Exploring the Changing Family Structures: A Gay Dad's Journey with Surrogacy, Sperm Donation, and Co-Parenting

Let's embark on a riveting and inspiring journey with gay dad Rodney Chiang-Cruise. You will hear how he and his partner navigated the intricacies of creating their family, their heart-wrenching losses during their surrogacy process, and their generous decision to donate sperm to assist their friends in starting their own families. 

In the second half of our conversation, we tackle the broad spectrum of options and roles in sperm donation and co-parenting. Rodney provides us with a first-hand account of his experiences as a known sperm donor in Melbourne, and the unique family dynamics it creates. We delve into the importance of open conversations, shared values, and fostering a supportive environment in a co-parenting arrangement. Tune in for a fascinating exploration of the changing world of family structures.

Growing Families https://www.growingfamilies.org or call +61 02 8054 0078

Growing Families was established by Sam Everingham in 2014 (initially as Families Through Surrogacy) and has assisted over 3000 singles and couples to engage in cross-border donor and surrogacy arrangements.

As an International Advisory Board creator Growing Families specialises in education, guidance and support on surrogacy and donation globally. It provides legal, financial, psychological and practical professional industry advice as an independent third party in a complex area to providers. Growing Families helps singles, heterosexual and gay couples on their family building journeys.

Contact Growing Families today to find out more about its confidential one to one consultations, holistic concierge packages and global events with guest speakers and industry experts from around the world.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

My Miracle Baby navigating surrogacy and donor IVF a limited podcast series recorded and produced by growing families, sam Everingham and Kerry Duncan.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to today's podcast. I'm here with Kerry Duncan. I'm Sam Everingham. We are here today with Rodney Shane Cruz, who's one of the original leaders in the gay dad's community via surrogacy here in Australia. He and his partner, jeff, engaged in a surrogacy I think it was back in 2006, wasn't it? You first started Rodney, is that right? Yes, 2006. And then our dad's two, ethan, who must be now aged gosh 16. Then, is that right?

Speaker 3: 0:47

16, going on 25. Yeah, he's 16.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Yeah, wow. This episode is not so much about surrogacy, though. It is about changing family structures, helping help others, and how generosity of a few can change and indeed create lives. It all starts with altruism, and someone's sperm has to be used along the way. Let's go back to your own journey, rodney, when it comes to Ethan, how did you guys decide whose sperm would be used back then?

Speaker 3: 1:17

Well, we decided, because we were doing surrogacy in the US, that we would both provide sperm and both fertilize eggs. So we had two different egg donors and created two sets of embryos and we implanted one of each, which was allowed, and they both took, but one miscarried early and the other one stuck. And that's how we got Ethan. Wow, wow, we got pregnant first go.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Yeah, amazing, yeah, and I had forgotten that. But there are still people that's still possible to do it that way in the USA, isn't it, where you can actually use one embryo from each of you in a transfer? Yeah, I think it's one of the few countries where that's still allowed to do that. Amazing, okay. So it was really a lucky dip in a way. You could have had one of each and it was in the end it was just one survived, did you think to yourself? We want to try again.

Speaker 3: 2:12

We did. We did try again several times, post Ethan being born, over a number of years. They were all unsuccessful. We either didn't get pregnant, or we did get pregnant and got all excited and announced it and we got to that stage where you get past the first trimester but then we lost the baby. And then, after that final one where we lost the baby, we just decided we would stop, because of course we already have other kids as well.

Speaker 2: 2:42

Yeah, which is what we're going to talk about next. I mean, I know how hard it was. We went through some losses like that and it was pretty tough when you actually when you've announced the thing to family of friends and then you've got to untill them.

Speaker 3: 2:57

Untill. Yes, yeah, of course the hardest thing for us was we had told Ethan that he was going to have a sister, and that very night we got a phone call that you know I think it was about four o'clock in the morning telling us that Nicole was off to hospital, she was bleeding, and so everything sort of just fell apart straight after that. So, yeah, it's a really difficult time. I think it's that in itself is one that's not examined very often. What happens in surrogacy when there is a loss?

Speaker 2: 3:32

Yeah, You're right. It's a good point, sort of why we run those parent panels at events to try and tell people that things can be tough and often things don't go that well and you've got to be strong enough to cope with those things. All right, look, let's moving on. When did you first realise that there were women in Melbourne who had a need for sperm donors themselves?

Speaker 3: 3:54

Well, I think we always knew that, but we hadn't actually really played, let it play any more to be, you know, part in our thoughts. Until we came back from the US. Ethan was to just over two weeks old, yeah, yeah, and very good friends of ours, debbie and Lynn, graded us, you know. When we came back and said, you know, we want to have a baby, we need some sperm, and we had. We decided that, well, if we hadn't had somebody to donate an egg, we would never have had Ethan. And we thought, well, yeah, I think we can do this. So we decided that we would donate sperm to the girls.

Speaker 3: 4:32

We didn't go through IVF, we just did the old DIY, yeah, yeah, at home, yeah, and took a couple of attempts, but nine months later well, not quite nine months later, but at ten months later, eleven months later, justin was born, wow, and Justin is now 15. And then they wanted a sibling, you know, went through that sibling project a few years after that, and Again. So we provided the sperm and again it was DIY and RQ was born. So wow.

Speaker 2: 5:09

So if you have any upfront agreements about what contact you wanted to have post birth? Did you talk about that? Yes, we did.

Speaker 3: 5:17

We had a written agreement that I had Drafted with the aid of previous agreements that we'd got from other lesbians yeah, that we knew who had done this. It was pretty, pretty simple. It was like a one or two pager, yeah yeah, and it did have very specific Clauses. You know about this is how much contact and these days and all that sort of stuff and we all agreed to it. We didn't see it as going to be an issue, but we also knew that these things in this sort of co-parenting role can go south very, very quickly.

Speaker 3: 5:53

Yeah, yeah but after a year we looked at it again and we looked at all the conditions that we looked at In terms of you know what we put down in the agreement and realized none of us stuck to any of them. I mean, we had, we didn't have the special days didn't work out because we saw each other, we were very close friends anyway and we yeah, we're each other all the time anyway, and we had merged our flat families at that stage. So we were on the weekends we would all get together, yeah, and we were sharing, you know, the parenting, the Everything, sort of that. And so when we got round to the sibling project with Archey, we didn't bother with an agreement, we just said let's just keep going as we have gone and, you know, 16 years later, every weekend the families merge and we go on holidays together.

Speaker 3: 6:44

We have a we had a strong friendship before. Yes, we went down this path. We also have some Cultural links between our families. They're both Taiwanese and my partner, jeff, is Taiwanese, and so there was a cultural link there as well. So there was a sense that, you know, the village raises the family. Yeah, that cultural thing that made it, that made, I think, a huge difference to the way we parented.

Speaker 2: 7:10

Yeah, that's really nice. And tell me with that that Taiwanese cultural link when you go to Taiwan. Come back there. I mean, how do the local Taiwanese culture cope with those modern family structures that you're presenting to them?

Speaker 3: 7:21

I think you know, 16 years ago I think it was a little bit of a mmm. This is a bit odd, we're not really sure how to make of it. Yeah, but a lot has changed in 16 years in Taiwan, I mean, they have marriage equality now. So it's there's a whole cultural shift that's gone on within Taiwan, but back then I think it was it was something they didn't know how it would all work.

Speaker 3: 7:42

You know their tradition of male and female and raising the family, but once you actually there with a child and they see you in operation, all those concerns evaporate because it's a very child focused culture. Everything is focused on the child, so the adult sort of, and the family structure just fades into the background. It's that culture which is like in most cultures around the world. Western culture is the exception where everybody's an auntie, everybody's an uncle. Whether they're related or not, they all share some sort of parenting role, even in an extended family way. So whilst I think it was, you know the whole gay or lesbian parent thing was a little bit of a challenge for them. Once the child's there, the focus is on the child and it does fade into the background and I can certainly say it's just not an issue now, when we go back.

Speaker 2: 8:37

That's great and I understand that's not the only two kids you have with others out there.

Speaker 3: 8:43

There are a number of others. There's two other children that we have with another lesbian couple, who are younger. They're in their mid to late 30s now and they approached us about six or seven years ago because once Ethan was born, they were friends with them and we just jokingly said when you girls are ready to have a baby, give us a call. And they did. And so there's two children with that lesbian couple. One was that had to be done. We both tried the DIY, you know, macabre and self insemination. That didn't work the first time, when we had to do IVF for the first one, and then the sibling project. That one did work without going to IVF. That did work DIY. So each of them carried, each of the women carried one of the babies. Yeah, wow, that's amazing. We don't have the same sort of relationship with that we do with the first couple, debbie and Lynn, simply because there's a much bigger age difference between the children and also the parents. They're younger than us. However, having said that, we do see each other regularly. We're part of their lives, they're part of our lives, and they're all coming over to Taiwan at the end of the year so the grandparents can get another. You know, meet the kids. Again, they've already met the kids, but we want to make sure because Jeff's parents are quite elderly, so they're all going to come over and so we still keep that structure going.

Speaker 3: 10:15

I should also point out there's a cultural similarity. Not it's not identical Both. Both these girls were born in Australia, but they come from a Southeast Asian backgrounds, one's Malaysian, the other one's Thai. So again they have that similar culture of the village raises child and I think that's been a fundamental benefit for us. So we've been able to participate in the family and be part of the family without what often happens in some situations is that there's a sense of not wanting to share the like, the ownership of a child. It's a really interesting I see this with other co-parenting or donor dads going through this and it can be quite traumatic because the cultural there's just a cultural difference. So we haven't experienced any of that. In fact we've had quite the opposite. We've had the flourishing relationship that just gets better and better as the kids get older.

Speaker 2: 11:13

Yeah, that's the great story. But you're right, there's a difference that people need to understand about being a sperm donor and co-parenting, obviously, and it's not like you were going into the first arrangement definitely as a co-parent and the second one is a bit of both, so you were going to be a known donor in touch with the kids.

Speaker 3: 11:30

Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a whole range that you can go through. You can just be an anonymous donor if you want, and you just go off to Monash or Melbourne and be a donor that way, and it goes right the way through from what we call an unknown donor dad to a known donor dad, to an active donor dad and then right up to co-parenting, and then within co-parenting there's a whole range of involvements that can be everything from just seeing the kids occasionally taken away on holidays to actually going into the thing that's deciding what schools they go to and discussing things like religion and all that sort of stuff too. So there's a broad spectrum that comes into play when you donate or share or use your sperm with somebody else, and it's a matter of working out what's right for you and what's right for them, and hopefully you can agree on it and build on that without shifting and I assume Aten has been an only child.

Speaker 2: 12:28

It must be a great benefit for him having sort of four half siblings around him.

Speaker 3: 12:33

Yeah well, he doesn't see himself as being an only child because he's grown up with Justin Arke as his brothers and they all refer to each other as brothers, and he refers to Debbie and Lynn as mum, even though they're not related in that sense. But they fulfill that role in the family and you can have lots of mums, you can have lots of dads, you can have lots of aunties and uncles, and we've encouraged the kids to adopt language that they're comfortable with in how they refer to the significant adults in the relationship in the family. Of course, when they're younger, you can direct a bit what you can refer to them as.

Speaker 3: 13:16

But as they get older. We've encouraged them to explore what they're comfortable with and the beauty has been is that we've had such these dramatic rainbow families that are open and inclusive that they don't have any problems in having calling multiple people mum or multiple people dad. It's just a. In fact, I think it's a benefit to them. They get to say to their friends I've got two dads here and I've got two mums here and I've got another mum over there, and it all seems to be something that I often say.

Speaker 3: 13:51

Adults get all tied up about it and confused about it and stressed about it, but kids don't. Kids see right through all that and that's why, as they get older and you don't have to be much older, I mean they could be six or seven you just got to leave it to them to start directing and managing the language that they use, and I think it's really important to respect it. I mean they still know who their primary caregivers are, their primary parents, because they know they're the ones that have to ask for permission to stay up late or to get on the video games or something like that. They know who it is, but they also know that when they're with other people in that family, other adults who are assuming parental roles when we're not there, they have to abide by their rules as well?

Speaker 2: 14:38

Yeah, yeah, good point. Are there other kids around from your sperm as well, or is it just those?

Speaker 3: 14:43

five. No, there's another five children, because between the between these two families yeah, co-parenting one and covering two, if you like we decided that it was would be a good idea to pay it back and Donates burn through one of the clinics in Melbourne. Mm-hmm, now I was too old at this stage. I'd hit 40, and then I've interested in 40 year olds right.

Speaker 2: 15:09

Wow, that's right.

Speaker 3: 15:11

But they were interested in 38 year old sperm which was Jeff.

Speaker 3: 15:16

Yeah yeah, and Jeff being also time and either Asian, they were particularly keen on getting Asian sperm because it's very hard to get sure sperm donors for Asian. So at that period Jeff donated. We know of five children who have been born. We've never met them and we may never meet them. They may never want to meet but because it's through, it's a known donor process in Victoria. Should those kids who would be 6789 10 years of age, should they those kids in the future, want to meet their donor and their donor's family, they can approach later and Arrangements can be made to reach out to contact us. Do we expect that to happen? No, we don't.

Speaker 2: 15:59

Yeah at what age can the kids do that if they want to? So Minimum.

Speaker 3: 16:04

They can do it. They can actually do it at any age. However, usually that sort of thing doesn't happen until they're 15 onwards. Now, once they're 18, they don't have to require they don't require their own parents Assistance, they can just go to Vata and go down that path. But prior to that they'll need to work with their parents and Vata to do it. So they all have to agree to go through with it.

Speaker 3: 16:27

But, you know, there's a comfort in knowing that it is a known donor arrangement and, as we know, kids who are brought up knowing that they are the product of artificial reproductive technologies and have donor sperm or donor eggs, they grow up with that knowledge and and and it's been part of their Journey and you know origin story they tend not to be stressed about it. They may okay, I don't really need to meet my donor, that's right. It's usually when they denied that they don't know about and they find out about. Often when they're about 17, they go get their learners permit and they find out oh my god, what does it say on my birth certificate? And then they can feel quite cheated and Because that time of life is the time where they're developing their own sense of identity and their own sense of who they are, and if they feel that they've been lied to for 18 years, it's because their parents haven't told them their origin story.

Speaker 3: 17:25

It can be quite traumatic oh and Vata runs a whole series on this called time to tell, and it's very apparent that what happens with queer families is you can't hide the fact that there's a donor involved, whether it's lesbians or gays. So kids grow up with that knowledge and they don't have that tension in straight families. It can be quite the opposite, yeah yeah, no, it's really good point.

Speaker 2: 17:51

I think what the Vata program has been been great for people and certainly at the conference we run we tend to try and always have sessions on them and born to telling your kids young. One more question I've got for you, Rodney You've also been a long time leader in the gay dads Australia group. What motivated to give you time to sort of to that cause Initially? It?

Speaker 3: 18:10

was pretty selfish. I mean, we wanted to find out information. We were at the forefront of it. We had very few people doing it. We got together with some other dads who were doing it at the time and decided if we pull our resources and every new person comes in and joins us, we can create this network of information and we can then pay it forward.

Speaker 3: 18:34

I think for me, it was really in having our own children. We met so many people who realized they could be parents as well and wanted to go down that path. So sharing information and seeing them go through this process and being successful and having children has been one of the most amazing things and it's self-fulfilling. You know, you say this is what I want to see. I want to see and we've seen it. I want to see a world where having kids born via surrogacy or co-parenting whether they're IVF, sperm donor, egg donor, whatever is common and our kids grow up in an environment where they're not unusual. They're not an exception and I think I've mentioned this to you before, but Ethan's at school with two other boys who have gay dads who did surrogacy.

Speaker 2: 19:25

So yeah.

Speaker 3: 19:26

And the odds on that are pretty low. I would have thought that he would end up in a school, but they're there, so, yeah, that's the good thing, that's what we want to see.

Speaker 2: 19:36

Yeah, yeah. No, it's great. Great to talk to you, Kira. You got other questions for Rodney you want to ask him about have an amazing story, rodney.

Speaker 3: 19:43

So just a quick question If someone says to you how many children do you have, what do you answer? It depends on who we're speaking to. If it's somebody at the checkout, we'll just say one, because it's a conversation you just want to end, but we generally would just say five. We don't talk about the donor, known donor, things through the clinic, but we talk about the others because people see photos of them, they hear about them, they know who these children are, and so we explain it. And then people say how does this all work? And so we just, depending on who it is, how much time we got, we'll go through a bit of an explanation and people are fascinated because, a they're fascinated that it works and, b they often come back and say I've got a friend who's done something like this, and it may be a straight friend or a gay friend.

Speaker 3: 20:33

And as painful as it is to have to explain the story over and over again and I'm not sure Sam has experienced this too I think it's really important because we are leading a conversation and we are creating an environment that our kids are going to grow into, and if we take that bit of time every time to answer people's questions, no matter how frustrating or how repetitive they are. We work to make a better environment Because 99% of people who are curious are curious in the most genuine and loving and caring way. It's really hard, it's really really hard, to find hostile people who'll ever?

Speaker 3: 21:13

speak to about it. It's just almost non-existent.

Speaker 2: 21:16

I found that too. One more question I've got for you is we know there's a shortage of sperm donors here in Australia. What do you think we can do to encourage guys to do that sperm like you guys did?

Speaker 3: 21:28

Well, my view is, if you can do it through an arrangement that you avoid a clinic, that is the best idea. Clinics they are money focused, solely money focused. They do not care about sperm donors. They are means to an end. They'll tell you that they do, but they don't. They care about people who don't for IVF, because everyone's paying money, lots of money, so they're their clientele. Sperm donors are just a resource. So, yes, you can go through those clinics and we have to donate, but be very careful. They're not set up to focus on the donors. But I also think that there's a lot of people out there who would like sperm and would be happy to have some arrangement and you can work out what's comfortable with you. If you can find that, I would encourage you to do that. But there's a lot of things you should do before you do it, not just with somebody stranger of Facebook, but if you're a long-term friend, that might be a good option.

Speaker 2: 22:27

Because I was going to ask you about the Facebook issue because, as you know, we often see articles made you about repeats of sperm donors on Facebook and about many kids over the limits and so forth, and you're saying that's also a risk for people.

Speaker 3: 22:41

Absolutely, yeah, look, I think if you are doing it with somebody that you know and trust and you have an established relationship and you understand what their values are, I think it's really important to understand what their values are and what they want to get out of it, that's the best foundation. It's like any relationship whether you're in love with somebody or you're just doing this as an arrangement, you have to have shared values and shared beliefs. Otherwise you risk going down that sort of anonymous, random stranger on the internet thing, and that can be. That can work and it does work but it can also be an absolute disaster because you haven't discussed or understood what shared values are. You've got to remember baby lust, for both parties is very strong and people will say what they think you want to hear.

Speaker 1: 23:33

That's where having a long term relationship is with somebody.

Speaker 3: 23:36

A long term friendship with somebody will help you understand what the values are before you get to that stage.

Speaker 2: 23:41

Yeah, that's great. Look, we've run out of time, ronnie, but great to talk to you. It's been terrific, as always, it's wonderful to have you on. That's just terrific, thank you.