By CARL T. HALL
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, May 07, 2007
Infertility clinics in areas of the country with large gay populations are actively promoting biological parenthood for gay men and lesbians, hoping to expand the market for reproductive technologies once aimed almost exclusively at infertile heterosexuals.
The methods can be expensive and fraught with difficulties, and the families that result may or may not be legally recognized _ or even socially accepted _ in less gay-friendly places.
Despite the risks, biological parenthood is increasingly seen in gay communities as an attractive alternative to adopting _ or remaining childless.
"For some people, having a biological connection to their children is important," said Judy Appell, a lesbian parent of two and executive director of Our Family Coalition, a San Francisco gay-parenthood group. "More doors are opening to us through medical advancements, so more and more people are willing to try new ways to create our families."
Options range from simple intrauterine insemination for women, which may cost a few hundred dollars, to use of paid egg donors and gestational surrogates for gay men, who may have to pay $150,000 in medical and legal services to have a child.
Statistics are hard to come by, in part because of the controversy surrounding same-sex marriage and the hostility in some parts of the country to the idea of gay men and lesbians raising families. But experts in the field say there's no doubt that at least 5 percent of clients at many clinics are homosexual.
"In the last decade, it's dramatically increased," said Gail Taylor, president and founder of Growing Generations in Los Angeles, which offers surrogacy services.
Jeff Eichenfield, 46, a gay man from San Francisco, said he's perceived a lot of isolation and unhappiness in the gay community partly because of limited opportunities to have families. That changed for him in October when his son, Nate, was born using a surrogate.
"I've talked to a lot of gay men, and they say, 'How many trips can you take? How many restaurants? How many new cars?' " Eichenfield said. "I want people to see there's a whole other side to gay life. Gay life is changing."
Taylor's organization has been involved in the births of about 500 babies in the past 11 years, she said, mostly to gay men using a gestational surrogate _ a woman paid to carry an implanted embryo produced from a donor egg fertilized with the client's sperm.
In vitro fertilization technology today offers gay people more options to participate directly in the biological adventure of childbirth than once thought possible, creating along the way some novel family relationships.
Ronda Hanson, 47, and her partner, Darleen DeRosa, 36, of Moss Beach, Calif., decided to use the younger woman's eggs, which were fertilized in vitro. They obtained sperm from an anonymous donor through a sperm bank. The resulting embryos were transferred into Hanson, who after three failed pregnancies delivered a boy, Lorenzo Hanson DeRosa, on July 12, 2006.
"I am the birth mother, but not the biological mother," Hanson said. "It was a way for us to feel that we were really sharing this baby, much the same as a straight couple would. To whatever extent we could do this together, we did."
Both men in a relationship can contribute sperm to fertilize donor eggs. A resulting embryo from each man can be implanted in a surrogate, sometimes at the same time, in order to produce fraternal twins, each child with a different biological father.
Dr. G. David Adamson, director of a San Francisco Bay Area medical group called Fertility Associates of Northern California and president-elect of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the leading in vitro industry group, said the boom in biological parenthood is driven not so much by technology as by gradually changing societal attitudes.
"There's increasing acceptance of nontraditional families, meaning either single women or men or couples of women and men having a life together and sometimes wanting to have children together," he said. "So there's unquestionably been an increased utilization of these more sophisticated technologies and less traditional approaches to creating families."
This recently prompted the American Fertility Association, a national patient-advocacy group in New York, to create its first referral list of providers eager to expand their gay and lesbian clientele. "It's another reflection of the gay community growing up," said Pamela Madsen, the group's founder.
(E-mail Carl Hall at chall(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)
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