Morgan. It’s a family name on my mom’s side. I know my mom and dad liked the name morgan because I recently found a list they made 52 years ago when they were trying to think of names for me. Wyatt Morgan Cooper. My son.”

“As a gay kid, I never thought it would be possible to have a child, and I’m grateful for all those who have paved the way, and for the doctors and nurses and everyone involved in my son’s birth,” he wrote. “Most of all, I am grateful to a remarkable surrogate who carried Wyatt, and watched over him lovingly, and tenderly, and gave birth to him.”

Cooper shared that he never thought fatherhood would be a possibility for him while he was growing up.

People.com, by Ashley Boucher, April 30, 2020

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Anderson Cooper Welcomes Baby Boy Via Surrogate: ‘I Am Beyond Happy’ appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Phyllis Lyon, on Right, Lesbian Activist and Gay Marriage Trailblazer, Dies at 95

When Phyllis Lyon married her partner of 55 years in 2008, they formed the first legal gay union in California.

Phyllis Lyon, who when she married her partner, Del Martin, in 2008 became part of the first legal gay union in California, died on Thursday at her home in San Francisco. She was 95.

Her sister, Patricia Lyon, confirmed the death.

Phyllis Lyon

Phyllis Lyon on the left with life long partner Del Martin

It was not their first wedding. In 2004, despite state and federal bans on same-sex marriage, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Ms. Lyon and Ms. Martin were the first to receive one, but that union would be short-lived. The California Supreme Court invalidated their marriage a month later, arguing that the mayor had exceeded his legal authority.

Four years later, the same court declared same-sex marriages legal and Mr. Newsom invited the couple back as the first to be married under the new ruling. Ms. Martin died shortly after.

“I am devastated,” Ms. Lyon said following her wife’s death. “But I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed.”

The mauve and turquoise-blue suits that the couple wore to their weddings are in the permanent collection of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

Mr. Newsom, who is now the governor of California, said on Twitter: “Phyllis — it was the honor of a lifetime to marry you & Del. Your courage changed the course of history.”

Phyllis Ann Lyon was born on Nov. 10, 1924, in Tulsa, Okla. to William Ranft Lyon, who was a salesman, and Lorena Belle (Ferguson) Lyon, who was a homemaker. The family moved to Sacramento, Calif., in the early 1940s.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946 with a degree in journalism, Ms. Lyon worked as a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record in Chico, Calif. She moved to Seattle in 1949 to work at a construction trade journal, where Ms. Martin was also employed. They began dating and, on Valentine’s Day in 1953, moved in together in San Francisco.

Click here to read the entire article.

The post Phyllis Lyon, on Right, Lesbian Activist and Gay Marriage Trailblazer, Dies at 95 appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

I Just Wanted a Baby, But Surrogacy Gave Me So Much More

compassionate surrogacy

When I started telling people I was having a baby with a gestational surrogate, the responses ranged from awkwardly supportive to just awkward.

A woman at a party congratulated me, praised me for being so clever, so ahead of the times. “Ugh, you’re brilliant,” she told me. I’d have someone else do the dirty work of motherhood for me. Genius.compassionate surrogacy

Others wanted me to know I was in good company: Kim Kardashian had just been through the process. So had Gabrielle Union. And Andy Cohen. And now me!

My traditional Indian mother, fiercely private and surprisingly sneaky, had another idea. She thought it might be better if we made up a story that the baby was adopted. “People aren’t going to understand this,” she said.

Misguided, to be sure, but my mother (as usual) had a point: There is still an incredible amount of secrecy around the gestational surrogacy process. And wherever there is silence, stigma isn’t far behind. It’s for rich people, it’s immoral, it’s dystopian, it’s exploitative…

I know that these are just a few of the thoughts swirling in people’s heads when I tell them that this month a woman named Amber in Kansas will deliver my son. For me, and for countless other families who struggle with fertility, surrogacy isn’t a luxury or shortcut: It’s the light at the end of a very long and lonely tunnel.

The first time I got pregnant, I had just started running for Public Advocate in New York City. It was unexpected, but welcome news. My husband, Nihal, and I were so excited. We told family and friends with abandon (12-week rule be damned!). We changed our destination wedding date so I wouldn’t have to travel in the third trimester. That was almost eight years ago, and we were blissfully, naively unaware of what was ahead of us.

I remember fantasizing about being pregnant while running for office. I imagined how I would march my big fat, swollen feet all over the five boroughs knocking on doors. I would be a symbol of feminine power on the campaign trail: a knocked-up Rosie the Riveter. My baby would be a born public servant, just like me.

When we went to the doctor for our first appointment and saw the solemn look on her face, we didn’t understand. We were no strangers to failure. I had publicly bombed a race for Congress two years before. Nihal, an entrepreneur, had learned resilience from running start-ups. But this was supposed to be easy. Isn’t this what we were born to do? We were shocked that something like this could happen, that we could lose our baby.

Two nights later I put on a brave face and got on stage to introduce President Obama at a fundraiser. It should have been the best night of my life, but I was dying inside, literally, the entire time.

Six months later I miscarried again, hours before I was slated to give a huge pitch for my nonprofit to the “who’s who” of New York City. My job was to be dazzling. I felt so much rage knowing it was easier to betray myself and go through the motions than to admit why I couldn’t.

Vogue.com by Resma Saujani, January 24, 2020

Click here to read the entire article.

The post I Just Wanted a Baby, But Surrogacy Gave Me So Much More appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Kindergartner Invites His Entire Class to His Adoption Hearing

parent adoption, co parent adoption, 2nd parent adoption, second parent adoptions, gay parent adoption, second parent adoption states

Nearly two dozen kindergartners gave testimonials in a Michigan courtroom about how much they loved the soon-to-be-adopted boy.

The 5-year-old boy, wearing a blue vest and a maroon bow tie, sat on a swivel chair in front of a judge as his kindergarten classmates filled two rows of courtroom seats behind him. The students held rulers adorned with paper hearts — the theme being “love rules.”Open Adoption

The boy, Michael Clark Jr., was one of 36 children to be adopted on Thursday during Kent County’s 23rd annual adoption day in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Twenty-one kindergartners and several parents, teachers and school administrators attended Michael’s hearing, said Carlye Allen, the principal of Wealthy Elementary School, where Michael is a student.

He invited his teacher and classmates to the ceremony because, he said, he wanted his whole family to be there on his special day, Ms. Allen said.

Judge Patricia Gardner, the presiding judge of the 17th Circuit Court’s family division and founder of the county’s adoption day, asked all the people in the courtroom to stand up and say what they loved or appreciated about Michael, Ms. Allen said.

One boy declared, “Michael is my best friend.”

Another child stood and said, “I love Michael.”

David Eaton, Michael’s adoptive father, said he started tearing up listening to the children’s testimonials. Michael seemed touched too, though it was hard to tell with a child that age, he said.

“He was in his swivel chair up front, swiveling around and facing his classmates,” Mr. Eaton said. “He felt like a king of a castle on that day, just loving it.”

After the official documents were signed, the kindergartners waved their handmade heart signs in the air. They were bumping in their seats with excitement, and all the adults were “extremely emotional,” Ms. Allen said.

“I think he understands that this means he has a permanent home now,” Mr. Eaton said. “He’s not going to be taken away.”

NYTimes.com by Maria Padilla, December 7, 2019

Click here to read the entire article.

 

The post Kindergartner Invites His Entire Class to His Adoption Hearing appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families