The Single Dad Who Had a Baby Via Surrogate
Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.
Chaz always pictured himself with kids of his own. Growing up in Brooklyn, “I was part of a Jewish community that’s very family-centric,” he says. Chaz’s immediate family — his mom, dad, and sister — was tight-knit, and holidays and other gatherings were joyful affairs filled with friends and their children. Chaz assumed that someday he’d add his own kids to the mix.
In his late 20s, Chaz came out to his family. He’d known he was gay for a long time, but he’d never doubted that he would one day become a father. “I kind of assumed I’d have a similar type of family to the one I grew up with,” he says. He also assumed he’d do it with a partner.
But by the time he hit his mid-30s, Chaz was unattached. Gay friends in his circle were settling down and having children, many with the help of surrogates. Suddenly, Chaz found himself thinking about his own future and whether or not it would include kids. “I had to really contemplate if I wanted to do it solo,” he says. Seeing his friends thriving as parents gave him confidence that he could be a great dad, too. “It went from this hypothetical thing to, ‘This could be real,’” he says. Chaz deeply wanted to be a father, he realized — whether he was partnered or not. “This idea of a two-parent family is kind of archaic,” he says. “I thought, I’m confident, I’ve taken care of kids, I can do it.”
To learn more about surrogacy, Chaz went to a conference in Manhattan in 2018 hosted by Men Having Babies, a nonprofit organization that helps gay couples and singles interested in having children. There he connected with an outreach coordinator for a fertility clinic that some of his friends had used in Portland, Oregon. The pair had a lot in common and ended up striking up a friendship outside of the conference. A couple of years after their initial meeting, Chaz’s friend encouraged him to start his journey to fatherhood. “He told me, ‘Just take a step. Just get a physical exam and make sure everything works okay,’” Chaz recalls.
He did, and he started the process in earnest after that. Chaz also knew he’d need to put away a significant amount of money. For a few years, he took on freelance consulting work outside of his full-time job in higher education to supplement his income. He also received some financial help from family and applied for and won a grant from a nonprofit that helps Jewish couples and singles trying to build families.
But that wasn’t all. During COVID, Chaz also gave up his lease and moved into his parents’ house upstate, a pivot that saved him tens of thousands of dollars. Then, in 2021, when he decided to move back to the city and started looking for apartments, he hit the housing jackpot, stumbling onto a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side with a bevy of baby-friendly features. “At that point, I was very much thinking ahead about what it would be like to get a stroller in and out,” he says. “The apartment was great: recently renovated, in a great location, on the first floor, with a good-size alcove that would be good for the baby. I didn’t know it was rent-stabilized until I signed the lease. It was just really lucky.”
Around the same time, Chaz began researching fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies and learned that the process of having a baby via surrogate was likely to take around two years. Chaz gave himself a timeline and decided he wanted to have a baby by the time he was 40.
Chaz, who recently celebrated his 40th birthday, reveals what it was like to pursue surrogacy on his own, the unspeakable family tragedy that complicated his sharing his happy news with loved ones, and how he’s navigating life now as a single dad of a newborn. “I always say I’m doing this solo, not alone,” Chaz says. “Alone sounds sad. Solo sounds like more of an adventure.”
On looking for an egg donor
Early on, I decided I was going to use the Portland fertility clinic that my friends had used, and where my friend had done outreach. I formalized my relationship with them in 2022, by which point I’d saved quite a bit of money. I flew out there to do the semen collection, and after that, began looking for an egg donor. My fertility clinic had an egg bank, so I focused my search there.
Finding a donor can feel like the Hunger Games. It was tough. In early 2022, it was still the height of COVID, and there was a supply-chain issue with eggs, just like with everything else. Donors often travel to other cities to donate — but people still weren’t traveling as much, and the clinic wasn’t bringing in a lot of new people.
The clinic had a lot of clients on the East Coast and overseas, so to make things fair, they’d upload new donor profiles between 12 and 2 p.m. ET, so people all over the world had a more or less equal chance to see them. For months, I was scheduling all of my meetings around those hours so I could be online, looking at the clinic’s site. Sometimes they’d upload at 12 on the dot; other days it could be 11:57 or 12:05. I’d just be sitting at my computer, hitting refresh.
I didn’t have a huge list of criteria. My first thought was, Okay, if I were looking for a girlfriend and saw this person standing across the bar, would I go over to talk to her? Is she pretty? Do I find her interesting? Is this somebody I would want to hang out with outside of this profile? That was my base point.
But the profiles give you more information than you would ever need, which makes choosing much more complicated. When most people meet their spouse, they don’t know their paternal grandmother’s height, eye color, and cause of death, right? But when you’re looking at egg donors, you have this information for them and for all of their family members — medical history, psychological history, whether their relatives had psych evals or alcoholism, things you don’t ordinarily know about people, especially right off the bat. You start weighing different variables, as well as notes from the clinic’s geneticist. If the donor’s half-third cousin had multiple sclerosis or something, there’s a one percent chance your baby could have that, the geneticist’s note might say. After you see a note like that, you can’t unsee it. I was navigating all of this on my own — but I can imagine how difficult it must be for a couple to do it together, to have two people with different preferences, looking at these profiles.
Every family has something in their history — something that could be passed along. I kept reminding myself of that. If I had a partner I wanted to marry and knew his sibling had Down syndrome, would that detract me from wanting to have children with him? If you love someone, you want to be with them no matter what. But in choosing an egg donor, there isn’t love guiding your choice. There’s just information.
Searching donor profiles was like a game I learned to play. You could only reserve one profile at a time, and once you reserved it, you couldn’t release it back without contacting the clinic. Getting the clinic to release it for you was a pain — you’d have to call them or email them, and they might not get back to you for hours. If someone “better” popped up in the time you were waiting, you might miss your chance to reserve them.
I assumed that what I found attractive in a woman would be similar to what I’d look for in a guy. It was just about vibes. Is this somebody that I find interesting? If this child ends up looking like this donor, is this a face I would want to look at? Other than that, I didn’t have any “must-haves” — except that I knew I wanted someone who would be open to being contacted down the line. Every teenager has an identity crisis. If my child wants to know where they came from, I want them to be able to find out. A lot of egg donors donate multiple times, and a lot of surro-babies have half-siblings out there somewhere. I don’t want my child to ever feel like I was keeping her history a secret from her.
When I finally found my egg donor after about two or three months of searching, I felt like, Okay, this is somebody I could be friends with. I found her responses to questions in her profile to be heartfelt and thought-out and genuine. I could tell she was somebody who thinks a lot and had chosen to be a donor for good reasons. She wrote, “I don’t know if I want to have kids, but I know that there are people who do, and if I can be helpful, I’d like to be.”
On finding a surrogate
I started looking into surrogacy agencies around the same time I was looking into egg donors. The one I ended up using, Brownstone Surrogacy, I found through a mutual connection of mine and Brownstone’s founder, Jarret Zafran. Jarret was just starting out at the time and was working really hard. I liked that ― I figured he’d be able to give me individualized attention, something I needed since I didn’t have the support of a partner. Other friends I’d spoken to who worked with bigger agencies in Boston or Florida told me they felt like they’d been lost in the shuffle. I also liked that Jarret lived locally — he lives and works a few blocks from me — and that he’s a parent who’s been through the surrogacy process. He and his husband have two daughters and understand it firsthand.
I was open to finding a surrogate anywhere. Whoever I found was going to have to fly to Portland, anyway. All I really cared about was that the person was healthy and took good care of themself and had a good support system. I also wanted them to be open to having me come to appointments. I just wanted them to be normal — a trustworthy, reliable person. I didn’t want to be controlling. I wanted to give the person a lot of autonomy, because it’s a lot to go through. As a surrogate, you’re giving almost a year of your life.
Unlike with choosing an egg donor, surrogates and intended parents have to choose each other. It’s almost like you’re set up on a blind date. Jarret presents intended-parent profiles to the surrogates he works with first, and if they’re interested in working with that person or those people, he’ll present them with the surrogate’s profile. He worked impressively quickly. I matched about six months after we started working together, while most of the other places I’d called were quoting 9 to 12 months.
The surrogate I ended up matching with — Jill — lived upstate, in Rochester. Jarret set up a Zoom call that was attended by him, me, Jill, and her spouse. Jill seemed lovely, very down-to-earth. Her spouse is deaf and nonbinary. Jill had carried her spouse’s embryo, so while she’d never been a surrogate before, she’d already gone through IVF and knew what it entailed. Jill is also a fertility doula who knows a lot about prenatal care and pregnancy and delivery.
As someone who’s also LGBTQ+, Jill felt strongly about helping someone from the LGBTQ+ community build a family. I liked that. It was also helpful that she wasn’t too far away — Rochester is an easy 30-minute flight from New York. I could also tell she was very family-oriented. On our initial call, her kids ran in and out of frame a bunch.
But she just seemed really nice and genuine, and Jarret spoke highly of her. After the call, we both took a couple days to think things over, but decided to move ahead fairly quickly. Then all the legal stuff started. I had to find an attorney for myself and she had to find an attorney for her, and we had to finalize a contract. One of my best friends, Cori, is also a lawyer, and her firm, Robinson Estate Law, drew up my will, which I also needed to proceed.
It’s common for surrogacy agencies to have intended parents set up an escrow account to make sure all funds are available to pay for their surrogate’s expenses. There’s a minimum amount that had to be in there at all times in case things came up, like she needed a C-section or something like that.
On choosing the sex of the embryos he would use
I kind of went back and forth on the baby’s sex. Every embryo is given a grade, and all of mine were the same, so it was really up to me and what I wanted; otherwise, an embryologist would choose for me. Either sex would’ve been great, but I don’t know. As a gay man, I joke that I have the emotional mentality and taste of a 15-year-old girl. The year before I had the baby, I planned a year of fun — I went to Las Vegas to see Kelly Clarkson and Adele, Los Angeles to see Beyoncé, and Philly to see Taylor Swift. That’s my jam. I just felt like a girl dad.
I also felt like choosing was the one thing in the entire pregnancy that I would have any control over. Everything else was at the hands of science and God.
On telling friends and family
Once I contracted the donor and hired Jill, I started telling family. First I told my parents, who were great. At the end of the day, parents want grandkids, and they don’t care how they get them. When I told them I was going to have a girl, they were thrilled.
Then I told my sister and her daughter, my 10-year-old niece. Telling my niece was interesting. We were on the phone and I said, “I’m having a baby!” And she put me on mute for a second to talk to her mom. Later, when I was talking to my sister, I asked, “What did she say?” “She thought you were saying that you have a girlfriend and you’re having a baby,” my sister said. That was funny. Like, no, no, that’s a totally different conversation.
Everyone was really cool about it. I don’t think it caught anybody off guard; I’d been vocal about wanting kids and put the idea out into the universe years earlier.
However, there were points when I decided to keep some of the day-to-day details of what was going on to myself, rather than share them. After I matched with Jill and we started doing transfers, I didn’t update people constantly; if anybody asked me how it was going, I’d just say, “We’re making progress, and when I have good news to share, I’ll share it.” It felt like divulging too much info would put too much pressure on me and on them — kind of like when you have a job interview you’re excited about and you tell your friends, and then you don’t get the job and then they feel bad for you. That was my logic. If a transfer didn’t take, I didn’t want to disappoint people or have them feel disappointed for me.
On the transfer process
Going into the transfer, I definitely panicked. I started thinking, Wait — who am I to do this? To play God? Am I being selfish? What am I trying to prove here? After the procedure, you have to wait about ten days to see what happens. I tried not to think about it too much. I also didn’t want to bother Jill, even though I constantly wondered about how she was feeling.
The waiting period forced me to really think about things again and ask some big questions. Is this something that I really feel strongly about? Or is this a thing I’m doing because it’s a societal pressure thing — people have kids, so I should have kids? My biggest fears going into this had been (a) the finances, and (b) the social aspect of how having a baby would change my life. I wasn’t afraid of the day-to-day stuff. I work mostly from home and have flexibility with my job, and I have friends in the area who I knew would be willing to help. I’m used to not sleeping, I’m used to high-pressure situations, and I’m used to kids. I have five nieces and nephews, and I used to babysit for the oldest ones constantly when we all lived close to each other. Taking care of a baby wasn’t a thing that scared me.
But when I found out the first transfer didn’t take and felt badly about it, it made me realize that I was very invested and really wanted it to happen. My reaction wasn’t, Wow, what a relief. It was, I want this. It reaffirmed for me what I wanted.
I found out the second transfer worked when I was sitting on my couch at home. Jill called me and told me she’d taken a test and she was pregnant. It was amazing. For a day or two, I kept it to myself, to be in the moment of it. I was going to see my parents in person a few days later and decided to tell them then, rather than over the phone. They were very excited and went into grandparent mode quickly. I started telling more people after I heard the heartbeat. I flew up for her first ultrasound. It’s funny — at that point, I was just thinking, Please, let there just be one heartbeat.
And there was. Just one. And hearing it was like, Whoa, science is crazy. The fact that you can take these three different parties and make a human is crazy.
On losing a relative in Israel on 10/7, halfway through the pregnancy
I told a pretty small circle of people that I was expecting and planned to tell more people after learning the results of the 20-week anatomy scan in mid-October. In late September, I went to Israel for my nephew’s bar mitzvah and ended up telling a couple of people there, including Cori, who visits Israel frequently.
I was supposed to come back home in late October so I could go to the scan in Rochester. So I was in Israel when October 7 happened. It was obviously horrific. Just shocking. And it affected my family personally. One of my aunts was killed, and her daughter and two granddaughters ended up being hostages for 49 days. My aunt’s long-term partner is actually still being held captive. Here I’d been feeling so excited — and now there was all of this going on around me. It suddenly felt like the wrong time to share good news.
It was incredibly difficult, balancing all the emotions. I left Israel on October 23 before we were even able to have my aunt’s funeral.
On managing the rest of the pregnancy amid his grief
I landed in New York a few days before having to go to Rochester. I was already in a nervous place, knowing that the 20-week scan could show abnormalities. So I was thinking about that a lot. But my mind was also really consumed with what was happening in Israel. It was a very weird time, emotionally.
Seeing my daughter on the screen was a little anticlimactic. You’re looking at it and the sonographer is saying things like, “This is the kidney, this is the liver,” and it’s like, Okay, if you say so, I believe you. But I also got a picture of her in profile, and that made her feel more real.
I slowly began opening up about how things were going as the pregnancy went on. I wanted to be open, in part to normalize what I was doing. Some people offered me things. I had a friend who had a beautiful crib, and other friends gave me a changing table, a Pack ’N Play, all these things. Not to generalize, but the gays take great care of their things. Everything was in great shape. A lot of my friends had had twins, too, so they had a lot of things to pass on. I worked off of other people’s registries to get the rest of everything covered.
My friends wanted me to have a baby shower, but everything I’d ever heard about them sounded awful. I didn’t want to play “How many jellybeans are in the jar?” or “Here’s how to diaper a stuffed animal” or whatever. In the end, one of my friends came up with the idea of throwing a “Dad-chelor” party. We just got a bunch of our friends together at a bar to hang out.
That was about five weeks out from the birth. After that, I guess I entered a nesting phase. I don’t build things — I don’t do manual labor — but I’d gotten a crib from somebody and it was just sitting in pieces, and I was like, “Whatever, fuck it,” and put it together somehow. That felt like a little accomplishment.
On the birth
The birth took … a long time. It was late February. My friend Cori was my emotional-support partner and drove up to Rochester with me. We realized right away that the hospital really wasn’t equipped to deal with us. They had a “one room per birthing family” rule, but we weren’t one family; there was Jill and her spouse, Jill’s doula, and Jill’s spouse’s ASL translator, and then there was me and Cori. The first night we were waiting, I was sleeping on the couch in the waiting room. The nurses were great and did the best they could — they brought us sheets and pillows and really rallied around me — but obviously, it wasn’t comfortable. The second night we were waiting, they were able to give us our own room around 2 a.m.
On Wednesday afternoon, two days after we started, Jill’s water finally broke and she called me over. I had not seen a birth before. I actually joked with Jill that I was probably going to be really awkward when it happened. She didn’t want to have an epidural, and she was obviously going to be in a lot of pain. To know you’re the reason she’s going through that discomfort — I mean, that’s a weird feeling.
It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced, seeing her go through that. I’m not great with pain and blood and that sort of thing, so I chose to stand to the side and wait and let her do her thing. I didn’t want to get in the way — but it was also my moment, and I was trying to process that.
I cut the cord and started skin-to-skin right away. My daughter peed on me pretty quickly. Her eyes were very open, and she was very alert. It was surreal, like, Okay, now what? We’re here in the middle of nowhere. When can we leave? I FaceTimed my parents and sister from the nursery and messaged a bunch of people. I also thought about her name; I still didn’t have one at that point. People had said to me, “You’ll look at her and you’ll know,” but that wasn’t true. That night, I stayed up thinking about it.
By the next day, I’d decided on one that had been high on my list from the beginning: Lia Pearl.
On adjusting to the rhythms of life with a newborn
The first night in the hospital, the nurses were amazing. They found me a recovery room so the baby and I could be together but told me they could take her to the nursery if I wanted to rest. I guess there’s nothing more adorable than a single gay man having a baby, because all the nurses wanted to help me.
Before we were discharged, Jill came to our room to see the baby and say good-bye. I tried my best to thank her, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to find adequate words. I’m much better with writing than I am with speaking and planned to do a better job when I had the emotional bandwidth. I also knew our relationship wasn’t over, over — neither one of us wanted to cut it off completely and planned to keep texting and FaceTiming each other.
Cori drove us home. The first night in the apartment was interesting. Lia was great throughout the drive — we stopped every two hours to feed and diaper change and move around. But as soon as Cori dropped us off, there was an explosive diaper. The baby was covered and crying. It had been so long since I’d set everything up, so I was like, Huh, where are my towels? I hadn’t looked at them in three months.
My parents came to see us that first weekend, and a lot of people came by those first few weeks. People set up a meal train and sent food and gift cards, anything I needed. It was really cold and rainy, so we were initially homebound a lot. Having people drop by with groceries helped.
A few family members offered to crash on my couch in the beginning, to help. But I wanted to try doing things myself first, in my own space, and develop a routine for us. If it was too hard, I figured, I could move in with friends or family or go somewhere. And in Lia’s first few weeks, I did go to my parents’ for the weekend a few times.
In my group of friends, I’m the first person to have a child solo, so I think that was interesting to a lot of people. I think some of my friends are sometimes surprised at how much I manage to juggle. Any first-time parent goes through a lot — although, yes, it’s true I don’t have the luxury of passing the baby off in the middle of the day.
It’s funny; sometimes, when people ask, “How are you?,” they ask it in a way that seems like they assume you’re struggling. And while there have been tough moments, I didn’t put all this time and energy and money into this to be frustrated and annoyed when things don’t go perfectly or the baby’s tired or I’m tired. We’re figuring things out.
Thankfully, at this point, Lia is 18 weeks old and usually only wakes up once in the middle of the night. I’ve gotten better at falling asleep quickly after a feeding. Things are getting a little bit easier. Lia is really into taking everything in — lights, shiny things. Somebody recently brought over birthday balloons for my 40th, and she can stare at those forever. And she just loves studying people.
On the impact of single fatherhood on his social life
I’m somebody who likes to go out and see people and do things, so I was concerned about feeling isolated with the baby. It’s definitely been an adjustment, and it was especially intense the first month. I remember the first time I went out for a few hours without her. It felt like, wow — like I hadn’t been outside in a year or something. It happened to be a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I spent it with friends on a rooftop. It was really nice, a reminder that like, hey, everyone is still here. They haven’t gone away, and they’re all excited to hear about how it’s going. In general, that’s been the case. I basically told my friends, look, keep including me. I want to be the one to say I can’t go to things. But give me the option. And everyone’s been great about that. And often they’ll come over and hang out with us, rather than us going to them.
I dated during my surrogacy pregnancy, but for the most part, I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. If the subject of children came up, I’d say that I would probably have them, that I was interested in it, but only to gauge a reaction. Once things were very real, I started being much more forward about it. It’s interesting to see how people react. For some guys, it’ll make them run in another direction, and for others, it seems to pique their interest a bit.
I deactivated my profiles on my dating apps around the time Lia was born. Since she arrived, I haven’t gone on any dates — though I have changed my profile info from “wants kids” to “has kids.” I haven’t reactivated those accounts yet, so I’m not showing up in searches. But I wanted to take that step. I’m sure at some point I’ll be ready, but I don’t have a ton of free time right now, and the free time I do have I prefer to use for myself, rather than dates.
On their lives now
My family and I are still struggling with everything happening in Gaza. It’s definitely on my mind. It would’ve affected me deeply if I weren’t a parent. But now that I am a dad, I do find myself thinking about the little kids who are still in captivity — especially the baby, Kfir Bibas, who was 9 months old when he was taken and has been in captivity now for most of his life. Knowing that there are families experiencing what they’re experiencing — not knowing how their children are, if they’re alive, how they’re being treated — I think about that a lot as a new parent. I think about my cousin and her kids, who were released in the hostage exchange in November. Her kids are 2 and 4. It’s heartbreaking, imagining what they went through.
I think that for a lot of people who become parents through surrogacy, the bonding experience is different because you’re not feeling the pregnancy or witnessing it firsthand. You’re not seeing the belly grow, you’re not experiencing morning sickness, or seeing your partner experience it. You know it’s happening — you’re excited it’s happening — but everything is a little remote. I was living my life as I’d always led it, with some additional prep work on top of it. One day there wasn’t a baby, and then suddenly there was one. But my love for Lia just keeps growing. When she started smiling — when I started registering that her smiles were for me — I think that love started to grow deeper.
When I think about our future, I want us to be like any other family. I see us doing regular family things — Lia going to school, us going on family vacations, us going to concerts together.
It’s really just us. We just have each other at the end of the day. That’s the ultimate bond.