Daddy Writer To Be – The Gift of Surrogacy

Tarn and I always shared the same dream: we wanted to have a baby and start a family together. We come from two different religions and cultures. I am Iraqi Muslim while Tarn is Punjabi Sikh. While these boundaries could separate people apart, it actually brought us together. We learned over time that, in fact, our cultures are not that different. We discovered many similar words in each of our languages that meant the same thing, and our religions were very similar too. We promised one another that we would teach our child Arajabi – a mix of Ara-bic and Pun-jabi (my and Tarn’s mother tongues, respectively) as we knew that they would learn English in school anyways.

For gay men, there are different ways of having a child, either through adoption or through surrogacy or even co-parenting. Tarn and I chose surrogacy to fulfill our dreams of having a child.

 First, we had to find an egg donor and a surrogate.

 When we became engaged, my sister in law Kiran had offered to be our surrogate whenever we wanted to start a family. She offered again at our wedding. But, we were young then and we knew we weren’t ready to be parents yet. Although it had always been our dream. When the time came.

 In May of 2018, when our family planning began, Tarn and I remembered Kiran’s offer. Kiran lived in Lethbridge, Alberta so we called her and she immediately said, “Absolutely,” which gave us hope.

 Tarn and I did our research and, with some recommendations we chose Olive Fertility Clinic. We contacted Olive Fertility Clinic and began our journey to parenthood. We discovered that paying someone to be a surrogate is actually illegal, however we were lucky because Kiran had offered to this for us a gift and didn’t want any money in return.

 The doctor explained the process – screening, blood tests. Kiran would be the egg donor with my sperm. That way, the baby will have both of our genes and blood (Tarn and I). They went over the cost, which was overwhelming at first because we realized, we had to come up with the costs for the cycle like fast. Plus, we had to hire a lawyer who would draft a mandatory agreement.

 We were determined to make this happen. With God’s blessings, Kiran’s love and selfless gift, and with the help of our family, we went through the process. Sure, it cost us much money, but we were blessed that on the first try, Kiran became pregnant with our son Malek. And that meant everything.

 This brings me to a point that I want to make. I feel like our government should make IVF treatments cheap or free so that LGBTQ2S families can afford to start their own family. It’s too bad not even our extended health insurance with work was able to cover anything. But that’s okay, we are blessed and thankful to God that our Malek will blessing our lives soon.

 As a daddy writer to be, I think governments, health insurance companies and employers should revisit their policies that are discriminatory toward LGBTQ2S families. This is 2019.