STUART, TONY, MARNIE (3) AND FINN (1), ESSEX
We’ve been together 25 years, and the journey of wanting kids started about 6 years ago, partly because we were looking after our niece quite a lot at the time. We first looked into adoption and got accepted for that, but we were told we wouldn’t get a child under 5, and that we might get a lot of press as the first gay male couple in Essex to adopt, so in the end we decided to look at surrogacy instead.
It was a social worker of ours who put us in touch with a married woman who was interested in being a surrogate. She had a grown up kid of her own but loved being pregnant and wanted to get involved. It worked out well for both of us as we got on from the start. You can’t pay for surrogacy in the UK, you can only pay for the woman’s expenses. The biggest cost for us was the fertilisation treatment. We had that in London, Manchester, Poland and Turkey, at various private clinics. We don’t discuss who contributed to the surrogacy, only because we believe that’s our children’s information, and so the first people we’ll ever discuss that with will be them. The kids do have a relationship with the surrogate – almost like a family friend – although they are legally ours and she has no active input in their upbringing.