Dads: A gay couple's surrogacy journey in India by Hans M. Hirschi Read Free Book Online Page A

things, more important things…
    Finally, we also (looks like it's been a busy week after all) received the financial breakdown for the entire process. To become parents, the cost of the clinic will be approximately 40K USD for us (add travel cost to that). That is for one IVF attempt. If it fails, the cost will increase for further attempts. This is, of course, a lot less expensive than similar treatments in places like the US where we'd have to spend upwards of $200K for the same treatment.
    As I wrote earlier this week, it's only recently, through a gift from your grandparents, that we are even able to do this. There are a few things that make me wonder about the state of the world.
    We've already discussed this whole notion of putting more children into the world. We would have accepted you and loved you no matter whether you had any of our DNA or not. To your dad and I, DNA is inconsequential. But given that a biological child is the only way to 'beat' the homophobic Swedish system, that's what we’ll do. But it saddens me that so many other gay couples are denied this chance simply because they don't have the money. It also saddens me to look at the price of the eggs:
     
    - Indian woman: cheap
    - Indian woman with education: more expensive
    - Ukrainian woman: even more expensive
     
    Or, if you want to put it in other terms: white is more “valuable” than brown/black. This is still a sad state our world is in. The uneducated (likely?) white egg donor from the Ukraine is worth three times more than her sister from India. I also wonder about the fact that an education more than doubles the cost. Is an education a genetic factor? Will children from an educated mother be smarter than kids of an uneducated mother? Or is it a social factor? Is the reason why some women are educated because their families are 'stupider' and thus less successful and thus unable to succeed in life or provide their children with an education? That is certainly an argument that could be pursued… Or is it simply a case of bad luck?
    Years ago, there was a huge argument that Africans were less intelligent than Europeans. Accusations of racism completely drowned the points made in the research. Fact is that many Africans (and thus the entire population of Africa) ARE less intelligent than the average European, measured in terms of IQ. But this is not a question of DNA or that black people by design are less intelligent, as some people would have you believe. NO, it's simply a matter of nutrition. We know today that malnutrition of unborn children is one of the prime reasons why these people are less intelligent. They struggle more through life than children whose mothers were well fed during their pregnancies! This is a very vicious cycle and probably the most important one for us to break if we're to improve the lives of humans over all.
    This is also one of the reasons why your dad and I support that school in India  with daily lunches for the kids.
    It saddens me to see that our society values some people more than others. When we chose the attributes of your mother, heritage was a factor, but not because we wanted “white,” but because we wanted a certain look, a certain height. It's almost impossible to do that from a catalogue. Normally, when moms and dads meet, there is attraction, physical attraction that plays a role, along with pheromones in a process we don't yet fully understand, but physical appearance does play a role. However, we are also influenced by the social circles in which we meet. Many cultures only condone meeting someone from our own “group,” and we typically meet our mates in a relatively nearby radius, a physical necessity.
    For your dad and I, that was impossible. Instead, we had to try and be as smart about choosing the physical attributes to give you the best possible start in life based on a photo (partially covered for the protection of the donor) and a few lines of text describing her personality. An