![]() Given his age and responsibilities, he did not feel he had time to develop a romantic relationship and decided to use surrogacy instead. When his mother died, and he was left caring for his father, Ian decided he wanted a family of his own. He had devoted himself to his business and caring for his elderly parents. Ian Mucklejohn became something of a celebrity when in 2001, at age 53, he became the father of triplets via gestational surrogacy ( Knight, 2016). They also offer a glimpse of how painful, life-threatening and life-altering these made-to-order pregnancies can be for surrogate mothers and their families.Ģ. ‘Britain’s first surrogate father … with no wife to help’ ( Daily Mail headline 30 June, 2016) Their first-person narratives augment our understanding of the experience of surrogacy for men who do not intend to parent with a woman. Together they reveal how in the space of these 15 years, at least in some cultural milieus, the ‘reproductive consciousness’ of men changed dramatically. This review examines the two surrogacy memoirs of a British heterosexual man who undertook single fatherhood in 1999 and that of a gay man from California who embarked on surrogacy in 2014. One US-based agency reports that between 20 they helped nearly as many heterosexual single parents as gay couples ( Trimmings and Beaumont, 2013: 471) and the American man who started an SFC hotline says about half of the approximately 30 calls he receives each month are from straight men ( Ludden, 2012). Some heterosexual single men are also using surrogacy. The Pop Luck Club for gay fathers in Los Angeles reported that about a quarter of the 240 families in the group in 2008 were headed by single men ( Navarro, 2008). British law, which had restricted parenthood via surrogacy to couples, was changed in 2019 so as not to discriminate against single parents.Ī USA-based nonprofit organisation that helps gay men world-wide use surrogacy sees ‘interest from single men’ as ‘part of a broader surge in gay families' ( Scher, 2018). Some single men adopt, but as the 21st century progresses, surrogacy, particularly gestational surrogacy ( Blake et al., 2016), is becoming a more frequent route. ![]() ![]() SFC created a Facebook group in 2018 with 137 members, they are getting some press attention, including but not limited to single celebrity dads, and social scientific studies are starting to be undertaken ( Carone et al., 2017, Graham and Braverman, 2012). Single fathers by choice (SFC) are a relatively new, quite small but growing addition to the many family forms that have burgeoned in the USA and UK since the 1970s ( Golombok, 2015: 160–162). ![]()
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