Dads: A gay couple's surrogacy journey in India (8 page)

I sat there, with my pants down to my knees (mentally ready for someone to walk in on me), fondling my dick, hoping something would happen. I had pulled over one of the boxes and opened up my Mac, on which I had stored some porn (hoping I wouldn’t get into any trouble about this, after all, this isn't Singapore…)

Without going into any further details, after a couple of minutes, I finally got it “up” and “out” into the jar. Actually, I was surprised how quickly it happened and disappointed at the result. After all, it'd been 5 days since… Oh well.

I placed the jar on the chair where I had been asked to place it and left the room to clean up.

I placed the sample on the chair, as instructed, and walked out of the room...

Jay was surprised to see me emerge from my “man cave” so soon and led me downstairs to a waiting room where they eventually presented me with a card saying my semen had now been frozen. The motility and quantity I had left behind was also stated.

While I was waiting, I was joined by another gay couple from Sweden and a straight couple from somewhere in Africa who had come to perform similar tasks. That, of course, made me think about the chair again. That chair I'll be seeing again on Saturday morning to deliver my next sample.

This was it for today. I'm off now and will try to relax a bit. The emotional drain is significant and I'm not yet clear where it comes from or why. Luckily, I feel very comfortable in this hotel. Everyone is doing their utmost to make me feel at home, making this a bit easier to carry.

Last fall, I wrote one of my - sadly - most popular (or most read)
posts about the female infanticide
taking place on a daily basis in Rajasthan among the upper class Rajput clans.

In short, having a girl in India isn't very popular. They are considered worthless in terms of contributing to their parents retirement, which is beyond me, considering cooking, cleaning and laundry, if you really insist on these ancient gender role. They cost money to maintain and are expensive to marry off (dowry), as the new family is taking on a significant cost. This is, of all the things that startle you in this great nation, the most difficult one to accept, even more so than the archaic caste system, which is also completely mind boggling.

To make matters worse, this is NOT a problem that Rajasthan faces alone. There are villages in Gujarat where NO girl has been born in decades, leading to families having to purchase (rather than receiving a dowry) a girl for their sons. You would think this is good news for women, but sadly, the opposite is the fact. As girls have become - again - the victims, being abducted or kidnapped and sold from neighboring states or even countries.

In today's
Times of India
, there is a long article about female
feticide
. I'm learning new ugly words every day. It seems the state of Maharashtra (where Mumbai lies), is proposing to put mothers who abort girls on trial for murder, which would again put women in the position of being the victim.

Don't get me wrong, it takes two to tango, and I have heard of many mothers who will marry off their sons, suspiciously eye any girlfriend or potential mate and whose mindset is as deeply rooted in this culture as men’s. But as Dr. Suchitra Dalvie, a coordinator at Common Health, is quoted in the article, “sex-selection is best dealt with through education and by implementing economic and social policies that improve the lives of young girls and women.” I don't argue his point. The devil lies in the implementation of such policies. Breaking through 8,000 years of Hindu culture is not easily achieved.

Yet, as Europeans or westerners, we shouldn't jump ahead and judge India. After all, similar things have occurred in our societies as well, and still do, albeit under different names or pretexts. We have our own honor murders, and our castes were the guilds of the middle ages. We may have overcome those phenomena on the surface, but many still remain intact at some level underneath the surface, making the battle for equality all the more difficult.

Having come to Mumbai to become a parent, I faced harsh scrutiny at the hands of the doctors in my clinic (
SurrogacyIndia
) to make sure I had no preference as to the sex of the child we are having. To Alex and I, having the chance of actually becoming parents is such a rare gift, that I wouldn't even dream of jeopardizing or delaying that by aborting a fetus just because it was the wrong sex. Sure, if we're lucky to have twins, a boy and a girl would be nice, but would we love two girls or two boys any less?

Surely not. It actually brings tears to my eyes to think that anyone could even think that way.

Mother India, you great nation of contrasts. Land where the poorest of the poor live on the doorstep of the richest of the rich. Where men and women seek out fertility clinics to make sure they aren't facing a life of condemnation by family and friends (and costs) by giving birth to girls, alongside rich couples from Europe & Australia, who come here to fulfill the dream of becoming parents in the first place… Land where gay couples may not adopt from the hundreds of thousands of orphanages around the country, but where we are more than welcome to make our own.

India makes me acutely aware of the extremely sensitive nature of procreation, of human rights, of use and abuse, women's rights and their chance of fulfilling their own dreams. I am aware that back home in Sweden, my own people are split in their views on surrogacy. Some claim that gays shouldn't have kids in the first place, some would even have us euthanized or aborted, if the test was available, while some claim that a woman's body is a temple and may not be abused to further the goals of others, basically saying that we are violating the surrogate mother, abusing her.

While I don't see the point of the conservative hate groups, I can certainly see the point of women's activists, yet at the same time, I am also aware that for many uneducated women in India, surrogacy is a way toward achieving independence, making choices on their own, being able to contribute to the their families, using a unique skill that their husbands or brothers don't have (and mothers no longer have). Without education, without the support of society to empower them, surrogacy offers them a way to earn a living doing what they have been taught to do best, giving birth to children, nursing them to life.

I am, of course, aware (and Alex and I debated the issue for years) of the health risks to the surrogate. We are extremely grateful for her decision to assist us and part of the remuneration we pay is to make sure she gets the best healthcare, the best pediatricians to make sure her pregnancy is a good one, for her, the child and us. She does it as freely as a miner climbs into a mine in the morning, a firefighter walks into a burning building or a cop into a crime scene. Different vocations face different risks, some potentially fatal. Denying women the right to make that choice over their own bodies and wombs is ultimately another “well meant” blow to their right of self-determination. In the end, for the women, it doesn't matter whether your actions are controlled by angry fathers, husbands, feminists or religious fanatics from other parts of the world. The end result is the same. SHE draws the shortest straw, every time. We hope that by cooperating with our surrogate, we help her strengthen her life, just as she enriches ours.

Of all the things you do in life…

Some you do twice, like jerk off into a jar made for bulls… Honestly, back home, when we did the semen sample, the width of the container was about 1 cm. Here it's 2 in (~5 cm) which would give any guy a dent in his self confidence. Who do they expect to fill those jars? Makes you wonder why the super sized container. Are there guys in India who need it? Elsewhere?

Oh well, all it takes is one good swimmer so I think I'm good, given that my count is estimated at 57 million / ml… Go ahead, pick one… :)

From the clinic and my back-up sample (we froze both samples as my egg donor couldn't donate this week), the driver took me to the office where I was going to meet the surrogate mother and her husband to sign the contract of our surrogacy.

Needless to say, I was nervous.

I first met with the lawyer who explained the contract to me in great detail, telling me all my responsibilities under Indian law governing surrogacy, including e.g. that I may not ever mention the surrogate mother's name nor upload her picture here, not that I would, but at least it seems the agency is reading my posts. Dhanyavad! ;)

When the couple came in, along with their youngest daughter, it felt a bit awkward. She was dressed in a most beautiful sari, and if possible, she looked even more nervous than I… And she's done this before!

Her husband gave me the once over, and then eyed me carefully, making me wonder what exactly he was thinking. He was carrying their beautiful baby girl with those perfectly dark eyes, and she was curious, too, about who the ugly white uncle was who kept grinning in her direction like an idiot all the time.

The contract consists of two original copies with more pages than I remember, and I had to initial every one of them and sign on three different places. The contract even included our photographs.

The lawyer asked me if I had any questions but I basically just felt like thanking both of them for making this possible. Since they don't speak English, direct communication, apart from glances and smiles, is difficult and requires an intermediary.

Once the couple had signed the contracts as well, copies were made and I was given one of the originals to hold on to very tightly. Apparently, I'll need it again when I come back, along with the original hotel bill (to prove to my consulate I was actually here to make this happen) and probably more paperwork than I care for…

Anyway… The family left fairly quickly (probably happy to get out of that somewhat awkward situation) and I took my leave as well, saying farewell to the great inquisition (aka the two doctors sitting next to each other) and got on my way back to the hotel. While waiting five minutes for them, I flipped through a guest book with greetings from happy families all over the world, from Korea to Australia, Portugal, and all over Scandinavia. Seeing all those babies and their happy parents made me very hopeful that, in roughly 10 months, we'll be back again, with ours in our arms. The thought alone can make you cry!

Today, the journey took a stunning one hour and 40 minutes. Traffic was murder and two broken down cars in just the wrong places didn't help, but alas, here I am, once again enjoying the amazing hospitality of the Taj Mahal Palace, at least for a few more hours. Tonight, I'm heading back to Europe on one of those despicable Asian midnight flights, where they make you eat at 2 am (although you'd rather sleep) and where you arrive before the sun, even more tired than when you boarded… Oh well!

Your father is a nervous wreck today!

Today, and I haven't heard anything to the contrary, our egg donor is supposed to do her part and donate her eggs after having been stimulated over a short period. I'm not sure if I told you this, but two weeks ago, when I was in Mumbai at the office of SurrogacyIndia, the egg donor and I were there simultaneously! I was sitting in the anteroom of the doctors when she walked out but I didn't see her, due to a wall separating the anteroom.

Later, the doctors pointed her out to me on a surveillance screen monitoring the office (the existence of which I found somewhat Orwellian). The average 17'' screen displayed several images and your “mother” (biologically anyway) was seated in a corner office. You could see it was a woman, but the image was so pixellated that I really couldn't tell if it was our donor or not. But I will take the word from the doctors and be thankful that your mother and I were at least once physically in the same location.

Today is the day of your conception, if all goes well! Once the eggs are retrieved, they will be fertilized with the sperm that I donated two weeks ago while in India. I just hope that the freezing and unfreezing goes well.

I still cannot believe that you can take sperm, eggs, or entire fetuses for that matter, and just freeze them to thaw at will with absolutely no tissue damage. It is one of those wonders in medicine I just don't get, but I'm happy it works.

Once the process is successfully completed (you can read about all the gory details on the Wiki), the cytoplasts will be implanted into our surrogate mother on the 27th—two days from now. These days are the most hectic ones in terms of the work for SI and probably the most stressful ones for your dad and I.