Before baby Wren was born in mid-2021, gay couples in Northern Ireland who wanted to pursue surrogacy did so abroad. UK law states that surrogacy must be done altruistically, but Northern Ireland’s Department of Health says it does not maintain a formal policy on the surrogacy process.

At first, Patrick and Jon said they considered fostering and adoption because they hadn’t seen any other gay couples trying to start a family by surrogacy within their country.

“We had never considered surrogacy,” Jon said. “We had heard of it of course, but it was nothing we had seen locally being done, certainly not talked about. We had always heard of couples going to America to have babies or to the UK, and that it was a very expensive process, way beyond what we could afford. So to that effect, it was something that wasn’t attainable and not discussed as an option.”

But when Patrick’s sister Charley offered to be their altruistic surrogate, they decided it could be their perfect path to parenthood.

The couple’s first visit to the Belfast IVF clinic was in 2016. Before any medical procedures could happen, they had to undergo counseling to make sure they would be prepared for the surrogacy journey. 

“After this, we were told that we would be getting our eggs from Kyiv in Ukraine because there were no donors within Northern Ireland at that stage,” Jon told Belfast Live. “We were very naïve in thinking that this would all be plain sailing, to begin with, because we were so hopeful and we just wanted to become parents.”

A few months after they underwent tests for themselves and Charley, the husbands were dealt their first blow, when the clinic said they would be ending their contract with the egg donor facility in Ukraine.

However, the clinic advised them not to lose hope. Instead, they told the couple to put an advertisement in the local paper seeking egg donors. Soon after, a woman came forward saying she wanted to donate her eggs to help the couple start a family of their own. Sadly, after Charley was first inseminated, she suffered a miscarriage. 

“We were devastated because Charley had successful pregnancies in the past, but after the miscarriage, we just decided that we would give Charley’s body time to recover,” Jon said.

The husbands’ family plan was put on hold yet again when the pandemic hit, as the clinic would only see people who were already pregnant. In October 2020, they finally agreed to try again. 

“We were a lot more positive about the whole process,” Patrick said. “And fortunately this time it worked. We were able to tell our families on Christmas Eve 2020.”

Baby Wren was born in July 2021 at Altnagelvin Hospital in their hometown of Derry. The dads said it feels “amazing” to be the first gay couple in their country to welcome a baby via surrogacy, and they couldn’t be happier to have their daughter in their lives. 

So far, Patrick said being at home with their little girl has been a truly wonderful experience. 

“We have been very lucky Wren is so content and full of laughs,” he said. “I would say that if you work as a team it makes things much easier, and let the other person rest if they need it, it will be your turn to rest sometime and just embrace the busyness of it all and enjoy it, it literally goes by so quickly.”

Importantly, Jon said, their little family also shows other gay men that it is possible for them to achieve it too. 

“I think of us as teenagers growing up, and thinking family was never going to be an option,” Jon said. “Hopefully it inspires and gives hope to a younger generation, and leads to changes in policy to support this and changes in attitudes around same-sex families.”

The dads, both 34, have since started a legal process to have both their names put on Wren’s birth certificate, which would be another first in Northern Ireland.

Follow them on Instagram @2dadsjourney