A single man in Canada has become a father after an eight year quest that involved five failed surrogacy attempts [1]. Nathan Chan, 33, said he felt the urge to become a parent eight years ago. “I was just a normal guy, working a corporate job, and then I hit 25. Call it paternal or maternal instinct, I said, ‘Hey, this is the right time to become a dad,'” he told Canadian broadcaster, CBC News. When he started down the surrogacy path, however, he quickly encountered lots of obstacles — going through five fertility clinics and five failed surrogacies as well as objections to being a single man wanting to become a father. “Really random comments, like, ‘Why don’t you just go and get a girlfriend’, or ‘Why don’t you wait until you get married,'” he said.
But Chan says it was worth all the effort and pain along the way. “I’ve experienced late-term pregnancy loss with a stillborn and also a miscarriage. So, I’ve just come a really, really long way, and I’m just so grateful for having this day today,” he said. “It’s really challenging. It was very hurtful.” Chan says that in the wake of the earlier failed attempts at surrogacy, his emotions sometimes got overlooked by people. “Of course I shared this pain with the surrogate mom, the different surrogate moms that have had these losses with me,” he said. “Those kinds of feelings are normally not validated, as a single male.” But in the end, it was with Chan’s sixth surrogate, Crystal Lane, that he was able to become a father. “Crystal was my sixth surrogate mom, and it fortunately worked on the first embryo transfer,” he said.
Mr Chan now runs his own surrogacy consultancy business.