Chad & David's Journey to Fatherhood

[SherryT]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...031,full.story

FATHERS IN THE MAKING
Ready to be dads, but they're going to need help
For a baby of their own, David and Chad will have to draw on science, the law, their families -- and most of all, each other.
By Kevin Sack, TIMES STAFF WRITER
October 29, 2006

FAIRFAX, Va. — Chad Hodge liked #694. She was a 21-year-old college student, 5-feet-5, 135 pounds, with straight brown hair, blue eyes and a narrow nose. She had won 16 awards in high school for academics and music, and scored a 1210 on the SAT. She was outgoing, intelligent, responsible and friendly, or at least she said she was.

Chad wanted her to be the mother of his children.

But David Craig, Chad's partner of seven years, had his heart set on #685. She was a teacher, 23, 5-feet-2, with wavy blond hair and light blue eyes. She wore a size 0. She had been a varsity tennis player in high school, a ballerina and a classical pianist.

For two hours on that day in early 2004, Chad and David sat in a small office at Genetics & IVF Institute, a fertility clinic in northern Virginia, and sifted through the dossiers of prospective egg donors. It felt more like catalog shopping than human reproduction.

The previous fall, they had decided to have a child through a gestational surrogacy arrangement. They would pay one woman to provide her eggs and then, after fertilizing them in vitro with their sperm, pay another woman to carry the resulting embryos to term.

It was a quest that would take them to the frontiers of medicine, bioethics, technology and the law, as well as to the front lines of the culture wars.

They had considered adoption, but Chad, 33, and David, 35, wanted to participate more fully in the process of bringing a child into the world. They longed to see the first ultrasonic images of a tiny pumping heart and even to provide coaching in the maternity ward, just like straight fathers.

They also hoped to exert some control over their child's genetic makeup, and to create a biological link across the generations. Over the last decade, science and society had conspired to make it all possible.

Rather than creating a life in the privacy of a bedroom, Chad and David would plot this conception in law offices, doctors' suites and Internet chat rooms. It would take a village to manufacture their child.

A weak link at any point — the egg donor, the surrogate, the lawyers, doctors or embryologists — could mean emotional devastation, at considerable expense. Chad and David were braced to spend upwards of $100,000, much of it borrowed, with no assurance of success. In the young field of in vitro fertilization, which had produced its first baby only in 1978, heartbreak often preceded happiness.

Hoping to keep the genetics within their families, Chad and David had first approached their sisters about donating eggs. But Chad's sister and her husband had not wanted to interrupt their own baby-making timetable. And tests suggested that David's 37-year-old sister, at three years past the usual age limit for egg donors, might be a risky bet.

That left few options but to shop the open market for half of the genetic material that would determine their child's appearance, aptitude and health. All they would have to go on would be the responses to a 10-page questionnaire, a couple of pictures and a brief audiotape.

The egg donors in the clinic's database commanded a $5,000 fee, the maximum recommended by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Because state laws barred the sale of human tissue, contracts would assert that the donor was being paid not for her eggs, but for her time and trouble, including weeks of daily hormone injections.

The parties would remain anonymous to each other, minimizing any risk that the egg donor might someday stake a claim to the child. Though that anonymity would afford Chad and David a measure of protection, it also meant there would be little way to verify the donor's representations, from her genetic history to her SAT scores.

David shook his head as he turned the pages. "This is so 'Twilight Zone,' " he said. "I mean, these are people. This isn't what shirt am I going to buy."

"We're not doing this because we want to," Chad said. "Our options are limited."

In their profiles, egg donors had been asked to describe every imaginable trait, down to the contour of their hairlines (straight, slight curve, or widow's peak) and the flare of their nostrils (small, average or wide). Medical histories, from heart disease to handedness, were required going back three generations. Did anyone in the family have clubfoot? How about psoriasis? The donors were even asked their favorite colors, movies and songs.

Chad and David had ideas about what they wanted. For weeks, they had evaluated virtually any woman who entered their field of view. One night, when David met friends at a Georgetown bar, a striking woman with olive skin and dark eyes asked him to dance. When he later told Chad how flattering it had been, Chad could only ask: "Do you think she would be our egg donor?"

If possible, Chad and David wanted their child to resemble them — white, with blue or green eyes and blond or light brown hair — so that regardless of which was the biological father, the child might seem a mixture of both. They flipped past the portfolios of black and Asian women, and crossed off anyone with a family history of significant genetic disease.

Among those remaining, they looked for educational achievement and an outgoing personality. They scribbled notes on yellow Post-its about whether the women had donated previously and whether a pregnancy had resulted.

Each file included a baby picture. Once Chad and David narrowed their choices to six, they were allowed to view adult photographs. They didn't want to consider appearance at the exclusion of all else, but they couldn't deny, in the privacy of that room, that it mattered.

"You can't ignore it," David said. "I mean, who wants an ugly child?"

"David, some people would be happy with that," Chad scolded.

"But I mean, if you get to pick, what would be the best-case scenario? We're not a normal couple, so, yeah, we would be happy with anything we get. But when you get to choose … "

It was the adult photo that sealed the deal for #685. They listed her first, followed by #694 and #662.

The clinic then informed them that all three donors had a waiting list. It could be months before any of their choices became available.

(Continued on next post)

[SherryT]

Yearning for fatherhood

When Chad came of age and grudgingly accepted that he wasn't like other boys in his south Georgia town, one regret stood out among others: In the 1980s, it was all but inconceivable that homosexual couples could have children. Not only was it biologically implausible, but to folks in Valdosta the very notion would have seemed as appropriate as wearing a bathrobe to the First Baptist Church.

Slightly built and short for his age, Chad had always had a way with children. He doted on his younger sister, braiding her hair and playing with her Barbies. His mother's friends competed for his baby-sitting services, impressed that he organized parties for their kids when simply tucking them in would have sufficed. He had always assumed he would have children of his own.

"It was a life I had always been told I would have," Chad said. "I loved being around kids. I loved it. And I didn't think I could have kids at all, unless I pretended I was straight and got married, just for the sake of having kids."

Once he came out, while attending the University of Georgia, his mother wrote him a series of tormented letters. She had convinced herself that he would die of AIDS, and that he would burn in ****. She told him it was as if he had died.

Debbie Young, who had divorced Chad's father when he was 6, now says she didn't mean that literally. "But my expectations, or what I wanted — him being married and having a family — that had died," she said. "I had to go back and rebuild something else. And I really didn't have an easy time of it until he met David."

Chad was introduced to David Craig, a gregarious and self-possessed North Carolinian, on April 25, 1997, at a gay bar in Atlanta. Both were living there at the time, with Chad working as a software engineer and David selling carpet while trying to build an interior design business.

They took to the dance floor that night as if in a bubble, then moved to the parking lot for a more private conversation. When Chad's roommate interrupted to announce he was ready to leave, David tossed him a pack of cigarettes. "Here," he said, "go somewhere and smoke these." The roommate complied.

Five years later, turned out in tuxedos and surrounded by beaming relatives, the two men pledged their devotion to each other in a civil union ceremony at an elegant resort in Vermont.

By the time they met, Chad had learned that lesbians — and a smaller number of gay men — were starting to adopt. "Maybe I could do that," he thought, and shared his hopes with David.

But for gay men, adopting domestically often meant accepting the most traumatized children available. International adoptions often required trips to Asia or Latin America, mounds of intrusive paperwork, and a measure of deceit about sexual orientation. Chad and David felt strongly that the process of having a child should publicly affirm their love for each other, not closet it.

Chad was intrigued, therefore, when he discovered surrogacy on the Internet. He liked that creating their own child would give them more control. They could handpick their children's DNA and insist on high standards of prenatal care. They could aim for twins by transferring more than one embryo, perhaps completing their family in a single transaction.

Chad also learned that the process was prohibitively expensive, almost twice as much as the typical adoption. It required carefully drawn contracts to guarantee that neither the egg donor nor the surrogate could claim parental rights. After birth, the biological father's partner would have to petition the courts for shared parental rights through a filing known as a second-parent adoption.

"You have to really want a baby very badly to do it this way," Chad said.

His first challenge would be convincing David to join him.

David had long held a theoretical interest in fatherhood. Like Chad, his parents had divorced when he was young and he had been raised primarily by his mother. His father, an insurance salesman who traveled frequently, tended to cancel visitation dates at the last minute.

Once David accepted that he was gay, he realized he would never have the chance to be the kind of father he wished he'd had himself.

"It was sad, but the only option was to live a lie," he said. "And I kind of went back and forth. Could I be abstinent? Could I change? If somebody said I could take a pill that would make me straight, would I? Those first couple of years I would have taken a whole bottle."

Yet David felt he could live without children if he had to, finding contentment in work and travel and relationships. And belongings.

By the time he was a teenager, David had developed an eye for fine things and an acquisitive streak that bordered on conspicuous consumption. Even then, his tastes ran to designer labels and rich fabrics, the forebears of the Armani suits and cashmere coats that would later line his closet. His best friend in high school, Evin Somerstein, recalled that while he wanted an Atari video game for his 16th birthday, "David wanted an armoire."

David's materialism made friends roll their eyes. But beneath the Neiman Marcus veneer they found a razor intellect, a generous heart, an optimistic spirit, and an almost effortless charm. By the time David came to grips with his sexuality, a lacerating tongue had mellowed into a quick and often wickedly entertaining wit.

From the outset, Chad and David seemed perfect complements. David grounded Chad, and made him more secure. Chad softened David, and made him more sensitive.

Straight friends found their emerging relationship a revelation. "It was the first time they realized that homosexuality was not just about sex," Somerstein said, "that these were two guys who loved each other."

Assisted reproduction

It wasn't until Chad and David went to couples counseling in 2001 that David revealed he had serious reservations about being a parent. He liked their life as it was, he said, and he wasn't convinced he was the nurturing kind.

He worried that having two good fathers might, in the end, be just as unfair as having one inadequate one. And he questioned the wisdom of doing this in the South. Would their children get picked on? Would they forever resent their gay fathers?

"We want the life experience of having kids," he told Chad, "but are we going to deny them the life experience of having a mother?"

Chad agreed that their children would have a different upbringing. "But will it be bad, or will they suffer because of it?" he asked. "I think absolutely not." He let David know how important this was to him. "Your relationship with a child is unlike anything you'll ever have with any other person," he said. "I just can't imagine dying without having the experience."

The therapist told David that the research to date had found little evidence that children of gay parents faced particular adjustment problems. In their case, she said, there would be loving grandmothers and aunts to serve as female role models.

David's concerns gradually melted away. "I just decided they could do a **** of a lot worse," he said. "A lot of people in much worse environments raise children and they don't all turn out to be ax murderers."

Chad knew their motives might be seen as self-indulgent. But that didn't make them bad people, he argued, or devalue the love they would give their children.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of unwanted children conceived each year by straight couples, theirs would be the product of planning and intent. Now that the technology existed, they asked themselves, why shouldn't gay men have the same right as straight people to produce a genetic heir? All they lacked were eggs and a womb. As it turned out, they could buy the first and lease the second.

Their financial condition improved markedly when Chad took a series of high-paying jobs related to a military software contract in 2002 and 2003, prompting them to move to Washington, D.C. David decided to make a go of it as a full-time designer.

They settled in to an elegant center-hall colonial in northwest Washington. As David appointed the house with European antiques, Chad began stacking textbooks about in vitro fertilization on his bedside table. He became a regular reader of Surrogate Mothers Online, a website with a lively forum for gay and lesbian families. He kept the television tuned to the Discovery Health channel for shows like "Babies: Special Delivery."

Chad learned that the $3-billion fertility industry now accounted for 1 of every 100 births in America. The number of assisted reproductive technology cycles performed in the U.S. had more than doubled since 1995, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Infertile heterosexual couples had been using surrogates since shortly after England's Louise Brown became the world's first test-tube baby in 1978. Most of the early pregnancies were so-called "traditional surrogacies," in which a woman, using her own eggs, was inseminated and delivered a baby on behalf of the biological father and his wife.

But a series of sensational custody battles, starting with the 1988 Baby M case in New Jersey, exposed the legal risks inherent when the carrier was also the genetic mother. That led many lawyers to encourage their clients to pursue gestational surrogacy instead.

In those arrangements, the egg donor would never have a chance to bond with the child in utero. Indeed, the donor and the parents need never even know each other's names. The surrogate, meanwhile, could make no claim of a biological relationship with the child she had carried.

There were still substantial obstacles for gay men. More than half of all fertility clinics refused to take them as patients, according to a recent study, though the vast majority did accept lesbians. Four states — Florida, Michigan, Mississippi and Utah — either explicitly or effectively banned adoption by gay couples, and similar proposals were under consideration elsewhere.

In most states, however, surrogacy arrangements involving gays existed in a legal Wild West where reproductive technology was rapidly outpacing the law. There were few definitive court rulings establishing parental rights. Judicial precedents varied not only state to state, but county to county. Time and again, judges had been asked to make Solomonic custody decisions, often redefining parenthood in the process.

There is no census of how many children gay men have produced this way. But surrogacy businesses around the country report that their gay clientele has grown exponentially over the last five years.

One of them, Los Angeles-based Growing Generations, is celebrating its 10th anniversary as the first agency dedicated exclusively to matching gays and lesbians with egg donors and surrogates. The firm, which attracts 15 to 20 new clients a month, has engineered the delivery of more than 300 babies, at prices that can reach $120,000, according to Stuart Miller, its chief executive. Increasingly, he said, the parents of gay men are helping to foot the bill, investing in grandchildren they'd assumed they would never have.

(Continued on next post)

[SherryT]

Finding a surrogate

One of those who recognized the market potential of gay men and surrogacy was Diane S. Hinson, a Harvard-educated lawyer in northern Virginia. When Hinson founded Creative Family Connections in 2002 as a one-stop shop for assisted reproduction, she promoted her services assiduously to gay men.

She filled her brochures with pictures of men bottle-feeding babies and walking their children to school, and highlighted the firm's founding principle that "everyone can build a family." Her firm specialized in customized searches for egg donors and surrogates, but also monitored medical procedures and crafted contracts to ensure that "the most important thing you have ever created — your child — is fully protected."

Late in 2003, Chad and David hired Hinson's firm to help them navigate the surrogacy process. She warned them it would feel at times like a roller-coaster ride, and that it would not be cheap. The going rate for a surrogate was $20,000 to carry a singleton, and $5,000 more for twins. Legal fees, doctor bills and fertility drugs would run into the tens of thousands. There also would be incidental expenses, like a $500 maternity clothing allowance for the surrogate.

Throughout the winter and spring of 2004, Hinson and her law partner, Linda C. ReVeal, placed a series of classified ads in weekly newspapers that circulated in suburban Maryland.

"Surrogate Needed: Help Us Start a Family," read the headline. "We have been a devoted couple for seven years and now we're ready to start a family. But we need a surrogate to carry our baby…. Could you be that special person? If you are in excellent health, not a smoker or drug user, and have completed your family, call our attorney. COMPENSATION $20,000 + ALL EXPENSES."

The traits Chad and David wanted in a surrogate were different from those they sought in an egg donor. Appearance and genetic background would count for little. What mattered most — along with good health and a proven ability to bear children — would be stability, reliability, and compatibility on an array of highly charged issues.

Chad and David were acutely aware that once a surrogate got pregnant with their child, her body was hers to control. They could not force her to selectively reduce in the event she carried multiple fetuses. They could not force her to abort if tests detected a terrible abnormality. It was important, therefore, to make their views plain from the start, to find a surrogate who would defer to their wishes, and to write their agreement into a contract.

Responding to a questionnaire from Hinson, Chad and David wrote that they "would love to have twins" and "would happily accept triplets." They said they would "accept fetal reduction for triplets at the surrogate's discretion," but would "ask for fetal reduction for any amount greater than three."

As for abortion, they wrote: "If the pregnancy became life-threatening for the surrogate, we would consider therapeutic abortion. We would request to terminate the pregnancy if there was a significant possibility that the baby would not survive the birth or would suffer significantly after the birth because of a genetic abnormality."

The questionnaire asked whether they preferred one gender over the other, because some clinics employed sperm-sorting techniques that could increase the odds. "We would be happy with either a boy or a girl," they answered, "or both."

Hinson and ReVeal targeted Maryland for their search because the state had no laws regulating surrogacy. For several years, judges in friendly jurisdictions like Baltimore had been granting second-parent adoptions to non-biological parents in gay relationships. (Surrogacy for pay was illegal in the District of Columbia, where Chad and David lived, and in several other states.)

When their first ad did not generate much response, Hinson and ReVeal tweaked the copy, with one version imploring: "HELP US BECOME DADS." Some surrogates, they had learned, preferred working with gay men rather than infertile women, who might carry the baggage of past failures. Womb envy, it was called.

The lawyers never knew quite what to expect when they visited the homes of the women who responded to their ads. While ReVeal sized up a prospect's reliability to keep appointments and take medications, Hinson would excuse herself to the restroom, surreptitiously inspecting it for grime and other signs of dereliction.

"Are you prepared for this commitment?" ReVeal would ask. "This is more important for these parents than anything they've ever done. You're changing somebody's life profoundly, fundamentally, for good."

Some candidates lost interest; others were quickly jettisoned for failing a criminal background check or for being obese, a risk factor for pregnancy complications. In some cases, religious views might make it difficult to reach agreements on abortion, or messy personal lives might pose other concerns.

"We try to avoid situations that are too complicated," ReVeal explained. "It's always a red flag if there's three or four or five children by different fathers. It's not a moral judgment. There are just too many details."

In checking out one respondent to the ad for Chad and David, Hinson and ReVeal found themselves on a front porch in a tough Baltimore neighborhood. There was a large poster of a glowering gun barrel in the window. "If you come here tonight," it warned, "you won't be here tomorrow morning!" After repeated knocking, a woman came to the door with a baby and asked to reschedule because she had spent the night in the emergency room. They told her thanks, but no thanks.

A biological question

At Hinson's request, Chad and David had been working diligently on a "Dear Potential Surrogate" letter. When candidates responded to her advertisements, she liked to reel them in with a direct appeal from the intended parents.

They wrote from the heart about their Southern upbringings, their contrasting personalities, their common values. They described Chad as "a loving person who expresses himself more softly and empathetically," and David as "a firestorm of confidence and humor, tempered with a trusting soul and an honest heart."

"Through grace we found each other and have forged a wonderful life together," they wrote, "but the challenge of building a family still stands before us…. We will make good parents because we have abundant love and dedication ready to give our child. We have a real view of the world and we know there will be good times, great times, and hard times all wrapped up into the raising of a child. We want the fullness of the experience."

As Hinson and ReVeal screened respondents, Chad and David made other preparations for parenthood. They signed up for a "Maybe Baby" class for gay men. Chad filed papers to take David's surname, despite being the last male Hodge in his line. They opened negotiations over first names, jotting down dozens of combinations.

They also began tackling a more awkward decision: Which of them would be the genetic contributor?

Both had donated sperm — David in November, when it seemed that Chad's sister might be their egg donor, and Chad in December, when it seemed that the donor might be David's sister. Their samples remained frozen at the Fairfax Cryobank.

In their earliest discussions, Chad had volunteered David for the job. "You're cuter," he had said. "You don't wear glasses and you come from a real creative family."

But the two men also had another imperative. Chad and David wanted to do anything they could to make sure that both fathers would be viewed equally as parents. And they thought that might only be feasible if they kept the identity of the biological father a mystery.

Chad said it didn't really reflect any internal insecurity. "In my heart, I will know that whether or not I am the biological contributor to these children, I will be a complete and whole parent," he said. "I can say to them without a doubt that they would not be here if it weren't for my efforts to create them."

The issue had more to do with how they would be perceived by a world that might not know what to make of their family. They knew that friends and strangers would ask who the father was, and that they would find the question offensive.

In particular, they did not want one of their families to feel more invested than the other because of genetics. They decided the safest course would be to keep the secret even from themselves.

"In the ambiguity of paternity, I think there's an implication of equality," Chad said. "We'll both equally be fathers in the eyes of whoever we're talking to because we can't give them a definitive answer."

"The best answer," David said, "would be, 'Well, your guess is as good as ours.' "

David reasoned that in an ideal world they would both have an equal chance at being the biological contributor. Maybe their sperm could be mixed before fertilization. Clinics in California had been doing that.

Hinson had heard of yet another approach, also from California, known as dual embryo transfer. Egg donors, after being shot full of hormones, typically produced 10 to 20 eggs rather than one. If they fertilized half the eggs with Chad's sperm and half with David's, and kept the batches separate, they could transfer one embryo from each. They might get twins, each with the same genetic mother and a different biological father. If only one embryo took, paternity would be unknowable without DNA testing.

In late April 2004, the fertility clinic contacted Chad and David to let them know their third-ranked egg donor had become available. Lacking a surrogate, they had to pass — another letdown.

But the next week, they received a flurry of e-mails from Hinson. She and ReVeal had checked out a promising surrogate candidate, a college student from Frederick, Md. Her name was Whitney Cruey, and she was waiting tables while studying to be a teacher. She had responded to an ad for another gay client, but he had already found a surrogate.

Whitney, who had just turned 25, was the single mother of a 2-year-old girl, and thus a proven carrier. After a three-year marital separation, her divorce was nearly final, and she had a boyfriend who supported her interest in surrogacy. Relatives and co-workers described her as determined and responsible, a good mother with a healthy vegetarian lifestyle.

Hinson e-mailed Chad and David that she had sent Whitney their letter. "She said you sound just wonderful and that she would love to help you by carrying your child!" Hinson wrote. "She is very sweet and we think you will be a really good match. She is definitely more like Chad than David, in that she is more on the quiet side."

Studying Whitney's profile, Chad and David sensed they would line up on the major issues. She had written that she would rather not abort in cases of birth defects or multiples, but would defer to the parents. Not only would she be comfortable with their active involvement, she would expect it. After the birth, she would appreciate an occasional card or picture, but would be fine without additional contact.

"As much as this baby might become part of my body, it would not be mine," she wrote.

A few days later, Hinson had other news. She had been getting so many responses to ads for egg donors that she had decided to create a pool for the ones she could not immediately match. If Chad and David wanted to pick from that pool, she could shave a few thousand dollars off her fee.

They asked Hinson to send them profiles.

(Continued on next post)

[SherryT]

The egg hunt

On a Monay morning in November 2003, a pretty young office manager named Jessica had been riding Washington's Metro from the Pentagon station to McPherson Square. As she flipped through the Washington Post Express, a free tabloid for commuters, her eyes fixed on an advertisement: "Help Me Become A Dad: Special Egg Donor Needed." It had been placed by Hinson and ReVeal for a well-to-do gay client named Scott, who was offering $10,000, double the going rate.

Jessica normally didn't pay attention to ads. But on each successive commute that week, she found herself drawn to the illustration of a man tossing a child in the air. It touched her that some man wanted a baby so badly he would offer $10,000 just for a chance. "I've now noticed this ad five days in a row," she told herself. "Maybe I should act on it."

She sent Hinson an e-mail. "Good afternoon. My name is Jessica, and I am a 24 year old professional Caucasion (sic) female. I am in excellent health, as is my family. In fact, several of my family members have lived to be older than 95! I am a petite 5'5, 120 pounds with blond hair and green eyes. I am well educated, intelligent and very athletic … Though I have never donated an egg before, I think helping someone have a child is a wonderful gesture, and would love to help your client produce the child he so longs to have."

Jessica hadn't known for sure that Scott was gay until ReVeal wrote her back. It only mattered to her because her boyfriend was on the conservative side and might be more supportive if she donated for a straight couple.

The lawyers met with her over lunch and liked her instantly. "She is easygoing, humorous and very self-assured," they wrote in their file notes. "She is the sort of person you would hire on the spot in a job interview."

When Scott picked someone else, Jessica wound up in the agency's pool of unmatched donors. It didn't bother her that her fee might be smaller. She made a good living — $60,000 a year — and the money was somewhat incidental.

In May, Hinson sent three egg donor profiles to Chad and David, saving her highest praise for Jessica. The men were impressed that there was virtually no history of disease in her family. David thought her picture made her look a bit like his sister. And when he read that she considered herself a perfectionist, and that her closets were "extremely organized," he felt the beginnings of kinship.

Hinson, assuming the role of 21st century matchmaker, also sent Jessica the letter from Chad and David. It made Jessica appreciate just how dependent they were on others to fulfill their dreams. "Please let them know that I would love to meet them in person," she wrote back.

For clients who were interested, and many were, Creative Family Connections would arrange a semi-anonymous meeting — first names only — between intended parents and a prospective egg donor. In an arrangement where so much depended on trust, even a fleeting introduction could provide comfort that couldn't be mined from a database.

Hinson set up an early lunch one Thursday at a Thai restaurant, far enough from Jessica's office that she would not be recognized. Chad and David felt excited, but anxious. After a long wait, they might be meeting their children's genetic mother for the first time, and for the last. Would they like her? Would she like them? Chad had already warned David to keep his foot out of his mouth. Please, he begged, no clever asides about how they planned to beat the children.

They were waiting on the sidewalk when they saw her coming, striding toward them in a gray pinstriped pantsuit. The photograph had undersold. Her hair was longer and pulled back, her eyes greener, her smile more radiant, and there was a confidence the camera hadn't captured.

As Hinson made introductions, David couldn't contain himself: "Oh, you're even prettier than your picture." Chad hoped it hadn't sounded like a left-handed compliment.

They asked for a private table. It was awkward getting started. How do you negotiate with a stranger for an egg? There was some chitchat about movies and home repairs. David was talking a mile a minute, as he was prone to do when excited.

Hinson encouraged Jessica to talk about herself. She said she had enjoyed a conventional childhood in Southern California but had been exposed there to many nontraditional families. She talked about coming east for college, and deciding to stay when she landed a job with a national trade association.

She pulled out baby pictures of herself as an adorable towhead. Chad and David asked about personality traits, whether there was mental illness or addiction in her family (no and no), even her favorite foods. Ice cream, she said, and broccoli and lasagna.

As she spoke, David couldn't stop smiling inside. It might as well have been Julia Roberts sitting across the table. "This is so perfect," he thought. "How in the world did this end up happening this way?"

David asked Jessica why she wanted to do this, and she told them about the ad. "I want to help someone," she said. "I've got these eggs. I don't need them. I've taken good care of myself for 25 years. Someone should get the benefit."

David blurted out that Chad's sister had once joked that a woman's unused eggs just got flushed down the toilet anyway. He thought it would get a laugh. Instead, the table grew quiet.

"My feeling about it is very different," Jessica said. "I'm not just giving you this because it's something I'm not going to use. I'm purposefully giving this to someone because I want to help them fulfill the dream of having a family." She was making unwavering eye contact, almost staring them down. "I would never want the child to think that part of their genetics came to be just because somebody didn't need it, or needed money."

Now Jessica had a question for them. They had written in their letter that they felt they had to prove they deserved a child. She didn't understand why.

"Some people think that as gay men we need to justify why we would succeed as parents," David said. "Perhaps our approval of you is perceived to be the more important aspect, but it's also important that you feel good about the couple you're going to help."

"It's not my place to judge whether someone would be a good parent," she said.

"We wouldn't consider it a judgment on your part," David said, "but rather a choice and a willingness to be a biological contributor to the right couple. In the end, you should have the right to decide who receives your gift."

"I'd be happy to help the two of you," she said, smiling.

Jessica had to get back to work. David gave her cab fare, and they shook hands goodbye. The men were giddy all the way home. "She was an absolute gem," David said. "We could never have asked for a better egg."

A team assembled

The next day, Hinson had arranged for them to meet Whitney outside a coffee shop in a Bethesda mall. Whitney would be bringing her daughter, Claudia, and Hinson had coached Chad and David that surrogates sometimes judged potential parents by the way they treated children. They arrived early enough for David to duck into Nordstrom and buy Claudia a stuffed bear.

Chad and David were still buzzing from their blind date with Jessica, and Hinson had to scale back their expectations. Whitney was reserved, and could be tough to draw out. Remember, she said, they were looking for something different here — a carrier, not an egg.

Whitney arrived in a black tank top that exposed the tattoo on her shoulder. As she introduced herself, Chad caught a glimpse of the silver stud in her tongue. Claudia clung to her side, and seemed unsure when David offered her the bear.

At Hinson's urging, Whitney summarized her life in terse snippets — her childhood in an Appalachian coal town, her broken marriage to a Mexican immigrant, her pregnancy by a co-worker at the restaurant. She explained that her flirtation with surrogacy had begun during conversations with her manager, whose wife had miscarried several times. Claudia had brought so much meaning to her life, and she wanted others to experience it.

Whitney wasn't desperate. She cleared $400 or $500 a week at the restaurant, and shared her $860 rent with her boyfriend, Cory. But a $20,000 fee would nearly double her income for the year, and she had student loans to repay. She had heard arguments about surrogacy and class exploitation, from her mother among others. She didn't see it that way. "To an extent, it's like renting your body out," she said, "but it's not like I'm being forced to do so. I'm not in a position where I need that money in order to eat. There probably are people like that, but we live in a capitalist society and this is the way things work."

Hinson guided Chad, David and Whitney through a discussion of the difficult choices they might face.

Whitney seemed relieved by the men's assurances that they would not terminate a pregnancy just because tests revealed Down's syndrome or some other disability. On the other hand, they said, if doctors forecast great suffering and a brief life, they would want to consider abortion. Whitney agreed it should be situational and that she would defer to them. She agreed to carry twins if necessary, and triplets so long as doctors approved.

Whitney did not ask a single question about money. But she repeatedly assured Chad and David she would not get attached to their child.

"I'm looking at it like I'm helping watch someone else's kid for a few months," she said. "I know I'm going to have a connection with this child, but the day it's born that's going to have to change. I'll have nine months to talk myself into it."

Whitney liked the way Chad and David interacted with Claudia, and with each other. Her gut told her they would be loving parents. While it was the money that had turned her head, she could feel herself wanting to be a part of their project.

"They are so committed to this and so excited about it," she told herself, "and it has been so long since I've been excited about anything."

Chad and David didn't think they would ever bond with Whitney the way they had with Jessica. But she seemed sweet and compliant and trustworthy, and that was what mattered most.

Hinson set Jessica and Whitney up for medical and psychological screening. She also began drafting contracts that would regulate virtually every aspect of their lives, from what they could drink to when they could have sex.

After nearly a year's effort, Chad and David had assembled their team. With a little luck, they thought, they could start decorating the nursery within months.

Next: Chad, David and the team try to make a baby.

kevin.sack@latimes.com

[anikkim0915]

I have to admit that I am amazed at the strength those two have. I am a GS and I know I will do this as many times as my IF's want to, but the two of them are so strong to keep going time and time again.

This story is so moving. I am sitting here at my office crying.

[surro2be]

UUGGHHHHH why did it have to end there???? Dang it!!!! Ok I know the story but I still like reading from another point of view!!

[SherryT]

FATHERS IN THE MAKING
Shots, eggs, embryos and a big dose of hope
Chad and David put the process in motion with a donor and surrogate, but much could still go wrong
By Kevin Sack, Times Staff Writer
October 30, 2006

FAIRFAX, Va. — Chad and David Craig fidgeted in the waiting room like expectant fathers, which is, after all, what they were.

Just down the hall, in a sterile surgical suite, a young woman they had met only once had her legs up in stirrups. Dr. Suheil J. Muasher, a fertility specialist, gripped a long silver needle between his right thumb and forefinger and twirled it gently as he guided it through her vaginal wall and into her right ovary.

"It's full of follicles," he said approvingly, glancing at an ultrasound monitor to track the needle's path.

The follicles showed up on the screen as black blobs. Each contained an egg the size of a dust particle. As Muasher punctured the first sac, he stepped on a foot pump and suctioned it until it collapsed and disappeared. Fluid the color of fruit punch streamed through a catheter attached to the needle and into a test tube.

The fluid was spirited into an adjoining lab, decanted into a dish, and examined under high magnification by one of Muasher's embryologists.

"Do you have anything?" the doctor called.

"I have a first egg," his assistant announced. She transmitted an image resembling a star cluster onto a monitor in the operating room. The anesthesiologist, Dr. David C. Yarnall, couldn't resist. "Looks like it's sunny side up," he said.

The date was Oct. 9, 2004, and Chad and David had been awaiting this moment for nearly two years. It was the first significant medical step in their unconventional quest to become fathers, an undertaking that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier.

As gay men trying to produce genetic offspring through a gestational surrogacy arrangement, Chad and David had invested their hopes and their savings in the primacy of technology over biology.

They knew from years of research into assisted reproduction that success was never guaranteed. And their process would have more moving parts than most. They were paying one woman to provide her eggs, and another to carry their artificially inseminated embryos to term. To make it all happen, they had assembled a team of doctors, nurses, embryologists, technicians and lawyers. Things could go wrong at any stage, and Chad and David would have little control over events beyond playing the odds.

At the moment, none of that mattered. After months of planning and anticipation, it felt to them like Christmas morning.

"We are absolutely on the edge of our seats," said Chad. "The process is such a test of patience. Tons of waiting and then quick and short bouts of intense progress. I am guessing it will just hit me all at once that we are finally about to be pregnant."

Their fate now depended on the intricate choreography Muasher had directed by prescribing various fertility drugs to stimulate the egg donor's production, synchronize her reproductive cycle with that of the surrogate, and prepare the surrogate's uterus to accept an embryo.

They knew their egg donor only as Jessica, but their dreams of building a family relied heavily on this near total stranger. She was single and 25, in her egg-producing prime, but she had never been pregnant or donated eggs before.

For the previous three weeks, at Muasher's direction, Jessica had injected herself daily with hormones. Each morning, she numbed one of her hips with an icepack and jabbed it with Lupron, a synthetic formulation that prevented her from ovulating until the desired moment.

At night, she gave herself two shots that stimulated egg production — Follistim (derived from the ovarian cells of Chinese hamsters) and Repronex (extracted from the urine of postmenopausal women). In addition to bruising from the injections, Jessica suffered side effects like sleeplessness, headaches and bloating that sometimes forced her to unbutton her jeans.

Muasher carefully monitored her hormone levels and follicle development through regular blood tests and sonograms, and tweaked the dosages accordingly. The adjustments were critical to warding off a rare but dangerous condition known as hyperstimulation, which could lead to renal failure or blood clots.

"It's more of an art than a science," Muasher explained, "because people respond differently to the medications." Indeed, he had tried to treat Jessica conservatively, but based on her sonograms he projected she would yield at least 20 eggs, well above average.

Precisely 35 hours before Muasher planned to retrieve the eggs, Jessica gave herself a final "trigger shot" of yet another hormone that would prepare her follicles for ovulation. The timing of the procedures was calculated so that the peak of her egg maturation would dovetail with the priming of the surrogate's uterus for maximum receptivity.

That moment did not always coincide with office hours. When Muasher began suctioning Jessica's follicles, it was 7:45 on a Saturday morning. Chad, 33, and David, 36, steeled themselves in the waiting room with coffee and Krispy Kreme doughnuts as the doctor methodically punctured one sac after the next. With a single swift stroke, he guided the needle through three abutting follicles, like a toothpick through cocktail olives.

After he finished, Jessica was wheeled into recovery, where she emerged quickly from a deep sedation. "How many eggs?" she asked groggily.

"We did very well here," Muasher reported. "We got about 26 eggs."

"Woo-hoo!" she cheered.

"You go, girl," said the anesthesiologist.

After Muasher informed Chad and David of Jessica's bountiful harvest, they donned yellow surgical gowns and blue hairnets to greet their heroine. Though her full identity was to remain anonymous, she had agreed to let them visit her in the recovery room.

"Twenty-six! Twenty-six!" she grinned, giving a thumbs-up.

"Oh my gosh, you're such a trouper," David said. "Fertile Myrtle."

They presented her with an arrangement of white roses and yellow freesia, and then a box from Neiman's. It contained a sterling Konstantino bracelet, adorned with egg-shaped gold balls.

"How do we even begin to thank you for the generous gift you have given us?" began the handwritten note. "Each and every day from this moment on will be an unfolding miracle for us."

Jessica was touched. "Oh, guys, that's fabulous," she said. "Thank you so much. So, do we want to take bets on how many babies there are going to be?"

"Everything over two," David joked, "we give away as Christmas presents."

Creating embryos

SHORTLY after the egg retrieval, Muasher's embryologists returned to the lab, where they thawed, washed and counted the sperm that Chad and David had donated months earlier.

In late August, it had fallen to David to collect the frozen samples they had deposited at the Fairfax Cryobank and transport them the few blocks to Muasher's office. He had never felt as self-conscious as he did leaving the sperm bank with a tall, cylindrical canister in each hand.

In the lab that Saturday, the embryologists used a pipette to draw up a drop of sperm from each man's sample and release it onto a counting chamber — essentially a microscope slide overlaid with a grid. By averaging the number of sperm in several squares, and the percentage that were moving forward, they could derive sperm counts and measures of motility.

The two samples were visibly different. Chad's sperm scurried frenetically like mice through a maze. David's, by contrast, seemed in no hurry.

Six hours after the egg retrieval, Jessica's 26 eggs were divided into two batches. They had been rinsed in a special medium of proteins and nutrients and placed in an incubator at body temperature. The embryologists fertilized one batch with Chad's Olympian swimmers and the other with David's lollygaggers (he preferred to think of them as "overcalculating").

That night, the prospective fathers talked about how the ingredients of life were brewing in a dish. "It's not just genetic material now," Chad said. "It's together. The creation of this life has started."

Early the next morning they got a call from one of Muasher's nurses. Of the 26 eggs, 16 had fertilized, nine from David's batch and seven from Chad's. "It sounds like we've got enough for several tries," David said.

So long as Muasher deemed the embryos of comparable quality, Chad and David wanted him to transfer one from each batch. This so-called "dual embryo transfer" would increase the odds that their surrogate, Whitney Cruey, would get pregnant, while also increasing the chances of twins. Chad and David had always been comfortable with that prospect; they wanted siblings, and twins would give them two for the price of one.

Some doctors would not perform dual embryo transfers, because in cases of genetic defects they would not be able to determine a child's paternity without DNA testing. That was exactly what appealed to Chad and David. If possible, they wanted to cloak the paternity of their children, even from themselves, in order to reinforce their equal stature as parents.

With twins, each man presumably would be the biological father of one, though they wouldn't necessarily know which. With a singleton, each would have had an equal chance at being the genetic contributor. If Muasher determined that one man's embryos were better than the other's, they had instructed him to transfer two from that batch, but not tell them whose it was.

The couple recognized there might be an obvious resemblance, or that they might have to learn paternity for a birth certificate. But this way, at least during the pregnancy, if someone had the nerve to ask who the "real" father was, they could answer honestly that they had no idea, or that both of them were.

In addition to choosing which embryos to transfer, Muasher had another critical decision to make — whether to transfer the embryos after three days, when they typically would have grown to eight cells, or after five, when each would have become a mass of 100 or more cells known as a blastocyst. Three-day transfers were more common, but some research suggested that blastocysts were more likely to implant in the uterine lining.

Muasher felt it was an open question. You could expect to lose embryos between the third and fifth days of incubation, meaning there would be fewer to freeze for a second attempt. And if more than one blastocyst were transferred, the odds of a multiple pregnancy would be high. Twins and triplets, while sometimes desired, carried greater risks of miscarriage and premature delivery.

Three days after the egg retrieval, Muasher studied the embryos and saw that a number had cleaved into eight cells. He summoned Chad, David and Whitney to his office that morning.

He told them he had graded 12 of the embryos as good candidates for transfer, based on their structure and cell division. He would try to pick the best one from each man's batch and freeze the rest.

"We're looking at a 50 to 60% chance of success," he said. They had a young egg donor — the most important variable — and pregnancy was more likely with fresh embryos than with frozen ones. If Whitney got pregnant, the odds of having twins would approach 30%.

Statistically, this first transfer would be their best shot.

Pregnancy hopes

WHITNEY felt ready to play her part. A 25-year-old college student, waitress, and single mother from Frederick, Md., she had been wearing estrogen patches on her lower abdomen for nearly three weeks. As the estrogen seeped into her body, it coaxed her uterus into reacting as if she were ovulating. The hormonal surge made her so emotional she found herself sobbing through "Fahrenheit 9/11."

On the day Muasher collected Jessica's eggs, Whitney added a daily shot of progesterone to thicken her uterine lining. It was administered with a 2-inch-long needle. If she got pregnant, she would have to continue the shots and patches for up to two months, one of many burdens she would endure for her $20,000 fee. (If she did not get pregnant, she would receive just $2,000, plus $500 for each unsuccessful embryo transfer.)

- - - -

Continues on next post . . .

[SherryT]

In the nearly five months since Whitney had signed on with Chad and David, they had made a point of going to dinner and visiting each other's homes. But the time they spent together only seemed to magnify their differences.

She couldn't relate to their vacations in Tuscany and the concert tickets they bid for on EBay. She found herself afraid to touch anything in their immaculately decorated house. Their walk-in closet was the size of her apartment bedroom, and she wondered if they had any idea how much baby-proofing the place would require.

On the morning of the procedure, classical music lilted through Muasher's operating room as he prepared Whitney to receive the embryos. Dressed in blue scrubs and masks, Chad and David took seats just to her left, and reached for each other's hands.

The embryologists flashed magnified images of the two embryos onto a monitor in the O.R. They looked vaguely lunar, their eight cells like craters in a gray landscape. This is surreal, Chad thought, our first view of our children.

"They look almost perfect," Muasher said. "This is the uterus there. We're going to try to put the embryos right in the middle."

Muasher took the catheter containing the embryos, which were suspended in fluid, and maneuvered the tip into place. He depressed the plunger on the syringe and held it for 15 seconds. After withdrawing the slender tube, he handed it to an embryologist to check under a microscope. She returned to say the embryos were gone.

Whitney smiled serenely throughout the procedure, which she said was no more uncomfortable than a Pap smear. Muasher instructed her to limit her activity for 24 hours, and to return in 13 days for a pregnancy test. He handed Chad and David the culture dish that had held the embryos.

"If it works, this will be like your first baby crib," he said. "Good luck."

Chad and David were amazed by what they had witnessed. As they settled in for their two-week wait, they were utterly convinced Whitney was pregnant.

Getting the news

WHITNEY arrived at the Craigs' house in northwest Washington about 11 a.m., her 2-year-old daughter in tow. It was a dreary morning, with a white fog enveloping the Washington Monument. She had just given blood at Muasher's clinic and the nurse had told her to call at 2 p.m. for the pregnancy test results.

Chad arrived home from work with 20 minutes to spare. "I'm so stressed out that I'm beyond stressed out," he announced.

The two-week wait had been tough on him. Unable to focus at work, he kept searching the Web for pictures of embryonic development so he could imagine what their child might look like on any given day.

Chad slid into a kitchen chair next to David, who placed the phone on speaker and called Muasher's office. The room was silent as the call routed from one assistant to the next and then to the doctor.

"Hello?" His thickly accented monotone was instantly recognizable.

"Hey, Dr. Muasher," they replied in unison.

"Hi, how are you?"

"Fine, how are you?" David replied.

"Good, who do we have there?"

Chad listed those in the room.

"How's everybody doing?"

"We're doing fine," they all answered. It was starting to seem like too much small talk.

"Good," he said, and paused. "I'm really sorry, you know, I don't have good news."

Chad's head dropped.

"The test was negative, unfortunately. I'm really very, very sorry. I mean, all of us are sorry. This is one of those situations where everything went fine, we expected it to work, and it just didn't work."

"So what do we do next?" David asked.

Muasher explained they could try a second transfer with frozen embryos in as little as three weeks. Whitney would have to stop her medications, wait for her period and then start a new regimen.

"Is that all right with you, Whitney?" David asked.

Her voice cracked. "Yeah," she whispered. "That's fine."

The doctor gave her instructions, told Chad and David to set up an appointment, then apologized twice more.

Whitney started to tear up.

"Hey, listen," David said, "it's certainly not your fault."

"I'm going to cry," she said.

"No, don't cry," said Chad, his own face puffy.

"It's a roll of the dice and we'll just keep going," David said.

Whitney began sniffling. "I'm sorry," she sobbed.

"Don't be sorry, Whitney," David said. "It has nothing to do … it's just … you know … it's sad for all of us but we'll try to do it again."

They thanked her for all she had done, walked her to her car and hugged her goodbye. Both men dug their hands in their front pockets as she backed out of the driveway.

Chad and David started making calls — their mothers, their friends, Chad's sister, who was seven months pregnant with her second child.

"It's just one of those things," David told his mother. "You know, everything happens for a reason."

It was a family motto, and Chad and David had made it the guiding tenet of their Christian faith. God always had a purpose, though it might not reveal itself immediately. Perhaps the point here was to bring them closer to Whitney, David mused.

During the two-week wait, Chad had sent an e-mail to friends and family members informing them of the surrogacy project. As he followed up with a note that afternoon, he could not believe how arrogant they had been to assume it would take the first time.

"Please know that we have great faith that this will work and we will one day have a baby," he wrote. "It's just a matter of when…. God is teaching us about patience."

Playing the odds

SUHEIL Muasher felt terrible for the guys, as he liked to call them. It was the first time he had treated two men as patients, and he'd badly wanted it to work.

"You wish you could call everybody with good news," he said the next day, "especially with cases that you work the hardest on. And in this case, we had to coordinate things with multiple people."

Born in Amman, Jordan, the doctor came from a prominent family; his brother, a one-time ambassador to the United States, was then deputy prime minister.

Muasher, who immigrated to the U.S. after training as an obstetrician at Johns Hopkins, represented a link between the earliest achievements of assisted reproduction and its newest and most controversial applications. He had studied and worked for more than two decades under Howard and Georgeanna Jones, the legendary husband-wife team who created the first IVF baby in the U.S. (and 15th in the world) in 1981.

The Joneses and their superiors at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk had never been completely comfortable with the use of IVF for patients without conventional fertility problems. But after Muasher went into business for himself in early 2004, he recognized that gay men might form a promising niche market.

He had no moral qualms, but he did have practical ones. He had wanted reassurances from the Craigs' lawyer that provisions had been made to care for their children if they went separate ways.

It frustrated him — and them — that he couldn't find an explanation for Whitney's failure to get pregnant. All the component parts — Jessica's eggs, both men's sperm, Whitney's uterus — had seemed ideal. It was always possible he had simply selected embryos with undetectable chromosomal abnormalities.

At an appointment in late October, Muasher explained that the odds of success would decline with the next attempt. The remaining embryos had on first inspection been deemed inferior to the two he had already transferred. And only 70% to 80% of embryos typically survived the stresses of freezing and thawing.

Playing the odds, they decided to thaw five of their frozen embryos, hoping three would survive to be transferred.

As they wondered how many attempts it might take to get pregnant, they began to feel the press of time. Not only was the process getting more expensive by the day, but on Nov. 2, 2004, when George W. Bush was reelected, 11 states passed constitutional amendments to prohibit same-sex marriage. Chad and David understood the next front in the culture wars might well be gay parenting, and they feared the political tide would surge before they could complete a pregnancy.

On Nov. 17, Muasher called with unsettling news from his lab. His staff had thawed the five frozen embryos and only one was remotely viable. Deeply discouraged, they authorized him to thaw the remaining five.

Things only got worse when Chad, David and Whitney arrived at the clinic early the next morning. Of all the thawed embryos, only one was suitable to transfer. Muasher could not explain the extraordinary loss rate. He and his chief embryologist had checked conditions in the lab and all seemed fine.

"It happens maybe 2 to 3% of the time," he said.

Chad and David were starting to feel they weren't very good at this. "Now we really do need a miracle," Chad said. "We need to beat the odds big time."

Nobody was surprised when Muasher called two weeks later to say Whitney was not pregnant.

Harder to give up

NOW their frustration was palpable, bordering on anger. Chad had foolishly thought his obsession with research would give him a measure of control. Instead, he had a head full of information and no answers.

They faced the same questions so many infertile couples confront after repeated rounds of IVF. How long should they keep trying? How much bad news could they take? Was there a physiological problem or a lab problem, or were they just unlucky? Were they throwing good money after bad?

They had spent nearly $70,000, much of it from a home equity loan. The costs would escalate rapidly with a second egg retrieval, and they were running out of cushion. Yet the more they invested, financially and emotionally, the harder it was to back away.

"This process just sucks," Chad said. "Oh my God, I don't know how people do this for years. You better have twice as much money as you think you need and three times the patience."

"And four times the time," David added. "I thought we'd have kids in kindergarten by now."

Whitney remained committed to Chad and David, but the process was wearing her down as well. The drugs made her sleepless and moody. She couldn't help but feel responsible for the failures. Her boyfriend had started calling her a "guinea pig." And if she didn't get pregnant, she would not receive the lion's share of her fee.

"I feel I'm trying so hard to make this happen," she said.

Though their confidence was shaken, Chad and David decided to stick with Muasher through another round. It didn't hurt that he offered a 20% discount.

Their lawyer, Diane Hinson, got in touch with Jessica, who instantly agreed to a second egg retrieval. This time she yielded 32 eggs, even more than before. Chad and David rewarded her with earrings to match her bracelet.

"If we have to do it a third time, you get a tiara," David said.

"Is it wrong to hope?" she teased.

Twenty-seven of the eggs fertilized, 14 by one of the men and 13 by the other. Their friend Lisa Alexander observed that they seemed to be "over-egged and under-uterized."

At Muasher's recommendation, they froze 12 of the day-old embryos and let the rest grow to the blastocyst stage. Seven made it.

On Feb. 1, 2005, Muasher picked the two best blastocysts — they were from the same batch — and placed them in the center of Whitney's uterus. The others were frozen.

Again they all gathered in the Craigs' kitchen to receive the news. And again it was negative.

When Muasher finished his apologies, David looked at his partner. "We just can't get it right, can we?" he said.

"Is it possible he's doing something wrong?" Chad asked dejectedly. "Everything looked so perfect."

To try to isolate the problem, Muasher suggested new tests on Whitney, including a biopsy of her uterine lining. The tests would be invasive and costly. And if they detected trouble, such as a blockage, it might require surgery. Whitney, who had already been subjected to 64 injections and 164 estrogen patches, hadn't signed on for that.

- - - -
Continued on next post

[SherryT]

New possibility

Ten days after the third negative pregnancy test, Chad got a call from his 33-year-old sister, Tonya Rosenberger, who lived in Arlington, Texas. Sissy, as the family called her, had just delivered a second child after a wonderfully easy pregnancy, and had been tracking her brother's efforts closely.

She sensed that Chad and David were running out of money and resolve, and she thought she might have a solution.

"What would you think about me being the surrogate?" she asked Chad. "You wouldn't have to pay me."

"Are you kidding me?" Chad asked. "My God, I'm thrilled, but I don't know what to think."

What he really thought was that it was too much to ask. Did she fully understand what she was volunteering to do?

He knew Sissy was terrified of needles. And because Texas statutes were neither surrogacy-friendly nor gay-friendly, she and her two kids might have to spend the last eight weeks of the pregnancy with them in D.C. to be sure she delivered in Maryland.

How would her husband, Jay, feel about her carrying her brother's child? Only a year earlier, they had balked at her being the egg donor.

Sissy told Chad they had discussed the idea, and that Jay, an engineering professor, was fully on board. Surrogacy, he had remarked, was "like loaning someone your car, only a little more."

Sissy assumed she would develop a special bond with the baby, and might even suffer postpartum depression. But she thought it would be worth it to know that Chad and David finally had a child to love.

"Any kid would be lucky to grow up with them as parents," she said. "I wish they would adopt me sometimes."

She told Chad, "This is something we really want to do for you."

The only complication, she said, was that she wanted to breastfeed her baby, Anabelle, for six months. She would not be able to start the surrogacy process until midsummer.

Chad's head spun with the possibilities. He and Sissy, separated by 12 months and two weeks, had been close since early childhood, their bond forged by the shared trauma of their parents' divorce. The journey would be much more meaningful with her along for the ride.

"I think it will make everything better," Chad said, "but it has the potential to make the bad stuff, like negative pregnancy tests, even more painful."

Their mother, Debbie Young, who still lived in south Georgia, told them she thought it would be wonderful. She was moved that her children remained so connected. Whatever horror she had felt when Chad came out 15 years earlier seemed long forgotten.

She worried, though, that failure could come between Sissy and Chad. Her daughter was headstrong. Her son was sensitive. Sometimes they clashed. This would be the fourth attempt at a pregnancy, and she thought Sissy might feel the pressure.

"Chad," she said one day, "you do realize there's a possibility the same thing could happen. I'm not trying to be a downer here, but I don't want any problems between y'all if it doesn't work out."

"I realize that, Mother," he said. "I know all of that."

Sissy and Jay knew suburban Dallas might not be the easiest place to carry a child for two gay men. Jay wasn't going to advertise it around the campus where he was trying to gain tenure. They were prepared to lose some friends, and to deflect any questions with humor.

"Didn't you know," Sissy would drawl, "that it's a tradition in south Georgia to have your brother's baby?"

Feeling optimistic

THAT summer, Chad and David made a rather sudden decision to move from Washington back to Atlanta, where they had met eight years earlier. The cost of living would be lower, and it would bring them closer to family. Chad's stepfather had been ailing, and his mother needed a hand.

They made a tidy profit on their house and used it to pay off their surrogacy debts. In Atlanta, they bought a two-story manor and began a top-to-bottom renovation, with plans to move in December.

The legal process to help Chad and David take clear title to their children had already been complicated by the selection of a surrogate from Texas. Now they would need lawyers and doctors in three states, each with its own adoption laws and birth certificate practices.

They were moving to a state where, only a year earlier, 76% of voters had supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. There were rumblings in the Georgia Capitol that social conservatives might introduce legislation in the next session to ban gay adoption. The clock was ticking.

Sissy weaned Anabelle in August and began her drug regimen. She flew to Washington in late October and prepared for the Nov. 5 embryo transfer. Diane Hinson drafted contracts saying that Sissy would carry up to triplets.

Muasher was pleased to have a new variable in the equation. This round, he decided to thaw eight of the frozen day-old embryos. Six survived the thaw, and the doctor allowed them to grow for two more days.

To improve their chances, he decided to transfer three. At Chad's request, he utilized a chemical process called assisted hatching, designed to help the embryo implant in the uterine lining.

Chad hugged Sissy on her way into the operating room, and he and David held hands at her side as Muasher transferred the embryos. "I hope this is the moment," Sissy prayed.

She was amazed at how brief and antiseptic the procedure was. "If I'm going to get pregnant," she told herself, "the least they could have done is put a little mood music on."

Muasher, as always, exuded optimism. "I think we have a good chance," he told them as he finished.

After Sissy returned to Texas, Chad called every day to see if she noticed any symptoms. "How's your uterus feeling?" he would ask, making her laugh. At first there was some cramping, but then it disappeared. As the pregnancy test neared, she could feel the tension mounting. "They're just so positive about it," she said of Chad and David. "It makes me nervous."

On Nov. 17, Sissy gave a blood sample in the morning, and later collected the results in a sealed white envelope. It stared at her from the kitchen counter as she waited for Chad and David to arrive on a late-afternoon flight from Washington.

After exchanging hugs and some chitchat, Sissy grabbed the envelope and tapped it on the counter.

"D'you want to do it?" Chad asked.

"I'm very nervous about it," she said.

Chad took the letter, ripped it open, and instantly made sense of the numbers. "Negative," he said. "It's negative."

A last chance

Chad and David didn't know what to do. They had frozen embryos remaining, but was it worth putting Sissy through another round of hormone treatments? They wondered whether they should raise their odds by starting over with a fresh embryo transfer, perhaps with a new egg donor.

When they heard that Whitney's boyfriend had gotten her pregnant, it reinforced the hypothesis that Jessica's eggs, though high in number, might be low in quality. But finding a new donor would add months and tens of thousands of dollars to the process. And it would leave their remaining embryos in frozen suspense, a prospect that made them uneasy.

"I don't want to leave them out of the game," David said.

Muasher, meanwhile, had thrown up his hands. "I tried my best here," he told David in a phone call the next day, "but I don't know what else to do. I'm ready to give up."

Chad and David looked into doctors in Dallas, but could not find one that would work with gay men. A clinic in Atlanta said it would take them, but would not transfer embryos from both simultaneously. Furthermore, transporting frozen embryos could be risky.

Muasher agreed to give it one more shot. This time, Chad and David wanted to transfer three blastocysts, pushing the boundaries of accepted medical practice. To prevent high-risk multiple gestations, fertility industry guidelines recommended the transfer of no more than two embryos in most instances, and fewer in the case of blastocysts. Muasher stunned them when he said that, given their track record, he would even consider transferring four. "I'm good with three," Sissy interjected. "Four makes me nervous."

On Jan. 9, 2006, Muasher's staff thawed the four remaining day-old embryos and began the delicate process of growing them into blastocysts. Later that week, they also thawed the five blastocysts that had been frozen previously. When Chad, David and Sissy sat down in Muasher's office, he told them he planned to transfer three embryos — all from the bunch that had been growing all week. Two of the embryos had been fertilized by one man, and one by the other. There would be none left.

Because expectations were low, the mood was light. Chad had stuck a lucky penny in his loafer, and David joked that Sissy should put it in her uterus.

As they left to prepare for the transfer, David told Muasher that perhaps this would be the last time they would see each other. "I honestly hope so," the doctor deadpanned, and they all laughed.

The statistics told them that this final attempt would be the least likely to work. They had four failures behind them. They were using second-string embryos that had been frozen and thawed and then cultured for five days in a dish. The odds had broken against them for 15 months. This time, they were lower than ever.

Next: Will Chad and David become fathers?
- - - -
kevin.sack@latimes.com

[Sugersnaps]

Well now this is my 2nd time crying today.

[waitingforbaby]

Here is the rest of the story ---- published today.

Launching a journey they'd never imagined
Chad and David had experienced both anguish and joy trying to create a child. But it was only the beginning.
By Kevin Sack, Times Staff Writer
October 31, 2006


Chad Hodge Craig had never been so put out with his sister.

She was the most accessible person he knew. They spoke virtually every day, and though he was in Georgia and she was in Texas, he never had trouble tracking her down. This day, of all days, Tonya Hodge Rosenberger could not be reached.

Tonya, who was known to her family as Sissy, had promised Chad she would wake up that Saturday morning, Jan. 21, 2006, and take a home pregnancy test. A week earlier, a fertility specialist in Fairfax, Va., had delicately transferred three 5-day-old embryos into her uterus.

She wasn't due to take a formal blood test for another three days. But Chad and Sissy simply could not wait to learn whether she might be pregnant with his children.

The embryos were the product of eggs harvested from a donor they barely knew and sperm contributed by both Chad, 35, and his longtime gay partner, David Craig, 37. Two of the embryos had been fertilized by one of the men, and one by the other, but they didn't know which.

It was their fifth attempt in 15 months to create a pregnancy through a gestational surrogacy arrangement. To get to this point, they had gone through two egg retrievals, 58 eggs, 43 embryos, two embryo freezes, three frozen embryo thaws, four failed embryo transfers, two surrogates and more than $100,000.

They were emotionally and financially drained, and they were down to their last batch of frozen embryos. If this transfer failed, Chad and David would have to start from scratch, and they weren't sure they had either the will or the resources to keep going.

When Chad and Sissy had spoken the day before, they had agreed to delay any disclosure of the pregnancy test results until Saturday afternoon, when David was due to return from a business trip. But Chad jumped the gun and started calling Sissy midmorning, after conferencing in David.

He could not raise her anywhere. Not at her home in Arlington, Texas. Not on her cell. Her husband, Jay Rosenberger, said he had slept in with a cold and had no idea where she was. Chad left messages, but they weren't returned.

Bewildered and increasingly agitated, he killed time until midafternoon, when David arrived, and then tried again without success.

"I don't know if this has happened my whole life," Chad said, "where it's been this hard to get hold of her."

Just before 4 p.m., there was a knock at the door and Chad, still unshaven, swung it open. Standing there were Sissy and Jay with their two young children, Matthew and Anabelle. Initially, Chad could not make sense of the scene. It was like one of those unsettling dreams where the characters seemed hopelessly out of place.

Then he saw that Sissy was holding a clear baggie. In it were two plastic sticks, the size of thermometers. They were pregnancy test monitors, and as Sissy raised them to Chad's eye level, he could see that each bore faint pink stripes.
*

Too momentous

"CONGRATULATIONS!" Jay said.

It took a moment to sink in. They hadn't let themselves believe it could work this time. "You're here?" Chad said, his eyes welling. "You're pregnant? Oh my God. Oh my God. When did you hear?"

Sissy began telling the story as David came to the door, a smile of astonishment spreading across his face.

She had in fact taken the test that morning, and gotten a positive result. Being wary of home pregnancy tests, she dashed to Walgreens to buy a different brand. It showed positive as well.

"What would you think about getting on a plane?" she asked Jay tearfully. The news seemed too momentous to deliver by phone. "Let's go," he said.

A few hours later, having led Chad astray, they were on their way to the airport. They paused in the parking deck long enough for Sissy to bend over the seat of their minivan so Jay could administer her daily shot of progesterone. Under the circumstances, the $1,500 they shelled out for tickets to Atlanta simply didn't seem to matter.

"Is it really happening?" Chad asked. "Is she really pregnant?"

With Sissy at his side, he called their mother in Valdosta, Ga., and put her on speakerphone.

"Hey, Mom," Chad said. "How do you feel about being a grandmother again?"

"Nooooo!" Debbie Young exclaimed. "Oh my gosh, I'm so excited."

Chad was pacing around the living room, almost hyperventilating. "I'm still in shock," he said.

They celebrated over Thai food at a neighborhood restaurant, brimming with anticipation. Sissy, 34, joked about printing up a T-shirt with an arrow pointing to her belly. "This is my brother's baby," it would declare.

Though new responsibilities lay ahead, David felt light with relief. For more than two years, their lives had been hostage to their quest to have children.

"I didn't think I could go through this again," David said. "This is one of the brightest days of our lives."

As they waited for their food, 1-year-old Anabelle entertained herself by squeezing a plastic cup until it croaked, over and over again. Her 2-year-old brother jabbered loudly while trying to coax milk from a bottle lying flat on the table.

Sissy grinned mischievously. "Now," she said above the din, "y'all have to get ready to be parents."

David laughed. "Let us enjoy the moment before we start stressing," he said.

*

How many babies?

Three days later, coral roses brightened the living room table, arranged with pink and blue balloons. Debbie Young had ordered them for her son and his partner, and had sent a matching bouquet to her daughter.

Unable to contain themselves, Chad and David had spread the word to family members, friends and readers of the online surrogacy bulletin board they frequented. Their best pals had thrown an impromptu "baby brunch" to toast the pregnancy, with Bloody Marys and champagne for everyone but Sissy.

The expectant fathers dusted off their list of baby names, and admitted to each other that they really wanted a girl. They began scrolling through Web catalogs selling Burberry strollers and Holstein-patterned car seats.

They called their friends Barry Golivesky and Dan Bloom, a gay couple in Atlanta who had just learned their own surrogate was pregnant with twins.

"Your kids are going to have a playmate," David chirped.

Sissy, Jay and the kids returned to Texas. She had confirmed the results with two more home pregnancy tests, so there wasn't much suspense when she called Chad and David after the blood test.

"Helloooo," she said. "It was positive!"

They talked about her beta number, a measure of hormone levels that can provide the first indication of multiple fetuses. It was 191. That suggested a singleton but it didn't rule out more.

They wouldn't know for sure until her first sonogram on Feb. 13. But her next blood test, taken on Jan. 31, provided a clear indication.

"Are you sitting down?" she asked Chad and David before telling them that the numbers had soared off the charts. The doctors and nurses said there was little doubt she was carrying more than one. The real question was how many.

"There's probably three of them in there," Sissy fretted.

"No, no, no, there's not," Chad told her.

The two-week wait for the sonogram was excruciating. The risk of multiples, which they had all willingly accepted while trying to get pregnant, was now a looming reality. Even twins would elevate the likelihood of prenatal complications, premature delivery and low birth weight.

"I'm worried about being on bed rest and my kids and how it would affect them," Sissy said. For legal reasons, the plan had been for her to deliver in Atlanta. Multiples would require her and the children to travel there sooner.

Sissy was already suffering terrible morning sickness. She was always hungry — with cravings for popcorn shrimp — but had trouble keeping anything down.

"Your babies are sucking the life out of me," she needled Chad.

Chad spent the weeks trying to fathom what life would be like with three newborns. David spent the weeks trying not to. Given all they'd been through, Chad told David, three would still be better than none.

*

'Nothing natural'

Chad and David flew to Dallas the day before the ultrasound. They wouldn't have dreamed of missing this glimpse of their child, or children. It also would be their introduction to the obstetrician who would handle Sissy's pregnancy.

The doctor had delivered both Matthew and Anabelle, and Sissy adored him. But she had shocked him a year earlier by announcing that she hoped to be a surrogate for her gay brother. He told her he had never handled a case like that and would have to think it over.

The doctor, who asked not to be named in this account, is socially conservative, the medical director of a clinic that steers pregnant women away from abortion. He holds firmly to the belief that children should have mothers, and he found the moral footing of this arrangement slippery.

"Without great use of technology," he said, "this pregnancy doesn't even come about. There's nothing natural about it. There's nothing spontaneous about it. And the circumstance is different when the parents are going to be two men. You can say it's not different, but it's like saying men and women aren't different."

On the other hand, the doctor didn't want to abandon his patient. Sissy's devotion to her brother impressed him. And she wasn't asking him to engineer this pregnancy, only to give a baby the best possible start. "The child is an innocent bystander in all this," he said.

Sissy wondered if she should go elsewhere. She didn't want checkups to be awkward for Chad and David. "I just don't want any negativity around any of it," she said.

Ultimately, the doctor decided he could put his feelings aside, and convinced Sissy he would make things comfortable. It was a good sign, she thought, when he called to congratulate her upon learning she was pregnant.

At the ultrasound appointment, the doctor breezed into the exam room, dressed in navy scrubs and New Balance running shoes. He introduced himself with a smile and a handshake, then warned them to get ready. With Sissy's hormone levels, there was no telling how many fetuses they might find.

"We'll see what's in here in just a minute," he said, guiding the probe as he watched the monitor. Almost immediately, the screen showed two teardrop-shaped sacs.

"Do you see what I'm seeing?" he asked.

"Two!" they proclaimed in unison.

"I was wondering if it was that obvious," David said.

"It's that obvious," the doctor said. "It's twins."

They could hear a metronomic rhythm, swooshing like windshield wipers. "Two good heartbeats," the doctor said.

"Whew," David said. "I'm a little relieved that there's not a third one."


.... Continued below in next post .......

[waitingforbaby]

Until gender could be determined, Chad, David and Sissy labeled the babies Acorn and Butterbean. The doctor took measurements and printed ultrasound images for them to take home. "This looks just fine, normal and healthy," he said. "It's a very good start."

He briefed them on the challenges of a twin pregnancy. "It is a little higher-risk," he said. "Full term is sooner with twins. I'd like to get to 37 or 38 weeks if we can."

He said there would be frequent sonograms and that he would be watching for signs of preterm labor, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and anemia. Given Sissy's track record, he didn't anticipate problems, but you could never tell with twins.

"You could be going along great and the water breaks early or she starts dilating," he said. "It's very unpredictable."

A grandfather talk

Despite their giddiness, Chad and David had hesitated to share the news with their fathers. Both came from divorced families, both had troubled relationships with their dads, and neither had told their fathers they were trying to get Sissy pregnant.

It came as quite a surprise to Billy Hodge, therefore, when his son and daughter called.

"You know," Chad began nervously, "David and I have been trying to get pregnant. And, well, in fact, we are pregnant."

Sissy interjected: "You're not pregnant," she said.

"Right," Chad said, "we're not pregnant. Actually, Sissy's pregnant."

They filled the silence with explanations about egg retrievals and embryo transfers. Eventually, their father asked a few questions. Whose babies would they be, he wanted to know. Whose name would they bear?

Chad, who had disappointed his father by taking David's surname, explained that they would be equals as parents, in practice and in law. They planned to incorporate both family names, he explained.

"Are you in shock?" Sissy asked.

"Yes," her father answered. "Wouldn't anybody be?"

He hadn't expressed displeasure, as they feared he might, but he clearly wasn't comfortable. He continued to call Sissy several times a week as usual, but never asked about the pregnancy.

Chad confronted his father when he visited in March. "I don't want someone who the kids grow to love and trust, a grandparent, to come to them at any point and make them feel bad about the situation they've grown up in," he said.

"I would never do that," his father answered. "We're going to love these kids as our grandchildren. We're not going to do anything to hurt them."

"It's not even about consciously hurting them," Chad explained. "It's about a sensitivity that you don't normally have. Whether or not you believe in it or think it's right or wrong, I expect you to subjugate that to their feelings and the fact that this is their experience."

His father said he understood, but he did not say much more.

*

Legal navigations

Chad and David continued to commute to Dallas for Sissy's doctor's appointments. At 15 weeks, a sonogram showed they had a boy and a girl.

"The babies are growing appropriately," the doctor said, "and you're not showing me anything that really worries me." He projected delivery for mid-September.

Within a day, Acorn and Butterbean were renamed Holland Kelly Hodge Craig, to be known as Holland, and Christian Asher Hodge Craig, to be known as Asher.

"Let the monogramming begin," Chad e-mailed their friends.

In mid-April, Chad and David met with an adoption lawyer in Atlanta to discuss the delivery. Sissy had decided it would be easier on her children if she could stay in Texas, but the lawyer, Lori M. Surmay, advised against it.

A Texas delivery would make it difficult to petition a judge to declare Chad and David the legal parents before birth, she said. That, in turn, could mean that only one of them, and perhaps neither of them, would get their names on the birth certificates. She could even spin a scenario in which a Texas judge might deem their children parentless and make them wards of the state.

"Ugh," Chad said. They weren't willing to take that chance. After they explained it to Sissy, neither was she.

Surmay was confident she could get Chad and David on the birth certificates in Georgia. Whoever was determined to be the biological contributor would be listed as "Father," and the other as "Parent."

"It's a little bit mind-blowing here in 2006 that you can get a birth certificate with no mother on it," she said. "We're through the looking glass here."

Sissy had a scare in early May when she felt contractions after cleaning out the garage, but they disappeared after two days of bed rest. She could feel the babies moving now, vying for diminishing space.

She got a kick out of telling people she was pregnant with her brother's twins. When the nosy nurse at her pediatrician's office asked why her brother's wife couldn't have children, Sissy answered: "Because his wife has a penis."

Chad created a website to keep family and friends up to date. The doctor, he wrote on June 5, had called Sissy "the poster child for twin pregnancies." He added: "If things continue to progress as they have up to this point, we are looking at an uneventful rest of the pregnancy."

Father's Day was around the corner, and Chad (whom they had decided to call Papa) decided to surprise David (aka Daddy) by having Sissy sit for a three-dimensional ultrasound. The results were remarkable — crystal-clear sepia images of two fully formed fetuses, complete with slender fingers and button noses.

"I just can't believe these are our babies," Chad wrote on the website. "They are adorable...I can't even begin to tell you how happy I am."

*

Hospital trip

The next morning, Friday, June 16, Sissy felt some mild pressure against her cervix when she got out of bed. She took her kids to swim lessons at 11:30 and, while in the pool, felt her stomach tighten. She wondered if it might be a contraction. They went home so she could lie down, and the pains began almost immediately. She timed them at two minutes apart.

She called Jay at work, asked him to come home, and started to cry. She just knew the doctors, once they stopped the contractions, would order her on bed rest for the remaining three months of the pregnancy.

Normally a cautious driver, Jay lead-footed it to Arlington Memorial Hospital, five minutes away. They wheeled Sissy into maternity triage, hooked up an IV, and timed the contractions at a minute apart. A nurse lifted the sheet covering Sissy, and paused.

"You're completely dilated," she said. "We're going to have to deliver these babies."

Sissy became hysterical, and the nurse gripped her by the shoulders. "You cannot do this right now," she said firmly. "You're going to harm the babies if you don't calm down." Sissy breathed deeply, struggling to focus.

The nurses rolled her into an operating room as strangers in scrubs swarmed around her. An obstetrician arrived and told her to push, but the babies were blocking each other's path. "We're not going to be able to get them out," the doctor announced. "We need to do a C-section."

In the hallway, Jay was approached by one of the hospital's neonatologists, Dr. Eva Carrizales. "Right now, at 24 weeks, they're barely viable," she said. "Do you want me to do everything I can?"

"Save my wife first, but, yes, do everything you can," Jay said.

There was no mention of Chad and David. Sissy and Jay hadn't had time to discuss it, but each had decided to defer explaining that these children were not theirs. This was the Bible Belt. Why volunteer information that might cause a distraction?

"I want these people thinking they're working for a desperate straight father and mother," Jay told himself. When a nurse called him Dad, he just nodded.

Jay reached Chad in Atlanta and David traveling on business in Virginia, and told them to get on planes as fast as possible. "Sissy's going to deliver in 10 minutes," he said.

*

'Just live'

The babies were born at 2:25 p.m. and 2:26 p.m. First came Asher, weighing 1 pound, 10 ounces. Holland followed, 2 ounces lighter. They looked just like the ultrasound images taken the day before, fully formed, but barely a foot long. The doctors called them micropreemies.

Chad and David didn't know it yet, but they were parents.

Nurses rolled the babies past Jay in pod-like incubators, ventilator tubes taped to their mouths. He touched the plastic, shaken by how tiny they were. The neonatologist told him the odds of survival at that age were not high; babies that made it were often afflicted with lifelong handicaps such as cerebral palsy. Then again, preemies like this sometimes left their unit after three months with virtually no problems.

As he waited to fly out, terrified and frantic, Chad wondered whether there would be legal hassles at the hospital. Would he and David even be allowed to see their own children? He called Lori Surmay, and she quickly e-mailed papers allowing Sissy to transfer decision-making authority to them.

Sometime that afternoon, the hospital learned through consultations with Sissy's obstetrician that she was carrying the babies for her brother and his partner. The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Arlington Memorial had never had a pair of gay men as parents. It didn't sit right with some of the staff, and there were whispers in the corridors and at the nurses' station.

"A few people thought it was very, very awkward and were a little grossed out," said Dr. Scott C. Tisdell, a neonatologist whose own gay brother happened to be adopting a child.

The staff was careful, however, not to show any disapproval. And even before Surmay's documents were signed, the hospital treated Chad and David as the rightful parents. When Chad arrived that evening, they snipped the ID bracelet off Jay's wrist and gave it to him.

As they entered the NICU, Jay warned Chad that his first look at his children might be unsettling. Breathing and feeding tubes snaked into their mouths, and lines ran into their hands and umbilical stents. Monitors were taped to their torsos and feet. White cloth patches shielded their eyes from phototherapy lights. Yellow plastic discs protected their ears from noise that could cause their blood pressure to spike.

All Chad could do was smile. His daughter had an adorable ski-slope nose. His son was wiggling his arm. They both had long blond eyelashes, and rounded chins like David.

A nurse told him he could touch them, but not to stroke or rub. For the moment, his sadness and fear were washed away by the instant connection he felt to his children.

David felt the same sensation when he arrived a few hours later. The babies had stabilized, and their color looked better than he expected. He couldn't believe how immediately his emotions were captured by these two tiny beings.

"Oh, my God, I'm a parent," he thought. "It's no longer theoretical."

"Just live," he begged the babies. When you get older, he told them, "you can throw up in my car all you want to. Just live."

Fathers' Day

Over the next 24 hours, the doctors prepared everyone for the worst. Statistically, nearly half of all babies born before 28 weeks of gestation do not make it. At 24 weeks and four days, the cusp of viability, the twins could be expected to careen from one life-threatening crisis to the next. Conditions could change in a snap, so a good night did not necessarily mean that a good morning would follow.

Because the babies' blood vessels were so thin, the risk of brain hemorrhage was high. Any stimulation to their systems — a change in temperature, say, or even a bout of crying — could cause massive bleeding.

Gastrointestinal problems also were common because their organs were not yet fully functional. Asher's blood-sugar measurements were high, and he was being treated with insulin. The nurses would try to keep the babies sedated and still, hoping they would gain weight.

......continued in next post ..........

[waitingforbaby]

If they could get through the first 72 hours, the odds would improve. The good news was that this NICU didn't lose many babies, maybe two or three a year.

Sissy's obstetrician spoke to Chad on Saturday morning and said he was baffled. Though twin pregnancies were risky, everything had looked perfect. Infection could cause this kind of rapid labor, but there were no signs of it. He could remember one case like this in 16 years. They would probably never know what happened, he said.

It didn't take long for the hospital staff to conclude that Chad and David were more devoted than many parents who passed through the unit.

They slept in Sissy's room — one in a chair, one on the floor — and kept vigil in the NICU late at night. Chad asked so many questions the staff eventually supplied him with medical texts. They were loving to each other and comforting to Sissy, even under stressful circumstances that drove many couples apart. Both of their mothers had flown in to provide family support.

Sissy was bereft. She stood for long stretches at the babies' sides, often alone. It was evident to Kay Douglas, one of the NICU nurses, that she was replaying events, wondering what she could have done differently. "She wanted so much to do this for them," Douglas said.

Just after midnight on Sunday morning, Chad and David were grabbing showers at a nearby hotel when they were summoned back to the hospital. Dr. Carrizales informed them that Holland had suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage. Blood was flooding her lungs. If they couldn't oxygenate her soon, she would die of asphyxia.

They went to Sissy's room, trying to sleep while the doctors worked, but Carrizales interrupted them at 3 a.m. Now the news was worse: Holland had suffered a brain hemorrhage. The radiologist on duty was certain that blood had seeped into the brain tissue, causing irreversible damage. Carrizales wasn't as sure, and thought there might be hope.

"Are you religious?" she asked.

They told her they were Christian.

"Just pray and turn it over to God," she said.

When they woke up the next morning and visited the NICU, the staff had taped Father's Day cards to each of the babies' bassinets. Asher seemed to have stabilized, but Chad and David spent their first Father's Day wondering if they would have to take their daughter off life support.

They bought a video camera and brought it to the NICU. "Here's little Holland on Father's Day," David narrated calmly. "Isn't she cute? Look at her little fingers. Her little face is covered up. It's very sweet. Hey, little angel."

They summoned the curate from Sissy's Episcopalian church to baptize Holland, and she thought it best to bless the twins together. As the nurses gathered around in prayer, the curate made the sign of the cross on the babies' foreheads with a single drop of sterile water. Then they shared communion and sang hymns in the NICU lobby.

Chad and David had braced themselves for bad news about Holland on Monday morning, when both children were scheduled for brain scans. They were not prepared for the news they got.

"I need to talk to you about Asher," Dr. Tisdell began.

"Oh, my God," Chad thought.

Only an hour earlier, at about 8 a.m., Asher too had suffered a brain hemorrhage, the doctor said. The ultrasound showed it was more severe than his sister's. Half his brain was devastated. If he lived, Tisdell explained, it would almost certainly be in a permanent vegetative state. It would be unfair to Asher and to their family to keep him alive, he said.

Stunned into silence, they went to visit their son. He had opened his eyes and was wiggling his bottom. But the doctor had been unequivocal. They looked at each other and knew they had no choice.

Sissy's obstetrician came to visit and they asked his opinion, knowing he felt strongly about choosing life. He said that under the circumstances he would disconnect.

That afternoon, the nurses removed the wires and tubes, wrapped Asher in a fluffy white afghan, and brought him to his fathers in a conference room. He lasted only a minute or two. Chad, David and their family members held him for the first and last time, kissing his face and sniffling through their goodbyes.

"I'm a daddy," Chad said, looking to his mother.

"Yes, you are, hon," she said. "You will always be a dad, you and David both. You will always have children."

"Beautiful baby boy Asher," Chad said, cradling his son.

"Little angel," said David.

Changing hearts

Chad and David felt they had lived a lifetime in three days, just like Asher. They had experienced the extremes of emotion, high and low, all at once.

"Through the sadness of loss we have found a special joy that we never thought possible," Chad wrote on the website. "At the same time, it has been the most devastating time in our lives…. We both feel like a part of us has passed on and there is an enormous emptiness."

Holland made modest progress in the next few days. They fed her drops of breast milk that Sissy had pumped. Chad, David and Sissy serenaded her with "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes." One night, the nurses let Chad help change her diaper.

On Thursday, however, a CT-scan convinced Dr. Carrizales that Holland, like her brother, had suffered the highest-grade hemorrhage. The doctor had resisted that conclusion all week, but now she told Chad and David it would be best to let Holland go. There would be no quality to her life.

Again, the family gathered to say goodbye. Cris Nation, one of the NICU nurses, disconnected the lifelines, tears fogging her glasses. First Chad held Holland, and David kissed her nose and cheeks and toes. They told her she was beautiful and how much she had been loved.

Then David held her, and Holland reflexively wrapped her miniature hand around Chad's index finger. As she drew her last breaths, her grip softened and relaxed. "I knew she had taken Asher's hand," Chad would say later.

They held a memorial service on Saturday morning at Sissy's church in Dallas. Sissy's obstetrician, who had come to like and admire Chad and David, paid his respects with reddened eyes. The doctors and nurses from the NICU turned out in force, and sent a wreath for each twin.

For many, their week of caring for Asher and Holland had been profoundly affecting, even life-altering. Some wished aloud that they could take children from less suitable parents on the ward and give them to Chad and David. Others talked about donating eggs for a future attempt.

Kay Douglas, the nurse, found herself so drawn to Chad and David that she began to reexamine her Southern Baptist conviction that homosexuality is sinful.

"It made me stop and consider the people individually, not just their lifestyle," she said. "There was just something about Chad and David. I don't know if it was that they wanted these babies so desperately, or their love for each other, or their love for the babies. But the whole unit felt it."

Rev. Christianne L. McKee, the curate who had baptized the babies, officiated at the service. The crowd of 40 sat in concentric circles in an airy chapel.

David kept his arm around Chad, gently stroking his shoulder. Sissy, in a black pantsuit, tucked a box of tissues under her chair. When the pianist played an opening dirge, she buried her face in Chad's shoulder and sobbed. His mouth was turned down at the corners, like a mime's.

McKee read from Psalm 139, an ode to the divinity of creation.

"For you yourself created my inmost parts;

you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I will thank you because I am marvelously made;

your works are wonderful, and I know it well."

Truly, McKee said, Asher and Holland had been marvelously made, as well as adored. "These children were loved," she said. "They still are loved. That love does not stop with death. Chad and David will always, always be their fathers. They will always be your children."

Grieving parents

Chad and David returned to Atlanta the next day to find that boxes of baby furniture had been delivered in their absence. The big old house they were renovating, with its freshly painted nursery, felt empty and dark.

They held another memorial service in a beautiful stone church. Both of their fathers drove in. Diane Hinson, their surrogacy lawyer, flew down from Virginia. Their friends Barry Golivesky and Dan Bloom, whose twins had been born five days earlier, greeted Chad and David with a bittersweet embrace, then took seats toward the back.

The men grieved together and alone, each in his own way.

David, who had been the anchor at the hospital, returned to work quickly. He felt flat all the time, but kept it together. He even managed to attend a bris and baby-naming for the Golivesky-Bloom twins only two days after the Atlanta memorial service. Chad couldn't bring himself to go.

The ordeal only strengthened David's faith that everything happens for a reason. "There's still so much good that came out of it, the lives they changed," he said. "It's certainly not like they lived in vain. They did a lot for a lot of people in a short period of time."

......story continues below........

[waitingforbaby]

Chad took more than three months off, some of it thanks to co-workers who contributed vacation days as a bereavement gift. He was angry at first, and frustrated that so much effort had led to such an outcome. In their week as parents, they had borne more responsibility and made tougher decisions than most would in a lifetime.

"To love someone that much and have them such a short time and then to lose them, it leaves you with an emptiness you didn't have before," he said. "You've opened up a part of who you are and then it's gone, and it's very hard to understand what you're supposed to do with that."

He lighted candles, planned a memory garden, and occasionally spoke to the ashes they kept in a bronze box on a chest at the top of the stairs. He and Sissy talked several times a day. Some days were better than others.

The hospital bills arrived, totaling $125,000. All but $1,100 was covered by Jay's family insurance policy. Because no legal steps had been taken to establish Chad or David as parents, Sissy was listed as "mother" on the birth certificate and Jay as "father." (In Texas, the husband of the mother is presumed to have paternity unless proven otherwise.)

The hospital tab almost equaled the amount Chad and David had spent to create the pregnancy. When they tallied that number, it came to $119,000. While Jay's insurance covered prenatal care and the delivery, Chad and David had paid all fertility-related costs out of pocket.

A new chance

Almost immediately after the twins died, Chad and David began talking about trying again. Despite the intensity of the loss, their taste of fatherhood had only reinforced their desire to be parents.

"I think the only loss I am not prepared to deal with is the loss of the hope that we will one day raise children," Chad said. "Our hope did not die with our twins. Instead, the twins, by their existence in our lives, amplified our hope and strength to continue."

They briefly considered adoption, but decided to pursue another surrogacy so they could participate more fully in the creation of their children. "The journey itself has value," Chad said, "and if we eventually have another baby we will add that to the list of blessings that have come about because we stepped out on this path."

Their grief counselor recommended they wait at least until November to attempt an embryo transfer, so that a birth would not precede the first anniversary of the twins' deaths. Knowing how long it could take to produce a pregnancy, they threw themselves back into the process.

Friends and relatives worried it might be too fast. But Chad and David reassured them they weren't trying to replace Asher and Holland, only to create a sibling for them. As for financing another round, which would cost at least another $75,000, Chad said the strategy this time would be to win the lottery. Absent that, they would borrow again.

They signed on with a new doctor and made arrangements through Hinson's agency for a third egg retrieval from Jessica, the donor who had helped them produce Asher and Holland. It was important to Chad and David that there be a genetic link between their first children and any future ones.

In late July, they posted an ad seeking a new surrogate on http://www.surromomsonline.com . "We will forever be parents to our sweet babies who lived so briefly with us," they wrote. "They taught us that the capacity to love is without bounds. They also cemented our desire to have more children. We know our continued journey to build our family will be incredible because it will be guided by our special guardian angels."

They were flooded with responses. In September, they negotiated a surrogacy agreement with a 41-year-old school crossing guard, a divorced mother from Massachusetts. Two of her three children are twins, and she carried them for nearly 38 weeks.

Later this year, a doctor is scheduled to transfer two embryos into her uterus, in the hope that Chad and David Craig might again become fathers.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
kevin.sack@latimes.com

[waitingforbaby]

David and Chad - my heart breaks for you guys.

I wish you the best in the future.

[Monica613]

I'm sitting here with tears streaming down my face. That was the most moving, devestating, and hope inspiring thing I've read in a long time. I wish you the best, Chad and David.

[CEH1070]

Thank you for your heartfelt replies. We were a little nervous about sharing our story with the world and of course when we first started we had no idea where things would end up. Our hope in the beginning was to let the world see how wonderful surrogacy is and we were happy to share our experience to do that. By the end, we found that there was so much more to being parents than we ever dreamed...more wonderful and more difficult than we ever imagined. Our hope is that our story will help other people have families and help us all recognize what a blessing children are in our lives. Maybe someone will read it and decide to be a surrogate or egg donor and help create a family...that would be such an incredible outcome.


Thanks for taking the time to read the story!

[DRM]

Chad and David,
I have never cried so hard while reading something before. I think you two are amazing for being willing to try again. I just pray that you have a easier journey this time and Asher and Holland get to smile down on their siblings soon. Huge hugs to your sister too.
debi

[cathleen]

You two men are beyond amazing!!!

I wish you both the very best of luck in your upcoming journey.

My thoughts and prayers will continue to be with you.

[Snooky0601]

Like everyone else, I'm in tears. What a beautiful story! The love you two share for each other and your children is just amazing. I, too, live by the motto that everything happens for a reason. Although we may never know what the reasons are, it's really not up to us to question. I will continue to pray that you two are blessed again. Your story has really touched my heart. ((((huge hugs))))