I have been a part of the Men Having Babies www.menhavingbabies.org organisation for a number of years. It is an organisation that helps intended fathers from all over the US learn about the topic of surrogacy. In recent years it expanded to Europe and now hosts a conference in Brussels in September and this past week it expanded in to Asia and hosted its first Asian gay men conference (and although the name suggest otherwise, we also had a few lesbian couples who wanted to talk about reciprocal IVF - where one provides the eggs and the other carries the embryo so it isn't discriminatory against same-sex women).
To be in a room of over 350 people all wanting to learn about family building options through surrogacy was amazing (we didn't touch on adoption or coparenting due to the surrogacy focus). To see how there are possibilities for others to now think about how to expand their family through a new route is exhilarating but most of all, to be a part of a positive change in society is humbling.
I've been doing educational seminars in Hong Kong since my first joint event with Todd Sears from the OutLeadership team outleadership.com 5 years ago and it is amazing how far things have changed. My great friends, Marty and Bess, who run Rainbow Families of Hong Kong @RainbowFamsHK and I have been friends for an number of years and this weekend Marty and I discussed at length how we continue to see the change in attitudes with increasing acceptance of alternative families around most of Asia.
This to me was highlighted during the course of the weekend when one of my old clients, who is now a friend, said to me this weekend that his parents didn't accept him for years as a gay man and it was only when he came home with his baby that he became part of his family again. That made me cry and smile, cry for the pain of being ostracised by people he loved but smile because he is back in his family fold and I had a little teeny part of making that happen.
To be in a room of over 350 people all wanting to learn about family building options through surrogacy was amazing (we didn't touch on adoption or coparenting due to the surrogacy focus). To see how there are possibilities for others to now think about how to expand their family through a new route is exhilarating but most of all, to be a part of a positive change in society is humbling.
I've been doing educational seminars in Hong Kong since my first joint event with Todd Sears from the OutLeadership team outleadership.com 5 years ago and it is amazing how far things have changed. My great friends, Marty and Bess, who run Rainbow Families of Hong Kong @RainbowFamsHK and I have been friends for an number of years and this weekend Marty and I discussed at length how we continue to see the change in attitudes with increasing acceptance of alternative families around most of Asia.
This to me was highlighted during the course of the weekend when one of my old clients, who is now a friend, said to me this weekend that his parents didn't accept him for years as a gay man and it was only when he came home with his baby that he became part of his family again. That made me cry and smile, cry for the pain of being ostracised by people he loved but smile because he is back in his family fold and I had a little teeny part of making that happen.
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