Baby by Proxy.

GROWING GENERATIONS HELPS GAY COUPLES THROUGH THE MAZE OF SURROGATE PREGNANCY

When Will Halm came out in the mid '70s, being gay meant not being a parent. There were no gay parent role models for Halm to look up to. There hadn't been a lesbian baby boom. This was before openly gay men dared to even think about adopting children. But Halm is a determined man "I grew up always thinking I would be a parent," Halm says. After he met Marcellin Simard in 1986, they started thinking about how they would create a family. "I didn't want to lead my life without raising a child," Simard says. As it turned out, it would be a long, creative process involving many disappointments, shady characters, a "miracle," and the creation of Growing Generations, the world's first and only company devoted to managing surrogacy exclusively for gay people, both couples and individuals.

Gay men are not having children through surrogates in the same numbers that lesbians are through traditional artificial insemination. But Growing Generations may represent the future of the gay baby boom. As Halm and Simard's story proves, the tools that heterosexual couples use when they can't have children themselves often are unavailable to gays, who must create their own resources.

When they decided to have a family, Halm and Simard first looked into adoption. But because they are gay, adoption agencies discouraged them. International adoptions are difficult because most foreign countries won't allow gay couples to adopt their orphans. And in the United States gay couples often find home studies, in which social workers visit the homes of prospective parents, especially difficult. In a few states the appellate courts have ruled that same-sex couples can jointly adopt, and in roughly 20 others trial courts have made such rulings. But trial court rulings can vary widely, even within a given state, and in many states only married couples and singles are allowed to adopt. Lying is commonplace.

"You're not fully candid," says Halm, a lawyer, board member of the Family Pride Coalition, and former cochair of the national board of directors of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "You have to say you're a single parent who has a roommate. We really wanted to be open and honest about how we were getting our child."

Eventually, Halm and Simard started thinking about surrogacy, the process in which a woman is hired to carry a baby for another couple. Surrogacy has long been controversial. The Baby M case, in which surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead tried to renege on her contract and keep the baby she was carrying for a New Jersey couple, was a tabloid sensation in the mid 1980s. Some states, including New York and Arizona, still criminalize paid surrogacy, while surrogacy contracts are unenforceable in a few others, Halm notes.

And the cost, both psychologically and financially, is significant. Besides the stress of pinning all their hopes on technology, would-be gay parents also have to fork over a lot of money. Growing Generations estimates that at minimum couples should expect to pay $50,000, a figure that could easily soar to $70,000 or more. That price tag restricts surrogate parenthood to the most affluent.

Nevertheless, the practice has quietly grown in acceptance over the last decade. "It's not quite the taboo it used to be," says Gall Taylor, founder and president of Growing Generations. "As more and more successful cases go through, the general public will see it really is a tremendously positive opportunity."

But when Halm and Simard were first thinking about surrogacy, the taboo was still strong. They didn't use the complex medical vocabulary that they're so comfortable with now, terms such as gestational surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. They didn't even use a surrogacy agency. "We were very low-tech," says Halm. "We were thinking, one woman and a turkey baster."

The way they looked for a surrogate was just as inexact; Halm calls it "the cocktail party method." He and Simard asked around, and friends directed them to two women who might be willing to help. In hindsight, Halm says, rather diplomatically, "They were not ideal surrogate candidates." After starting the medical procedures--and after Halm and Simard had loaned her money and pinned their hopes on her--the first woman just disappeared. Simard, a cardiologist, found their second surrogate in Guam, where he often travels to provide medical care. Halm and Simard flew the woman to Los Angeles, had her inseminated, and then flew her back to Guam. Soon after, she announced she was pregnant. Then she too vanished. Halm finally flew to Guam to find her. When he did, she said she had miscarried and had been afraid to tell him. "It was a complete nightmare," Simard says. "When I found out I had to take a week off from work; I was so upset."

Then six years ago Simard met another woman interested in carrying a baby for him and Halm, and Halm knew a woman who was willing to donate an egg. With the egg donor not involved in the pregnancy and the surrogate not biologically related to the embryo, there was less emotional risk for both women. (This process is called gestational surrogacy; when the surrogate's own egg is used, it is referred to as traditional surrogacy.)

By the time everyone involved agreed, Halm had drafted the complex legal documents, and 12 embryos were created, two years had passed. The first embryo implantation didn't take; the second took but miscarried. The last two had been frozen, lessening the chance of pregnancy even further. "The doctor told us, `Don't waste your time,'" Halm remembers. But they did, and it worked. Malina is 3 now. "It was a miracle that our daughter was created," Halm says. "It was the best thing that ever happened in my life," says Simard. (The couple choose not to reveal the identity of Malina's surrogate mother.) By the time Malina was born, it had been six years since they had decided they wanted children.

And they wanted to do it again.

Halm and Simard knew they wanted another child, but after the ordeal that brought them Malina, they decided to have professionals handle the process. There were a number of surrogacy agencies in Southern California at the time, but Halm and Simard didn't find them helpful. "I would say all of them discouraged working with gay couples," Halm says. "If they do work with gay couples," he adds, "[those couples] are put at the bottom of the list." Says Taylor. "There are some professionals who help gay couples individually, but the majority do not--[those that do] are the exception to the rule." Surrogacy is controversial enough, Taylor says of the conventional wisdom. Add gay parents, and it's just too much of a public relations liability.

Through another gay couple who was having a child with a surrogate, Halm and Simard heard of an agency in Orange County, Calif., that was helping gay couples. But after paying $20,000 up front, the agency fell apart, and Halm and Simard lost their money. "Their business was disintegrating," Halm says. "There were months of frustration." Luckily, Halm and Simard had already met their surrogate-to-be, a woman from San Diego named Elizabeth, and the three of them decided to continue the process independently. Elizabeth was typical of the "ideal" surrogate: She already had two children (so she would be less likely to want to keep the child), was married to a marine (although surrogates are usually paid more than $15,000 for their services, being financially secure is a must), and had long been looking to become a surrogate (most surrogates are "givers" by profession or personality). She and her sister, a lesbian who had fertility problems, had discussed it in the past. When having a baby for her sister was put on hold, Elizabeth and her husband kept discussing surrogacy. "It all just came naturally," Elizabeth says. "If we can't do it for her, we'll do it for someone else." She'd already given birth to a child for another couple before meeting Halm and Simard.

Meanwhile, Halm had heard of a new surrogacy agency catering to gay couples called Growing Generations. Founded in 1996, it was run by Gaff Taylor, a lesbian mother who had had her own child through artificial insemination and who had five years' experience working for surrogacy agencies. "Most of the [surrogacy] industry was watching us," says Taylor. "There was a sigh of relief that someone was taking [gay men and lesbians] on."

Growing Generations was only doing traditional surrogacy at the time, and Halm wanted to assist couples with gestational surrogacy. "We decided to join forces," says Halm, now Growing Generations' CEO, "and help the gay community on a much larger scale than either of is intended originally." In a year the company has exploded in size: It had eight clients in 1998; now it has more than 60 from around the world. Halm brought in publicists, and that has certainly helped the business. Elizabeth gave birth to Halm and Simard's son, Luc, in September 1998, and the event was broadcast in March on the ABC-TV newsmagazine 20/20. Now they are trying for a third.

RELATED ARTICLE: LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK!

ONE LESBIAN'S FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE AT A SPERM BANK 

I prefer to remain anonymous. You would too. To be fair, I will be vague about where this all happened as well. Let's just say somewhere in Southern California, near a well-known university. To be even fairer, I'd like to state that I know there are wonderful sperm banks where people have supportive, encouraging experiences. As this report shows, I didn't happen to go to one.

My girlfriend and I sat in the waiting room with one other couple--heterosexual, of course. They stared at us the whole time. Terrific, I thought, just what I wanted to deal with--the experience of declaring I'm o lesbian, in the waiting room of a sperm bank. I was terrified, and what I do when I'm frightened is become counterphobic. Rather than retreat into humiliation, I launched into interrogation mode.

We were led down a dingy corridor that reminded me of an abandoned dentist's office and into a room where a seemingly together woman sat behind a desk. "Do you have any questions?" she asked out of nowhere. "Like about 800. Do you have two weeks for me?" I said, then asked, "isn't it a little convenient that you're located right outside a campus?" She seemed puzzled. "Is that where you get your sperm, from college guys?" "Yes," she admitted, "we pay them $75 a pop." Seventy-five dollars a pop! I thought. I envisioned a bunch of 20-year-old frat boys needing beer money and figuring, hock, at their age they could run ever here and do it all day. "Hey, dude, let's do a circle jerk at the sperm bank!"

"How discriminating are you about this?" I asked. She opened a desk drawer and pulled out several sheets of paper. "Important questionnaires," she noted. I looked at them in horror. They were filled out with what looked like chicken scratchings. "What is this?" I said, shaking. "Oh, that's a donor's detailed information on his biological background," she said, smiling. Looking at the messy scribbles, I suddenly saw it all: some nervous, maybe even drunk kid trying to figure out whether or not anyone in his family had heart disease or prostate cancer. (Uh, I don't know. Sounds awful. 171 check "no.")

"How de you know this is true?" I asked. She told us about a blood test they do to screen for HIV and pulled out another piece of paper on which donors had listed their hobbies and grade point averages. "No one's honest about their grade point average," I moaned. She admitted she'd never considered that.

"How many women receive one guy's sperm donation?" I asked. "Only seven to ten," she said. I screamed: "Seven to ten! That means many women living in this area are giving birth to children who are each other's half brothers and sisters. What if they grow up, meet each other, fall in love, and get married?" I left her looking horrified. We were led into another room to meet the "matchmaker." A very large woman with stringy hair and a missing front tooth greeted us. I ignored my first impression and asked, "How do you match people with sperm donors?" "I listen," she said simply. "I know all our donors." What? I insisted on seeing how they stored the sperm. She took us to a dark, cold room that reminded me of The X-Files. There were three big vats, each holding several vials of sperm. "They all look the same," I said. "What if you mix them up? They're net all marked."

"This is a very dark, handsome Italian gentleman, in B34 ..." she said, staring hard at a tube. "B33, actually ..." That did it. I don't know how we got out, but the next thing I remember, my girlfriend was sitting next to me in our car, saying, "What do you think?" "What do I think? I think that place is really the campaign headquarters for Zero Population Growth! That's what I think."

RELATED ARTICLE: ADOPTING A STRATEGY

SEVERAL STEPS TO HELP SIMPLIFY THE ADOPTION PROCESS

While more lesbians and gay men are adopting children, the process is not any less complicated than it ever was, depending on where you live. But a combination of changing attitudes has at least increased the options:

* You can adopt privately, internationally, or through the social welfare system. Cheryl Deaner, executive director of the San Francisco-based All Our Families Coalition, a group for gay families, says social welfare and international adoptions are most common, but all three types can be viable alternatives for gay men and lesbians. Says Deaner: "it depends on where you're at and how much money you have to spend." Second-parent adoptions by partners of biological parents also are available to gay couples in some areas.

* Private adoptions are costly but can be less hassle than those arranged through public entities. Private adoptions, whether within this country or outside of It, can eliminate the legal obstacles gays and lesbians often encounter in the social welfare system, but potential adoptive parents must then deal with the attitudes and biases of birth parents. Cost can also be an issue: Deaner says that private adoptions generally run anywhere from $12,000 to $30,000, whereas the cost of social welfare adoptions ranges from almost nothing to about $2,500. For, say, a gay couple in California, the latter process can go smoothly, but elsewhere there's no guarantee that it will. Anything from antiquated state laws (Florida law prohibits adoptions by gays; in other states the presumption is generally that gay individuals can adopt, but joint adoptions by gay couples have met with judicial approval in a minority of states) to a bigoted social worker can make such adoptions difficult, tempting many potential adoptive parents to closet their sexuality.

* Dishonesty is not advised. While understanding why some choose to conceal their sexual orientation, Deaner--who trains social workers on how to deal with same-sex adoptions--says it can come back to haunt you. "Honesty is the best policy here," she says. "The job of a social worker is to ferret out the truth. You don't want to appear tn be withholding any information." A lesbian couple in Texas did just that, hiding their relationship in order to adopt. A year later their social worker discovered the women were gay and removed the child from their home. Although the agent was demoted, she's suing her department, claiming she has the right to make such a decision in "the best interest of the child."

* Be willing to confront issues of sexuality head-on. Deaner explains that "invasive" questioning is a part of the screening process for potential adoptive parents in the social welfare system and is not necessarily a negative sign. However, if parents have a strung sense that a social worker is not sensitive to issues relevant to gay parents or is not supportive of gay adoption in general, parents can appeal to the child welfare department for another agent. "There are even outside agencies who can come in and de a home study for social welfare adoptions," she says.

* There is reason to be optimistic. "Laws are changing ... in favor of our families," Deaner says. "Don't prejudge what you think is going to happen in the adoption process."

--Christian Walker

RELATED ARTICLE: LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS

THE LAW PROVIDES MORE HURDLES THAN HELP FOR NEW PARENTS

"Bobbie" and "Kendra" met in 1984 end within a year became life partners. Each gave the other power of attorney and right of inheritance. They shared everything from credit cards to the lease on their home. Seven years into their relationship, they decided to became parents, with Kendra choosing to carry the child because Bobbie was older end had health problems that would make conception difficult. Soon Kendra bore a son, with Debbie acting as the birthing coach. The baby's birth certificate shows his last name to he an amalgamation of Bobbie's end Kendra's surnames.

The couple even moved from Maryland to Massachusetts because it would allow Bobbie to legally adopt their son. But in 1998 their relationship began to deteriorate, and just as they were proceeding with the adoption, Kendra and Bobbie separated. Kendra restricted Bobbie's access to the hey, who readily acknowledged having "two mothers."

Although a Massachusetts court accorded Bobbie temporary visitation rights, even such a small victory may have been legally denied her in most of the country. Thirty states do net allow second-parent adoptions, in which a child's nonbiological parent is allowed to adopt the child without severing the rights of the biological parent, end of the 20 that do, only Massachusetts, Vermont, end New York, have recognized the rights of nonbiological or nonadoptive parents through the highest courts.

Before you become a parent, and in addition to hiring a good attorney, gay family advocacy groups suggest you consider the following advice:

* Don't take advantage of a homophobic legal system. "The legal system doesn't include [gay men and lesbians], and it allows us to use it against each other," says Felicia Park-Rogers, director of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere. Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the Boston-based legal group that wrote the publication "Protecting Families: Standards fur Child Custody Disputes in Same-Sex Relationships," claims shortsighted efforts to use the system against one's partner stem from a lack of understanding of the partner's role in child-rearing and of the strong attachments that build between second parents end a young person.

* Partners should form an agreement. "Agreements are important whether or not they're legally binding," says Mary Bonauto, civil rights director of GLAD. The understanding that agreements provide can prevent messy legal battles. Bonauto sees agreements as more of a guide: "We want people to think about all the things there are to consider when beginning a family." These include what kind of contact each partner will have with the child in the event of a separation. Issues of faith and religion also need to be discussed, Bonauto says, as well as what happens in the case of job relocation. "Who's going to have the holidays?" she says. "Our purpose is to keep these cases out of the courts."

* Don't count on your health insurance to cover additions to your family. "Generally, companies that cover domestic partnerships will extend that coverage tea child, whether or not it's biologically yours," says Cheryl Deaner, executive director of the San Francisco-based All Our Families Coalition, a group for gay families. But if your company does not offer such benefits, and your partner is the child's biological parent, you may have to look for additional coverage far the child.

--Christian Walker

Gideonse has written for Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Salon.

Find more about surrogate parenting and links to related Internet sites at www.advocate.com