Gearoid + Seamus
Hi everyone,
We are Gearoid and Seamus Kenny Moore.
We went double-barrelled with our surname when our twins were born in Sept. 2018. They are called Sean and Mary and their arrival has literally changed our lives, for the better, forever. Their little sister Anne was born in June of this year and it’s as if she’s always been part of our family.
I (Gearóid) am a full time stay at home dad and Seamus works for a tech company. I am loving the fact that he is working from home full time at the moment, it’s great to have an extra pair of hands on standby when things get a bit hectic.
Some of you might know our family story from other Equality for Children events, I have been acting as a spokesperson since the group's inception. I’ve told the story of how our family came about and the issues not being fully legally protected/recognised has caused us, literally dozens of times. If I am honest, having to go public about something so personal annoys me. I wish I didn’t have to recount regularly and publicly what was a very stressful couple of years. However, I feel that people like us who do this make a difference as the reality is that most people don’t know that this issue exists and they assume that everything was solved with the passing of the 2015 marriage referendum.
Every time I tell the story I hope that it will be the last. However, sadly there’s no end in sight at the moment.
Our children were born through IVF and surrogacy. We always wanted to become parents, but started working on it properly in 2014. We initially tried to have our children through the Canadian system. Canada appealed to us as there surrogacy is based on an altruistic model and is fully legislated for, so that everyone’s rights and responsibilities are clearly understood. In fact, if the Irish Government are in need of inspiration re. how to introduce appropriate surrogacy legislation here, they need look no further than Canada. Sadly for us, the journey in Canada was filled with bad luck. Despite having 4 embryos to transfer and an amazing surrogate willing to help us, we failed to get pregnant. We were devastated at the end of that 2.5 year journey. We literally had; no ideas, no energy and just felt numb. We were also in a bad financial state and honestly felt that our dream of parenthood was gone forever.
We took a fair bit of time out to figure out what to do next and looked at all the options open to us. Ultimately though we knew that we had to try again and so we dragged ourselves back up and started over, having begged, borrowed and sold, in order to get the money to fund another round of IVF.
It was around this time that my anger regarding the legal position of surrogacy within Ireialnd started to kick-in. As you probably know, surrogacy is not covered under Irish legislation, as a result, the clinics cannot support same-sex couples who want to have children. Because of this, going overseas is the only option. This obviously makes IVF journeys more complicated and costly for couples like us. Hopefully with the passing of appropriate legislation this will change, allowing more gay men to achieve the dream of parenthood at home, surrounded by their support network.
We worked with a clinic in the US for the second journey and ended up with 6 embryos - 6 chances of parenthood and our dreams being realised. The surrogate who carried our children is an amazing woman. We had been friends for years, and we will forever be indebted - we will NEVER be able to repay her kindness but we will always try. Bizarrely, it was her idea to carry a twin pregnancy - she said it was always something that she wanted to do (don’t ask me why!) . She’d had her own children by the time she helped us, so pregnancy didn’t seem to daunt her. She lives in the UK, so that's where our 3 children were born. From a legal position, both jurisdictions treat children born through surrogacy in the same way at the outset i.e. the person who gives birth is considered the legal mother and she is the only person with an automatic right to be on the birth cert and act as a legal parent. However, the U.K. has a Parental Order system whereby the Intended Parents can apply, post-birth, to become the legal parents. Unfortunately that is only open to UK residents, citizens so we couldn’t avail of it.
Therefore our children are in the same position as the children of most other Irish based LGBTQ+ parents. That is, the children are only allowed to have a legal relationship with one parent and the other parent is a nobody for the first 2 years. At that point, the non-bio dad can apply for guardianship, which gets dissolved when the child reaches 18 - meaning that state declares our family unit null and void at that point.
EVERY time I write or think about this I get annoyed. I think about all the times that I have had to explain to a total stranger, in front of a packed waiting room, about our family and how we came about. For Seamus and I, we have had issues with basic things such as getting a PPS number and child benefit for our twins, getting a passport, getting access to vaccines and medical procedures. Each time, we have had to rely on the goodwill of the bureaucrat/medic that we met and often, we ended up having to write letters, to explain our position. I am weary of doing this, I am weary of having to find workarounds for my family. Ultimately, I am scared that for gay dads like us, Irish law will always view our parental rights as secondary, meaning that there is a real possibility, that at any point during a pregancy or following childbirth, we might be denied the right to parent and even see our children. That’s such a scary prospect. That’s what drives us to keep fighting for our family.
