LGBTQ family Planning: A journey of two fathers building a family

By Marta Wais MD | March 20, 2025

In honour of Pride Month June 2024, we interviewed Jason and Daniel, a same-sex male couple, about their fertility journey. This interview covers what to expect on this journey, timelines as well as considerations for using donor egg, and gestational carriers.

Let’s begin.

Tell us about your family and your journey towards starting a family.

Jason and Daniel: As a same-sex couple, I think we always knew that when starting our family we were going to need a little bit of help. Our journey started in 2017 and in the end, lasted about seven years. I always tell people there were four incredibly wonderful, generous women who helped us to start our family in addition to, of course, the fertility specialists that we worked with. It was a long journey. We’ve come a long way but we now have two daughters. Our older daughter is turning four tomorrow and our younger daughter is now six months old.

When you started to think about building your family, where did you start?

Jason and Daniel: We probably started with deciding whether we wanted to pursue surrogacy or adoption. We looked into both options, ultimately deciding on surrogacy. And so we started looking into the different agencies who could help us out. I know there are a lot of folks who go at it alone but we felt like, especially the first time around, we needed some guidance to help us through the process, to help us find a surrogate, and to help us with egg donation. At the time, there were really only three major agencies in Ontario that you could work with so we looked into each of them and we settled on one of them and away we went.

How did you work with a fertility clinic to find an egg donor?

Jason and Daniel: The clinic was recommended to us by the surrogacy agency. They seemed good so we used them. For our first daughter, the surrogacy agency we worked with had a sister company that offered egg donation so we worked with that company as well.

Did you ever consider using a surrogate from the USA or from abroad?

Jason and Daniel: We didn’t end up having to consider that. I think our thought process was that we were going to start with Canadian options first and we were very lucky that it ended up going very well. But, I know that that is something a lot of people think about. There are a lot of considerations when it comes to costs, and also just arrangements such as legal arrangements when you’re working with more than one country.

How did you find the process of matching with a surrogate in the first place? And did you have a surrogate ready to go before searching for an egg donor?

Jason and Daniel: We didn’t. Some people have people in their lives who are the right person to be their egg donor or their surrogate. And I mean, we have wonderful people in our lives, but we just didn’t have that person in our lives. And so we knew we were going to have to find someone. I think most people follow the order of finding an egg donor and creating embryos first and then move on to finding a surrogate and that’s the order we went with.

Once you had your embryos made, what was it like to match with a surrogate? Were there a lot of difficulties with the match? Did it take a long time? What was that experience like?

Jason and Daniel: Yeah, we should be clear. I guess that we’re speaking a bit loosely about agencies and them helping us find a surrogate. The law in Canada is such that agencies are not allowed to match you to a specific person. And they don’t do that, but instead, they facilitate you finding each other and each consulting company might do that in a very different way. We ended up working with two different companies and they both worked slightly differently.

But you know, it’s funny, finding a surrogate is a little bit like dating. There’s no perfect surrogate out there, just like there’s no perfect intended parent out there, right? We all come to a fertility journey with our own stories, our own journey. Everybody is different. And so a lot of it is being perfect for each other and finding that person who’s for you. And so you’re in a situation of trying to get to know somebody in a fairly intimate way, quite quickly which is a lot like dating, and that requires you to be very honest about who you are and what you need from the relationship, but also what you’re able to give and what you’re hoping to get from that partnership.

What are some of those things that you would have never thought about that you needed to think about when you’re talking to a surrogate?

Jason and Daniel: When you start talking with the surrogate, it’s just about getting to know each other, right? You just want to know who they are and what makes them tick and what makes them happy and what their family is like. And it’s like really like early dating. You’re just getting to know each other. But then very quickly, if it’s going well, you get into some fairly personal and fairly deep questions.

There are a lot of things in surrogacy that you can predict. You know that you’re going to have conversations about how many embryos should be transferred. How many rounds of IVF are we going to try? There are things you can predict, but there are a lot of things you can’t predict. What if there’s a major complication along the way? What if there’s a situation in which there’s a risk of harm to the surrogate’s body? There are so many situations you can’t predict, but you do need to have some conversations about that in advance so that you can all be prepared and be on the same page to tackle those challenges when they happen.

Was there anything that helped you facilitate that conversation? Like certain resources? How do you know what you don’t know to talk about? That’s always a challenge.

Daniel: Like Jason said, there are several things that you can predict, and that’s how you start those conversations. A lot of the conversations were also facilitated by the contract-making process, because the surrogacy contract is pretty thorough and it talks about all the things that Jason was talking about. It talks about, under what situation would you have an abortion? And then it goes down to granular things like, what foods should the pregnant person not be eating? and that kind of stuff.

It’s important, I think, to have a good or at least an experienced lawyer for both sides so that they can think about those things and ask you questions that you wouldn’t necessarily know to ask. But I think you’re absolutely right that you can’t predict everything that’s going to come up.

I think we won the lottery twice over with our surrogates. They were just so amazing and are incredible. They’re part of our family now. One of the things that we discovered with both of them during the process was that we had good communication. And that, I think, is the fundamental bedrock that you need going into this because you can’t predict every possible situation. So you need to make sure that you have a relationship where you can communicate effectively and you can be honest about everybody’s needs, opinions, and values.

Both of our surrogates have families; they have partners and they have children. And our second time we had a child as well. So it’s a dating process, but it’s a dating process between families. It was really important for both of our surrogates that their partners were also on board and felt comfortable with us. It was important for them that their kids were on board and invested in the process. And we’re so grateful to both of them, and I’m sure that every intended parent feels that way as well.

Can you guys speak a little bit about the timelines?

Jason and Daniel: Sure. The limiting step is probably going to be the surrogacy matching process. If you want to use an agency and you have settled on a particular one, get the ball rolling with that as soon as possible, and then you can make your embryos while you’re waiting to be matched.

We used two different agencies and the length of time it takes completely depends on how many surrogates there are in the pool and how many intended parents there are. Our first time around, the agency quoted us two years from the time we signed up until the time we would match with somebody. And we kind of thought like, okay, we’re a pretty eligible couple…people are going to like us and it’s going to take less than two years. But it actually did take two years for us to match.

With the second agency, it was a bit of a different process. They were less hands-on in terms of facilitating the matches which meant that it was basically like a dating website where surrogates would put profiles up and then the intended parents would basically bombard them with emails.

The surrogate we matched with said that she put a profile up and she got 50 emails within minutes! We actually matched pretty quickly the second time; I’d say within maybe four or five months of signing up but we were really fortunate. I think that’s uncommon and we must have had a profile that spoke to her and we hit it off right away.

It’s a long process. Even after you’ve matched and you have your embryos, there’s still the screening process that needs to take place, then there are all sorts of other medical steps, and then of course, there’s no guarantee that the transfer is going to be successful the first time around. We were not successful the first time around with our second pregnancy.

So from the time we signed up for surrogacy, from the time we sat down and said, okay, we’re going to have a family until the birth of our second daughter where our family is complete, that was over six years.

Learn more about LGTBQ family planning at Markham Fertility Centre.

How were you able to get involved in the pregnancy? Did you find your care was inclusive of your situation with your obstetrician?

Jason and Daniel: Yeah. I mean, we talk about it being a really long journey and it is, and there were really high, high points and there were challenging points. For us, the pregnancy part was the fun part. That was where the “work” of getting the legal matters and the medical matters was largely done and we were, at that point, just really excited to be pregnant.

I think that how involved you get is one of the things that you talk about with your surrogate in advance to make sure that you’re both on the same page about what that involvement is going to look like. We wanted to be as involved as we possibly could with both of our surrogates.

They lived quite far away from us, not a drive, but a plane ride away. We had to pick and choose financially where we could be involved. But both surrogates were really wonderful about Skyping us into appointments with the OB, we would fly down for certain really important ultrasounds, like the anatomy scan, and just involving us in the little parts of pregnancy. Like they would message us about their pregnancy cravings and other fun things about pregnancy that we wanted to be part of. When it came to the delivery we weren’t sure how it would work. Thankfully there’s a lot of experience building in Canada. When we went through it, we weren’t entirely sure how the hospitals were going to handle it and what the experience was going to be, but we were extremely pleasantly surprised that the hospitals were very accommodating. They did wonderful things to make us feel very welcome and to make it understood right from the beginning that we were the parents of the baby and we’re making decisions for the baby right away. It’s the little things that stick with you. They have these little birth cards for the baby after they’re born and the birth cards are pre-printed, and then you would write in the parents’ names and the baby’s name and the date of birth and all that but the pre-printed form had ‘father’ and ‘mother’ printed on it and we didn’t even notice in the hospital but I noticed weeks later, that they had taken white-out to the ‘mother’ part and written in ‘father’ in there – that’s attention to the smallest little details, and we were just so grateful for that. At the same time, they provided really amazing care for our surrogates, too. Let’s be honest, they were doing all the heavy lifting at that point. And the hospitals were just wonderful with them as well.

What was the most unexpected challenge that you guys faced as you went through this whole process? What surprised you?

Jason and Daniel: We haven’t talked about choosing an egg donor and I would say that that was surprisingly difficult, and it’s one of these things that on the one hand, it feels like one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make depending on where you land on the nature versus nurture spectrum. 50% of the genetics of your child could be very, very important so it feels like such an important decision. On the other hand, it feels so arbitrary; you think about the various things that people might think about in terms of how somebody looks, their interests, it’s their education, what they do for a living, all of these categories that at the same time feel very arbitrary. Should we be really looking at these things for our child? That just feels very strange. We found that actually surprisingly difficult to do.

The system is set up such that there is not a lot of connection between intended parents and donors. How does that feel?

Jason and Daniel: Yeah, it’s a bit funny that there’s these two people out there who share half their DNA with our two daughters and we’re never going to meet them and they’re never going to meet them. One thing we did is we sent flowers to the clinic where the egg extraction was happening on the day that it happened as our way of saying “thank you”, even though it’s somebody that we’re never going to meet and we will never actually be able to fully thank them for the contribution they’ve made to our lives. But yeah, it’s weird.

I think especially for our daughters, we share with them their birth story, everything of course, to the level of their developmental understanding. But for them, I think it’s something they’re going to really wonder about and want to know more. And you know what, the agencies have told us that they could potentially reach out to the egg donor agency at some point and see if a connection is possible. But yeah, it’s something that I’m sure they’ll ask us more questions about as they get older. We kept the full profiles for our egg donors and all the pictures that we could get and every scrap of information that we could get, and we have that ready to give to our daughters when it’s the right moment. A fertility counselor said to us: write down your thought process about choosing the egg donor almost as a letter to your child about how you made this decision that would impact the rest of their lives. I thought that was good advice because you want to be able to share with your children everything you do know about where their genes come from.

How are you introducing the concept of a donor and surrogate to your children? What is that experience like?

Jason and Daniel: We’ve kind of taken the approach from the beginning that we’re going to be completely open and upfront and honest with both of them about where they come from and who helped create them. From a very young age, our four-year-old knew that she spent nine months in surrogate #1’s tummy and she knows that daddy and dad drove across the country in the middle of a pandemic to meet her for the first time. These conversations get a little more sophisticated as she gets older. I mean, she’s still too young to understand the ins and outs of egg donation and surrogacy but yeah, when you introduce these things from a young age and are open with your kids about it from the beginning, it is just their reality and it’s neither here nor there. She knows that she has this wonderful person in her life who kept her safe for nine months. And the youngest will learn the same thing when she’s a little bit older. We think that was the approach that worked best for us.

Did you share that you were going through this journey publicly with your friends, your family, with social media, or did you keep it private?

Jason and Daniel: We decided to just be very open with our family and close friends. Neither of us are super active on social media, so we weren’t sharing a lot there, it wasn’t a decision not to. I think it’s different for every person. Some people really benefit from their privacy and from not having others intruding into their personal journey, but at the same time, some people benefit from having the support of people knowing what they’re going through, and that’s how we felt.

I think we wanted our families to know what we were going through so that we could share with them and rely on them for support. We had a number of failed transfers, several times where we lost the pregnancy at an early stage, and for us, having family support at that point was just really helpful.

In terms of social media, I think that’s also important to communicate with your surrogate because some surrogates will not want that kind of information public. And conversely, some surrogates really do want you to post on social media.

Having been through these past 7 years and having completed your family, what advice would you give to somebody who is starting out on this journey?

Daniel: Don’t be forlorn. When we first started we had a few failed transfers. You’d walk around on the street and you would see other parents with babies and strollers and you’d be like, how is it even possible that babies are made? You know, like when you’re in high school, they tell you how easy it is to get pregnant but they never tell you how hard it may be to get pregnant. And you feel like this is just never going to happen. And I think we both kind of went through that despair phase. Certainly the first time around, but even maybe the second time around too. And I mean, we are fortunate to live in a time and a place where there are a lot of resources available; some of them are expensive, unfortunately, but there are resources available to folks who are having trouble getting pregnant. Just know that nothing in life is guaranteed but, it can and likely will happen for you. It just takes time.

Daniel: I would answer the question by saying, know who you are and be true to yourself. When you’re going through a process like this, there are so many people involved. You end up talking to lots of specialists and you’re working with your surrogate and their family. It’s always kind of tempting to put on a fake persona – you want to give the best version of yourself, but it’s such an intimate, difficult process so that’s not going to last. You won’t be able to hold that up, and so you really need to know who you are, be honest with yourself, be true to yourself, and just be yourself through the process, because the faster you can get to that and be honest the easier it’s going to be.