Free Mommy Man by Jerry Mahoney

won Mindy over to Team Us. “You guys are awesome!” she raved. Drew and I were feeling great. We had the official Mental Health Seal of Approval.
    Mindy agreed that foreign adoption was unlikely in our case. She also acknowledged the perils of domestic adoption. But she saw another, more promising route. “Have you considered gestational surrogacy?”
    “Oh, no,” I said. “We couldn’t.”
    We knew plenty about surrogacy. That’s when you hand some strange lady a turkey baster and a contract and hope that when the kid comes out, she sticks to your deal. We’d seen enough soap operas and daytime talk shows to know how that can end up. No thanks.
    Mindy explained that gestational surrogacy was different. Embryos were created in vitro, using another woman’s eggs, so the surrogate bore no genetic link to the baby she carried. This weakened any emotional tie she might feel to the newborn, as well as any legal claim she might have should she decide she wanted to keep the kid after all. That, combined with intensive psychological screening, had pretty much wiped out the surrogacy horror stories that kept the Lifetime Movie Network in business. The ideal candidate had already given birth to her own children; thus, her uterus had a proven track record. But more importantly, she had completed her family. She had enough kids of her own, so she had no interest in keeping yours for herself.
    Not only was surrogacy unlikely to end as tabloid fodder, but there were plenty of advantages to making a baby that way. In an adoption, a birth mother can’t sign over custody of her child until after it’s born, usually following a forty-eight-hour waiting period. So even if she picks you, you have no say in how she cares for the fetus. She might chain smoke in her SUV all the way to her ob-gyn appointments, and you can’t even ask her to roll down the window. Plus, there’s always the chance that once she holds her offspring in her arms, she’ll have a change of heart and decide to keep the baby for herself. Of course, every woman should be afforded that opportunity, but it takes a major emotional toll on the intended parents, who play a tense, high-stakes waiting game until they can finally take a baby home.
    A surrogate baby, on the other hand, would be legally ours from conception. We could attend all of the surrogate’s prenatal appointments, watch our baby grow on the ultrasounds, even cut the umbilical cord in the delivery room. And there would be no fears about how the surrogate would take care of her fetus. Surrogates were professionals who took pride in their work. Before they were approved for the task, they were screened for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. They had to pass mental and gynecological exams. It was the perfect route for control freaks like us.
    There was another benefit, too. Unlike adoption, as amazing and generous as that can be, with surrogacy we’d actually be creating a life. Our baby would exist only because, against all odds, Drew and I met and fell in love. It just seemed so beautifully ordinary.
    Mindy knew a man named Wes, who ran a surrogacy agency specifically for gay couples. It was called Rainbow Extensions, and Wes wasn’t just the president; he was also one of their first clients. He and his partner had two surro-kids. We called him that afternoon.
    “You two are doing something very few people before you have done,” Wes began. “You’re pioneers!”
    Throughout our call, we could hear Wes’s kids in the background—playing, fighting, requesting juice. It was a glimpse into what we hoped our future would be. Wes was very patient as we lobbed questions at him.
    “Where do you find your surrogates?”
    “Are they doing this for the money or because they love the idea of helping gay dads?”
    “How do we know the surrogate isn’t pounding back cosmos and binging on sushi all weekend while our baby mutates into a sloth-like monster inside of her?”
    He’d heard them all before, and