There was no ribbon cutting to acknowledge the official beginning of our journey and after all the pre-planning, meetings, discussing, saving, waiting and talking some more, it properly kicked off the last week of January. We’ve been busy since then with a set goal to action tasks each week, so to keep us on track. As a recovering procrastinator I now have the biggest to-do list ever and consequently have become a bit OCD. Anyways here’s what we have been up to over the past five weeks:

  • Created a project plan (sounds formal but there’s a lot to do)
  • Budget review
  • Financing review
  • Insurance (we’re international intended parents so our new born won’t be covered by Canada’s health care system)
  • Sign contracts with the egg donor agency, surrogacy agency, clinic and legal firm representing us through the process
  • Sending updated medical info to the clinic so everything is ready for the next steps in that process i.e embryo creation
  • Created an Intended Parent Profile so a surrogate, who would like to help us, can find us (we need to create a video too)
  • Picking an egg donor
  • Create a will for us both (with details outlining who takes over the journey in an unlikely event we both die)
  • Travel review (cost of flights, accommodation, etc)
  • Miscellaneous items; like finding out how to transfer money the best / cheapest way to Canada, emailing each company for updates to push everything along.

The most rewarding experiences my husband and I had have come from completing the written Intended Parent Profile and Picking an Egg Donor.

Intended Parent Profile

With it taking up to six months to match with a surrogate, filling in the Intended Parent Profile form sooner rather than later was important. We realised we were formalising the principled moral approach we’d spoken about so much over the past eighteen months or so on our nightly walks around our neighbourhood. For the surrogacy related questions of the profile it was really important for us to express our flexibility and how we’d align with the wishes of a surrogate whenever necessary e.g bodily autonomy. Through answering the 50 questions we really connected with each other on our personal reasons for choosing to start a family and our shared expectations for the journey. The final request asked us to; provide a summary of your story for potential surrogates. So as to succinctly capture what we wanted people to see when they come across our profile we really took our time with this part, in the hope it would engage them. We also need to create a video which is outside our comfort zone but I feel this whole process is changing us both for the better ☺︎

We’re an English Irish same sex male married couple living in Cork, Ireland who met eight years ago by chance, whilst ***** was studying for his Chemistry PhD. It was love at first sight. A few years later we got engaged whilst on holiday in Malta (2017) and eighteen months later, we got married in a big house in West Cork in front of all our family and friends (2018). I’d previously bought a house in Cork City close to where I work and we currently reside here with our two cats, but one day we hope to move to the countryside.

Picking an Egg Donor

Over this past weekend we devoted time to picking an egg donor from the agency in Canada, after the clinic advised using eggs of someone we knew meant we could only avail of the single package (which didn’t suit us). I wrote about our initial mixed emotions in Tinder Egg but we actually felt good after completed the task. We’re going to check out a few more donor companies this coming week to see if there’s any other women’s profiles we ‘click’ with. Ultimately we’re going to be telling our kids the story of how they came to be and how it took an egg, a sperm and a uterus to make them [What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth].

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll complete a few more tasks including flying to Canada to visit the clinic to provide our DNA, hopefully match with a surrogate, find an egg donor we both connect with so the clinic can the create embryo’s, and starting the important legal bits.

RM x