As a young queer person growing up in the 90s amid Section 28, I never thought I’d be able to get married or have children. But against the odds, I tied the knot in October 2020 and now my husband and I are thinking about becoming parents. We’re quickly realising, however, that good old-fashioned homophobia isn’t our only obstacle. As queer men who are not sat on thousands of pounds, it feels impossible to have a child.
The options available to same-sex male couples – as outlined on the NHS website – are surrogacy, adoption or fostering and co-parenting. We want our own biological kids. I feel selfish saying it when presented with other options, like adopting. Heterosexual couples often make you feel this way, even though for a lot of them, this would be a last resort. Co-parenting also isn’t for us – we want to be the only two parents.
So we have surrogacy. There are two routes: traditional, where the child is genetically related to the mother and gestational, which involves a donated egg being implanted into a surrogate. We’ve spoken about the former with female friends, but the issues could be endless, like it essentially becoming a co-parenting situation. So we have decided that to have a child, we would need a surrogate that we have no prior relationship with and to go down the gestational route.
In the UK, it is illegal to pay a woman to have your child, but there are organisations, like Surrogacy UK and COTS that help in putting both parties in touch with each other. It can cost over £30,000 to pursue the gestational route, which involves embryo creation, fertility clinic fees, surrogate expenses, among other things.
How can my husband and I ever hope to start a family this way? The pandemic resulted in us losing our jobs and we barely have enough to live on, never mind saving up to start our family.
Aside from the obvious privilege many cisgender heterosexual couples have over us when it comes to procreation, there’s also more information when it comes to IVF and how they can access it via the NHS.
For heterosexual couples it depends on the NHS trust as to how many attempts you can have funding for and women have to reach certain criteria in terms of age, health and how long they’ve been trying for a baby. For gay couples, it is even less clear and often down to the discretion of individual NHS trusts as what help they will offer.
According to LGBT charity Stonewall, many NHS Trusts will require same-sex female couples to have tried to conceive six times using artificial insemination before offering funding. It is the decision of your trust if at home artificial insemination counts (which is free), but this could mean costs of up to £8,000 at a fertility clinic. There is no clear cut information on what this means for gay men and surrogates.
It should be noted, however, that IVF is not a silver bullet for anyone – LGBTQ+ or not. Even if prospective parents manage to save up for one round of IVF, their chances of achieving pregnancy are scarily low. For women under 35, this stands at 29 per cent and decreases to two percent for those over 44. Your overall health and lifestyle makes a difference to the success rate but still, it feels like playing a (very expensive) lottery.
Researching our options is an overwhelming task. Although it’s clear that state funding for anyone struggling to conceive is an issue, the ambiguity of information for same-sex male couples brings it home that the system is still not yet ready for LGBTQ+ people.
Fertility treatment, like IVF, should be more readily available for everyone on the NHS. It would mean that, once we have a surrogate, couples like my husband and I on low incomes and unable to afford private treatment might be able to have a family.
We don’t want special treatment – just equality – and while the NHS is less inclusive we just aren’t going to get there. While my husband and I feel more knowledgeable about our options, it still feels like an unachievable dream.
Samuel Sims is a freelance writer
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