Kelly + Gaby

Hey everyone,

I'm Kelly Socol.

I am married to Gaby. We are a Louth based couple and proud parents to our son Luca, who was born in 2019. 

We met online six years ago and spent the first two weeks chatting non-stop and getting to know each other.

When we met up in person, we both knew that nothing ever got us like this. It just worked from the beginning. Having children was something that we both wanted - in fact we had discussed it during our online chats. After we got married in 2016, we pretty much began working on having children straight away. 

We initially chose IVF as our route to parenthood. However, we can only describe our first journey as treacherous. It started well. We were very excited that we had managed to create 8 embryos and we were convinced that at least one of them would become a little son or daughter. Sadly, we were very wrong and none of the embryo transfers worked - despite us doing everything ‘by the book’. The clinic experience for us was horrible, it left Gaby feeling like something was wrong with her. When the last transfer had failed, the Doctor who was ‘looking after’ us rudely turned to me and said, “lets try with you, I’ve had patients with MS before”. It made me feel like some sort of vessel and made Gabriela feel disposable.  That was our last visit to that clinic, 

While we were glad to see the back of the clinic, we were absolutely gutted, broken and just lost. We hadn’t expected to end up in this position, we assumed it would be pretty straight forward. Having taken some time out and taken on board lots of advice from close friends and family, we decided that our next step would be at-home insemination, with a male friend acting as our donor. If I am honest, the at-home insemination journey felt awkward at first. Standing there, holding a pot of my friends ‘goods’ felt like quite an embarrassing transaction. However we got over it quickly and it didn’t take long for Gaby to get pregnant. I proudly inseminated her and felt more connected with the process as a result. In fact, we got so comfortable that we did it all over again recently and Gabriela will be having our 2nd baby, via the support of the same donor, very shortly.

We cannot describe how we feel about Luca - our cheeky, curious, funny little boy. Watching him discover the world, teaching him, looking at him, loving him, there are no words, it’s just bliss. We both found the emotion of becoming a parent overwhelming, but the relief and joy that we get from holding our child is just magical - it made the pain of the journey to parenthood just melt away. 

It was just shortly before Luca was born, that we came to the realisation that only Gaby would be considered a legal parent to Luca and that I would have no legal parental connection to him. To us, it makes no sense that Luca should only have a legal relationship with one of his parents, We are also truly baffled that the government have used the CFRA to tell us how and where we should conceive our children. It’s obvious discrimination. We will not give up - we all have too much to lose.