Today we signed the Carrier Agreement, which governs our relationship with the surrogate. I can’t say too much about our carrier because of confidentiality clauses in the agreement, but I will disclose the one thing that caused us the most concern in this relationship. She lives in Tennessee.

We originally hoped that the carrier would live somewhere in New England. We hoped that we would be able to visit her regularly and attend all of the doctor’s visits with her. We thought maybe we would be too involved, and we would start to annoy her.

But with the surrogacy agency we are working with, you don’t peruse a list of potential surrogates like you do with potential egg donors. Instead, the agency matches you with a carrier they believe shares your expectations for the pregnancy. Both the intended parents and the carrier fill out a questionnaire. In order to be matched, both parties must agree on communications preferences - during the pregnancy and after the birth - and on more difficult questions such as abortion. We were asked if we would choose to abort a child with severe genetic defects (we would) or if we would “selectively reduce” a multiple pregnancy (we wouldn’t, unless the health of the carrier were at risk).

Other than those decisions, I’m not sure what criteria the agency uses to make a match. I’m not sure if our religious backgrounds or personality traits were taken into consideration. We have “met” the carrier three times now, via a video call through Skype. She is quiet, but friendly. We decided to move forward with her after the first call. She seems to be a responsible and conscientious person, who will care for our child while it grows inside her. As I mentioned before, she passed numerous psychological tests and had an extensive interview with a social worker before she was eligible to be matched.

There’s just that one geographical issue. If we had decided to wait for a different carrier, closer to home, we could have extended our wait time by six months or more. Because she is so far away, we will probably only be able to visit her once during the pregnancy. If she has a quick labor, we may not be able to attend the birth.

We expressed our concerns to the agency. They said that this is a relatively close match for them. A slight majority of their clients are from foreign countries. Clearly it is a much more difficult thing for intended parents to make it from Paris to Denver than it will be for us to make it from Massachusetts to Tennessee. According to the agency, almost 80% of their intended parents are able to be there for the birth of their child, even given the distances involved.

How does this work? We were told that we need to trust the carrier and her knowledge of her body. That is a little imprecise for me, but what can I do. It’s just another part of this process that I have to admit is out of my control.

I have asked Alberto to stop referring to my sperm as my “little buddies”. I think I’d prefer that people don’t discuss my sperm at all, but I guess it is a necessary part of this process. My sperm has been frequent dinner table conversation recently. Still, there’s something infantilizing about “little buddies”.

He asked what he should call them instead. I tried out the Swim Team, My Soldiers, SWAT, the Sailors, My Missiles, and The Force. Unfortunately none of those have stuck. Maybe we should just go with My Sperm.

In any case, the results of the semen analysis came back today and My Sperm are of sound body and fitness. They should be able to get the job done. Congratulations to me.

However, there was one odd thing on the report. Apparently, 82% of My Sperm have “irregular heads”. The doctor didn’t list this as a concern, but it’s still strange. I don’t know if they are too big (My Giants) or too small (My Roaming Gnomes) or shaped like a heart (My Lovers). As long as they’re not shaped like swastikas (My Nazis?).

I kind of want to see pictures. It would be like a yearbook (Class of 4/25/12, the next class will graduate in a few days, if the mood is right). Or maybe more like one of those moments from nature at the end of CBS Sunday Morning (Charles Osgood: “We leave you this morning at a recent ejaculation in Massachusetts, where a group of sperm are showing off their irregular heads.”).

I don’t think that’s one of the services offered at our clinic, though. Maybe someday I’ll have access to a microscope and some privacy. Until then I’ll be wondering what’s wrong with My Missiles’ warheads.

We have chosen an Egg Donor. Unsurprisingly, she is Colombian. She has impeccable cheek bones. She is smart and healthy. I can’t reveal too much identifying information about her, but one factor that lead us to choose her from the Egg Bank over the other twelve or so Latina donors was that she listed Scrabble as one of her hobbies, with the added information, “I rarely lose.”

Bring it on Egg Lady.

Actually, the donor and I will probably never play Scrabble with each other. There are differing philosophies about “open” vs. “closed” donation. Our surrogacy agency is a big proponent of open donation, which is when the donor and the intended parents meet and exchange contact information. The intended parents may or may not share regular updates on the child’s life with the donor, but if the child eventually and at an appropriate age wants to contact the donor, he or she can. The agency believes this is the best way to answer a child’s questions about his or her origins and that he or she will feel more comfortable having the option to meet his or her biological mother.

Our IVF clinic feels that closed donation is best. They believe in a donor’s right to privacy and that the donor should have the right to move on with her life. She will process her feelings about donation and trust that the intended parents are raising their child in a loving environment. The clinic retains the genetic information on the donor, so there is no medical reason why it would be necessary to contact her.

We are open to either type of donation. Ideally, we wouldn’t meet the donor, but we would have her contact information in case the child wants to get in contact with her in the distant future. We want to think of this child as wholly ours and we don’t want to know the biological mother enough to wonder if he or she got some trait from his or her mother. At the same time, we aren’t willing to pass up a good, Scrabble-playing donor, based on her philosophy on open vs. closed donation.

Because this donor did not come from either the IVF clinic’s or the surrogacy agency’s donor pools, but from a third party, I am not sure what her preference is. But either way, we have chosen to work with her and we will work with her choice on this issue.

We have now been walked through the steps of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) four times. Once by each of the IVF clinics we met with and once by the surrogacy agency. Even more times if you count our discussions five years ago.

So I’m going to attempt to recount the process here without consulting Wikipedia.

The first step is for the carrier and the donor to sync their womanly cycles (if you want a more technically precise description of IVF, click here). The carrier goes on low dose birth control pills to suppress her own ovulation. Her eggs are not welcome here. The donor takes fertility medications that cause several of her eggs to become ready at once, instead of the usual one at a time. From what I’ve heard, a cheaper method to sync the cycles would be to have the donor and the carrier become college roommates, but I guess that’s impractical.

Next, everyone travels to the clinic for what is called a “fresh transfer”. The donor’s eggs are retrieved through the use of a hollow needle inserted into the pelvis. The natural father’s sperm is retrieved through the use of pornography.

The clinic combs through the sperm (multiple people who have described this process to me have used the word “comb” which is an interesting visual image) to find the most desirable specimens. Apparently, even healthy semen contains sperm that is deformed or lazy. The ones that are leaping around like golden retrievers are segregated from the ones that look like they’ve just smoked a bunch of weed. At this point, the doctor can either place the energetic sperm in a petri dish with the eggs and let them do what comes naturally, or he can pick up individual sperm and forcibly inject them into the eggs. The latter is more expensive and time consuming but usually results in a greater number of viable embryos. I prefer the second method because I have a suspicion that if we use the first method, my sperm may ignore the eggs and just try to fertilize each other.

Then we wait. I’m not sure if the carrier will be in town yet. It seems like she could arrive late to this particular party. The donor and the intended parents have to stick around to provide a second set of eggs and sperm if the first round fails to produce enough viable embryos. I don't think we'll be hitting the town together. That might be awkward.

We can choose to wait for three days or five days while the embryos grow. I guess if we wait five days, the doctor will know more about the embryos he chooses to implant in the carrier. Presumably if one of them starts to look like it might develop into a professional athlete or brilliant artist, that’s the one that moves to the head of the line. Yes, it is a sign of our era that we’ve started to assess a child’s potential when he or she is still smaller than the head of a pin.

Now, a choice. The doctor can implant any number of viable embryos into the carrier (technically they are “blastocysts” at this point, which just sounds cool – like the little guy is going to be piloting an X-wing through the carrier’s uterus – but I’m going to continue to call them embryos because that’s a term more people are familiar with). Most doctors limit the number of embryos they will implant to two, because they don’t want to have an Octomom situation on their hands.For infertile hetero couples, using their own eggs and sperm, doctors sometimes implant more embryos, but our embryos are more likely to develop into successful pregnancies, because they came from two fertile people.

So the decision is whether to implant one embryo or two. The downside of implanting one embryo is that it has only a 40% chance of success. The downside of implanting two embryos is that it is much more likely to result in twins. (Why is having twins a downside? There are medical reasons but I’ll just cite parental stress as the overwhelming reason why we would prefer a singleton.)

If the first IVF cycle is unsuccessful, we have to start all over. It is likely there will be embryos left over from the first cycle, so the donor and intended parents may not have to return for round two. Any left over embryos are frozen after the transfer, and our IVF clinic has a similar success rate with "fresh" and "frozen" transfers. (In fact, the reason we chose our IVF clinic is because they do not have a preference for fresh transfers, which means that if the carrier and donor are on different schedules we don't have to chose a different donor; we can create the embryos and wait for the carrier's body to be ready.) But a failed cycle is money and time wasted. The carrier needs to wait at least two months before her body will be ready to try again.

For this reason, we have decided to implant two embryos. The odds are about a 40% chance of twins and a 40% chance of a singleton, with a 20% chance of no child at all. If it has to go to a second cycle and we implant two embryos again, there is an overall 94% chance of success. If that also fails and we have to go to round three, the overall chance of success is above 99%. If that fails as well it means God doesn’t want us to be parents and we need to reassess our lives.

We are willing to have twins. Despite the added stress, we know we want to have more than one child and, given how expensive this journey is, twins would kind of be like a buy-one-get-one-free Safeway Club Card deal. Nevertheless, we strongly prefer a singleton.

My mother-in-law is praying for twins. I ask that all who read this try to counteract her by praying for us to have a singleton. But overall we would appreciate your prayers for us to have healthy children in any number.

The surrogacy agency that we picked is mainly a law office. This is a different approach than the companies that we looked into five years ago that were mainly fertility clinics. Some surrogacy agencies are independent organizations that outsource every aspect of the process.

And it’s a complicated process.

Gestational surrogacy is an arrangement in which the surrogate agrees to have embryos created from sperm and another woman’s egg implanted in her uterus through in vitro fertilization (IVF). I think when a lot of people think about surrogacy, they think of traditional surrogacy, which means that the egg is the carrier’s own. Traditional surrogacy can be accomplished through IVF or through less sophisticated means (i.e., the so-called Turkey Baster Method, which I pray involves something a bit more high-tech than an actual turkey baster).

Gestational surrogacy offers many legal benefits, but also an important emotional one. The carrier is less likely to form an attachment with the child she’s carrying if she is not its biological mother. The egg donor is unlikely to form an attachment with the child if she doesn’t carry it. In most cases, the egg donor won’t even see the child until much later in his or her life, if at all.

Gestational surrogacy is also a hell of a lot more expensive, mostly because there are more parties involved and IVF is a more complicated medical procedure. The organization that coordinates everything gets an “Agency Fee”, for bringing everything together. This is sort of like the fee a General Contractor gets when building a home.

Since our agency is a law office, they do all the legal work in house. This includes writing the contracts for the egg donor and carrier and finalizing the adoption by the intended parent who is not the natural father. In addition to the legal work, they have a team of licensed social workers on staff who screen the donor and carrier and also offer support to the carrier throughout the process. Both women have to take psychological tests and have to pass background checks. The carrier also has to have an extensive phone interview with the social worker. If the carrier has a partner, he or she must undergo screening as well. The agency recruits donors and carriers, but will work with donors from other organizations’ donor pools. Finally, our agency has an in-house staff of financial coordinators that handle billing and administer the trust account where our up-front fees were deposited.

Our agency outsources the medical work. The organizations that are mainly fertility clinics do it the other way around. We were able to pick essentially any fertility clinic we wanted, although our agency made some suggestions to narrow the field. We went with a clinic within driving distance, although compared to the overall cost, travel to a clinic anywhere in the country would have been a small expense. We chose our clinic because the people we met with seemed organized and emphasized choosing an egg donor based on her qualities not her schedule (more on that tomorrow).

There are intended parents that choose to coordinate this process on their own, just like there are some people who will build a house without a general contractor. They will choose their own lawyer, IVF clinic, egg donor and surrogate. They will attempt to recruit a surrogate online. They may work with an established egg donation agency or they may try to find a donor on the Internet as well.

Even though “going independent” can save thousands of dollars, that is not for us. I’m not going to trust some woman that I found on Craigslist and met once at an Applebee’s to carry my child. We want both the screening and the hand holding that comes from working with an agency. We’ve been assigned a coordinator that acts as a single point of contact and schedules travel as well as visits to the IVF clinic for the various medical procedures involved. She has set up phone calls and answered a ton of questions (or forwarded them to the various legal, financial and medical experts involved).

This journey is already stressful enough without having to worry about syncing everyone’s schedules. Google Calendar is not a substitute for a good agency.

I’m learning from looking through egg donor profiles that Columbians are just better looking than the rest of us. Shakira and Sophia Vergara are not outliers. As I click through the different pictures to find out more about these women, inevitably the ones I click on first are the Columbianas.

We have decided to use my sperm to create this baby. We came to this decision because my parents have no biological grandchildren. And all four of my grandparents have no biological great-grandchildren. I’m not entirely sure what the world would be missing out on if it were denied another generation of Smiths and Meekers, but we’d like to find out. The world already has a new generation of Barcenases and ample opportunity for more.

Since we are using white sperm (I mean, sperm from a white person), we want to find a Latina egg. We want our children to look like both of us, as much as possible. I’ve discovered that this process will be considerably easier if/when we use Alberto’s sperm, next time around. There are far more white eggs than brown.

The egg donor coordinator at our IVF clinic explained why. We aren’t the only couple that wants their baby to look like both of them. And there are far more white couples looking for donors and surrogates. This is not because infertility strikes white people more often or that there are fewer ethnic minority and mixed race gay couples that want to have kids. It’s because white people are more likely to be able to afford this treatment. In the case of hetero couples, there are more whites with health insurance that covers infertility (I’m saving the insurance issue for a day that I feel more like going on a rant).

So because of the socioeconomic demographics of the United States, we have a much smaller pool of donors. Ironically, because of those same socioeconomic factors, it’s more likely that donors of non-white backgrounds could use the money. Add in the fact that the eggs in the highest demand come from women who went to or are enrolled in Ivy League colleges, women who will likely make more over their lifetimes than the average donor, and it’s just like any other market – the rich get richer.

But at least God gave us Columbia and made its women fertile.

We started seriously looking into surrogacy right around the time that we were married. We had been dating for seven years and we were approaching thirty. A year earlier I had inherited a piece of saleable property from my Grandfather. The time seemed right.

At that point, there were two major, national organizations that catered to gay men who wanted to have children through surrogacy (there are now more than this, although the agencies vary in size and scope). We’ll call them Company A and Company B. We requested information from both of them.

Both of the organizations had glossy brochures. Company A included a DVD that we never watched. Both places included paperwork we needed to fill out if we wanted to have a customized presentation. Neither of the agencies worked exclusively with gay couples, but one of them had a questionnaire that was clearly not designed for this program and was more tailored to their work with infertile heterosexuals. It included questions like, “Is the semen usually deposited in the vagina?” 

Um, no. There isn’t a vagina within 100 feet of the semen.

Although we returned questionnaires to both organizations, we only set up a consultation with the agency that had no interest in whether or not I have regular menstrual cycles. It helped that they had a representative in Wellesley, just down the street from what would become the Pinkberry where I now spend way too much time.

We met with a nice, quiet man, probably in his early forties, who had used Company A to have a child with his husband four years earlier. He made it a point to say that although he was paid for these consultations he was not an employee of Company A (I guess that means that at the end of the year they give him a 1099 instead of a W-2; other than that I can’t really see a distinction). We had a lovely conversation about our desire to become parents and his experience with surrogacy. We were impressed by the level of screening Company A put both potential surrogates and egg donors through. He walked us through the timeline and the medical procedures and the cost. Because the brochures had come with cost estimates, we did not fall out of our chairs when he announced the price.

We left feeling excited. We thought that we would be fathers in 18 to 24 months, possibly before our thirtieth birthdays. We talked about Company A in the car on the way home and were in complete agreement that we would sign a contract with them as soon as possible.

Company A (as well as the organization we are currently in contract with, which is not Company A) requires that all of the costs be deposited in a trust account before the process can begin. That is to ensure that if the intended parents suffer financial hardships during the pregnancy, everyone will still get paid. You can’t repossess a child like you can a beach house. So we couldn’t sign a contract right away, but we decided that we would as soon as we could sell that piece of property that I inherited from my Grandfather.

Well, it’s five years later and that damn piece of property still sits on the market unpurchased. Company A got my hopes up a few years ago by offering a financing program. I excitedly emailed our contact there to find out the details. They said that they would finance 80% of the price at a rate of 12%. That seemed steep, but we were willing to go with it. Then I read the term of the loan: 1 year. As a financial professional I cannot think of a single person to whom that loan would appeal. Perhaps someone with a lot of money in short-term bonds. 

I fired back a terse reply: “Please let me know if a longer term becomes available.”  I don’t think I even included a “Regards” or “Sincerely” in closing. 

 And so, we waited. During this time we reconsidered adoption, but decided to keep waiting for a few more years. I re-evaluated what I consider to be a good age to have one’s first child. Alberto would want me to point out that we also continued to live our lives. We took trips and went dancing and spent a lot of time with friends. We extended our youth. 

But I don’t think it’s overdoing it to say that mostly we waited.

And finally, a different piece of property sold. My father also inherited property from my Grandfather and suddenly he was flush with cash. He intended to reinvest that money, but he agreed to let Alberto and I borrow enough to create a grandchild. Finally we were ready to move forward.

I have always wanted children. As a child, I wanted my parents to have some more, because I didn’t like being an only child. I remember telling them that I planned to have four or five children. “Just wait until you have the first one,” my father said. “You’ll want to put that one back in.”

I have never thought of being gay as an obstacle to parenthood. Well, obviously it’s an obstacle. I guess I should say I never thought it represented the end of my parental ambition. I have heard a lot of gay men say that they wish they weren’t gay because they want to have a family. I’ve never thought of the two as mutually exclusive. From the moment I started looking for a nice, young man to settle down with, I knew that one of my most important criteria for choosing a mate was what he would be like as a father (and I wouldn’t even consider anyone who didn’t want to have children).

I think the first time I heard Alberto say, “I thought I would be a father by now,” we were 23 and had been dating two years. I know he has ached over how long it has taken for us to reach this part of our lives as much as I have, but I won’t presume to enter his head and write about what the experience has been like for him. Over the course of our twelve years together we have constantly discussed how we are going to have children.

I have been an advocate for surrogacy since these conversations started. I won’t get into the Nature vs. Nurture debate (although I reserve the right to bring it up later). In any case, as much as I’d like to believe that I have biological reasons for wanting to have a child that is biologically my own, I should probably admit to myself that the decision is at least equally emotional. I want a child that looks like me and sounds like me. I want him or her to have at least a 50/50 shot of having my inborn talents, and if he or she has my innate deficiencies, at least I already know how to deal with those problems. I also want a child that looks like a tiny Alberto. I want him to have Alberto’s smile and thick hair and big head. Unfortunately, technology has not progressed to the point that we can combine our DNA into one little Philberto. (But don’t think for a second that if science came up with a method to do so tomorrow that I’d give weight to any of the Faustian arguments against it.) So, we’ll just have to have two kids.

Alberto has wavered back and forth between adoption and surrogacy. He believes (correctly) that adoption is a noble pursuit, a way to give children in need of a home the support and love they need. As a teacher he has seen the effects of bad parenting on children and believes that offering a more supportive environment to a child is a great way to improve the world. But he can also understand the desire to pass on your DNA to a new generation. I think he is even more concerned than I am that if I don’t have biological children, my family line will stop (I’m not only an only child but an only grandchild on both sides).

But again, I don’t want to dig too deep into his reasons. He can write a blog himself if he wants to share those. So I’ll tell you another reason why I want to have a biological child, even though it’s not quite as dignified. I don’t want to have to give anything up to be gay. Well, you know, except women.

That’s one of the reasons why I believe so strongly in the right to marry. Alberto is my husband (thank-you-very-much Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts). We have a nice house and good careers and a mischievous, affectionate cat. We have the acceptance of our peers. We can hold hands in public if we so choose.

And we can have children. They can look and sound like us. They can be good at basketball (if they take after Alberto) or suck at basketball (if they take after me) and dammit that’s because of our genes.

I know that’s not a good enough reason to choose surrogacy so please refer back a few paragraphs to where I was being more sympathetic.

I’m looking at a small, round, plastic container. In about ten minutes I’m going to be holding this container in one hand, and doing something with the other hand that’s none of your business. My thoughts in those moments will be equally private, so I want to tell you a little bit about my thoughts right now.

Less than a month ago, my husband Alberto and I signed a contract with a surrogacy agency and dropped it in the mail with a huge check. I mean a massive, giant check. A check that could have been the down payment on a charming three-bedroom house in a nice, leafy suburb.

Since then, things have moved quickly. We expected to be “matched” with a surrogate in two-to-six months. By that time, we would have chosen a fertility clinic to perform the embryo transfer, signed wills to ensure that if we die during this process someone will care for the child (or children, but more on that later), and had a lawyer examine our health insurance to see if our medical plan will cover any of this. But either the agency or God worked faster than we expected. Now we have to have all of those things done immediately.

And, I have to have my semen analyzed, hence the container.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll recount how we got here. Not just from the moment we signed the contract, but from the time we decided to pursue surrogacy, more than five years ago. We still have a long way to go and I’m trying not to get so excited about how close we are to having a child that I spend the next year of my life praying for the time to fly by, like a kid waiting for Christmas. I’m going to record this journey so that I don’t forget it in the future, and also to slow myself down in the present.

I will not, however, say any more about the container and its contents.