Alternative Families

The summer came and went and we were both rally busy with work so didn't really have time to re-visit the children thing. My fiancée was enrolling on a part-time MBA course and my business was keeping me incredibly busy and also rather stressed having had to pursue legal action against two clients in the same month. One thing I do remember about last summer was watching a documentary on Channel 4, the latest of their 'shock docs' called My Weird & Wonderful Family. Ten years ago Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow made history by fathering twins via surrogacy and over the years have added to their family in the same way. An option which seemed to work for them.

We heard about the Alternative Families Show which takes place each year in Covent Garden and decided to go along and suss things out. We registered in advance for a couple of the seminars. Being a mixed-race couple we were really interested in international adoption and keen to find out if adopting from India would be a possibility. We also booked for a seminar on surrogacy to find out more about that as a potential avenue.

The event was really great - there were a whole host of local authorities there promoting their adoption services, as well as charities such as Action for Children and Barnardos. Stonewall and BAAF also had a big presence. It was a great chance to ask loads of questions and speak to people already perusing the different options to find out what was best for us.

The seminar on International adoption reinforced a lot of what we had already been reading online in that the red tape many Asian countries has surrounding gay adoption meant that India wouldn't be a viable option for us. My partner as an Indian national would have to adopt as a single parent. Plus with running my business the time we would have to spend out of the country duration the adoption meant this just wasn't a viable option for us.

The other seminar we signed up for was about Surrogacy and guess who the speakers were? The Drewitt-Barlows! Whilst their story is inspiring and their children are adorable it just didn't feel right for us. Surragocy is a very costly road to go down given that its not legal in the UK so will almost certainly involve lots of travel, a fee for the surrogate mother and usually the agency fee, all in all you are looking at the best part of £100k and upwards. Their presentation was followed by a sales pitch from a US agency who just didn't seem right from the start. The CEO was their to speak and sell the benefits of their service which fair enough sounded very organised and well structured to protect the client, cover legal loop holes and audition potential surrogate mothers the whole thing just seems a little cold and business like and not right for us.

We left that in October feeling certain that adoption was the route we wanted to take. Aside from the fact the it wasn't going to cost us £100k we both really like to concept of giving a child who is without parents a home, a stable family life and all of our love and support.