Just out., November 01, 2012, Page 24, Image 24

by Aaron Spencer
PARENTING | Surrogacy
&
Two Men Two Babies
This couple creates a family via an egg donor and surrogacy and enjoys the gift of parenting, something they thought they'd never have.
The men, Alvin Black, 25, and Seth Hutton, 35, keep a manicured lawn
and a lavish, tasteful home. Their haircuts are neat and their clothes styl-
ish. They have all the makings of a gay poster couple (well, except for
their dogs; a German Shepherd and a Bulldog might be a little too butch
for the stereotype).
But what puts Black and Hutton over the top for Most Enviable Couple
are their children: twin boys, both with golden hair, scampering around
and squealing with joy as only toddlers do.
The couple had the twins via surrogacy, a long process that put to the test
their stamina for doing everything right. The process was also exorbi-
tantly expensive and raised new concerns at every turn. But in the end,
the couple’s diligence paid off.
The twins, named A.J. and Sterling, are 15 months old. They carry their
tiny feet across the plush living room carpet, which was installed right
before their birth (until then all the flooring was slick granite). The twins
pass a portrait of themselves on a shelf. Its frame is engraved to read
“Daddies' Boys.”
A.J. occasionally toddles up to Black and intentionally makes a face he
knows will make his dad laugh. It works. Black says he didn’t anticipate
the twins’ entire personalities.
“I knew I wanted children desperately,” Black says, “but I thought that
just might not be a reality. And when the opposite became true, it was
better than I expected.”
Though both men are strongly family-oriented, they had tabled the idea
of having children. But when their relationship began, the topic repeat-
edly came up.
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“We both felt a disconnect,” Hutton says. “Being gay, you don’t have kids,
but we wanted to use our life to contribute to another life. We both felt
that’s why we were really here – to have children.”
The impulse gradually snowballed into attentive research. The couple
considered their options. They ruled out adoption; their preferred meth-
od of adoption was almost as expensive as surrogacy, and they were
afraid of last minute rejection. They were also considerably risk averse,
apprehensive about unknown parts of an adopted child’s or a parent’s
past.
They decided on surrogacy, which still left many questions. Who would
be the biological father? Would either have hard feelings? Would they do
the “swirl?” Those questions were tossed aside with one trip to Oregon
Reproductive Medicine; the doctor recommended twins.
“I had seen celebrities do that,” Hutton says, “but I never thought it was
an achievable option.”
The doctor came up with a remarkably simple scenario: each twin would
be fathered by one of the dads, and both twins would come from the
same mother’s eggs. The twins, in effect, would be half brothers, but each
twin would be biologically connected to one of the dads.
The twins would be birthed from an unrelated surrogate. The entire
process, including egg donation, surrogacy fees, hospital bills and other
expenses, would end up costing more than $100,000 – or at least, that’s
when Black and Hutton stopped keeping track.
Black and Hutton painstakingly vetted the egg donor and the surrogate,
not only for health and intelligence, but for compatibility. In the thirty
pages of information available for each anonymous egg donor, Black
and Hutton searched for a hybrid of physical and personality traits that
would complement both men.
When the delivery day came, the first baby to be delivered, Sterling,
looked strikingly like Hutton, which worried him. What if the second
baby looked like him, too?
November 2012
Photo courtesy of Alvin Black & Seth Hutton
Vancouver, WA, or “Vantucky” as it’s some-
times fondly called, may seem like an odd place
for the perfect gay couple to live, but there they
are, literally at the end of a cul-de-sac in the
suburbs.