$70K and 8,000 Miles to Become a Father

Sangpan and his twins on their 1st birthday. Photo by Benjamin Chernivsky.

When Alan Sangpan was growing up in Chicago, the only child of a single mom who had emigrated from Thailand, there were two things he knew for sure: first, that he wanted to be a father when he grew up, preferably to more than one child. And second, that he was gay. His biggest fear was that the two were mutually exclusive.

“I always knew I was gay, but I never wanted to accept it because that also might mean I would have to accept I couldn’t have children,” Sangpan, 32, tells Yahoo Parenting. “With no gay role models around, this idea became ever more disheartening for me.”

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In fact it was decades later, after he had explored many routes to having children and had landed on the option of surrogacy, that Sangpan truly understood he would achieve his dream of becoming a parent. “It wasn’t until the moment I was signing a contract with the surrogacy agency,” he recalls, “that it finally dawned on me this could be happening.”

Now a Honolulu resident and the CEO of a thriving wedding-videography company that he founded on a shoestring, Sangpan is the proud dad of twin 18-month-old girls. How he became their father as a single 31-year-old man involved a many-tiered, multi-continental process that included a Chicago-based agency, an American egg donor, a hired surrogate in India, and Sangpan’s unwavering determination. But foreign surrogacy — a controversial option that’s referred to by critics as the “rent-a-womb” industry — was not his first choice.

Sangpan arriving in India to pick up the twins. Photo courtesy of Alan Sangpan.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it my last resort, but I do feel like I did my due diligence in exploring other options,” he says. “I don’t feel bad. If this is what I need to do to have a family, this is how I’m going to do it.”

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Even though he’s still young, Sangpan says he decided to pursue single parenthood after a failed relationship with a man who was not on the same page with him when it came to having children. “I figured, I don’t know when I’ll meet that person [who agrees], and this is something I want,” he recalls. “I thought: I don’t need anybody. I’m strong enough as a single person that it’s going to be fine.” It’s a resolve he says he learned from an early age, explaining, “My mom always raised me to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to.”

Before turning to Surrogacy Abroad in Chicago, he considered adoption. But as a single man with a risky career in law enforcement — Sangpan was a police detective in Oahu before getting into the videography business — he was seen as a less-than-ideal candidate. So he started asking various female friends if they might consider being surrogates for him, or, if they were single, if they would be open to having his baby and raising it with him through some sort of co-parenting arrangement. A lesbian friend who was single at the time agreed, and, using the so-called “turkey baster” method — at-home, DIY artificial insemination — the two shared a fleeting parents-to-be moment.

“She took an at-home pregnancy test and it was positive,” Sangpan says. “But the next day at the doctor’s office she found out it was a false positive.” That, he notes, wound up being a blessing in disguise, as he says the arrangement could have gotten very emotionally complicated. “It seemed perfect at the time, but looking back, it would’ve been a nightmare,” he says.

That’s when Sangpan began exploring the idea of formal surrogacy. But it seemed prohibitively expensive, with quotes from domestic agencies coming in at more than $100,000 for the basic contract alone. And then a reproductive doctor he knew advised him to look into foreign surrogacy, specifically in India. “I had no idea,” Sangpan says, regarding the whole world in which impoverished women are hired to be implanted with foreign embryos and carry babies for Westerners. It’s become an increasingly popular option because of its lower price tag: The agency’s fee in Sangpan’s case was $32,000. “I knew the compensation would help the surrogate’s family, and she chose [the job],” he says. “I felt like it was a win-win for everybody.”

Meeting his girls for the first time. Photo courtesy of Alan Sangpan.

The costs multiplied from there. Because surrogates in India tend to be gestational — meaning it’s only their womb that’s used — Sangpan had to also select and hire an egg donor, at a cost of $20,000. “I never met the donor,” he says (Sangpan also never met the surrogate). “But she was healthy, had a good genetic history, and is pretty, so that helped.” In order to keep the egg donor fee down, the dad-to-be chose to split her rather large donation of 20 eggs (“they’re called ‘superdonors’,” Sangpan explained) with another client, a male couple from New York City with whom he shared a cab on their way to donate sperm in India. Then Sangpan, hoping for twins, chose to have the doctors inseminate four of the embryos.

“Three months later the agency called me and said, ‘Congratulations, it was successful,’” he says. But there was a catch: The surrogate was pregnant with triplets, which he had tried to prepare for, but which felt overwhelming nonetheless. Not long after that, though, the doctors with the agency advised doing a selective reduction of one of the babies for medical reasons. So Sangpan went back to mentally readying himself for twins.

Meanwhile, there were other financial costs: the price of airfare for two trips to India (one for the sperm deposit, and another to go and pick up his daughters), as well as living in a hotel in India for one month, until his girls were old enough to fly. That added about another $15,000, he says, bringing the grand total of the entire process close to $70,000.

Sangpan entered into a yearlong payment plan, and in order to stick to that, he knew he had to take yet another lesson from his mom, the owner of a thriving auto-shop business: He needed to ramp up his own entrepreneurial skills. So he decided to turn a burgeoning side businesses — video documenting people’s weddings — into his main source of income. “I was going to make Isle Media into the biggest thing I could,” he says. “So I did 100 weddings in a year, and I built the company to the point where I could leave it in order to raise my girls.” Isle Media now has a team of 25 operating with such precision that Sangpan has been able to watch over things from afar, being mainly a stay-at-home dad to Ava and Addison.

Sangpan with his mom and the girls. Photo by Benjamin Chernivsky.

During that first year of building his business, the irony of Sangpan’s new career was not lost on him. “I chose an industry that forced me to be around extreme love and happiness — the wedding day — and I was secretly a little bit jealous of what all my clients had,” he recalls. “There I was shooting the best day in their lives, and I was still feeling empty inside. I had to remind myself that with each wedding I captured, I was getting closer and closer to my dream.”

Fear and isolation set in as the big day approached — he worried about going it alone after all, he worried he had no idea how to be a parent. Sangpan set off for India with a small film crew, stopping to visit family and have his own version of a “babymoon” in Thailand on the way. In the hospital in India he met his daughters for the first time, with the nurses teaching him how to properly hold them. “I had no baby experience,” he says, “but I learned it was always in me.”

He cried “every day” out of frustration (never regret) in the hotel room during that first month, and juggled the girls on the 40-hour “nightmare” trip back home. Sangpan says the experience filled him with confidence. The new dad became accustomed to sleep deprivation, learned to put his needs “in the backseat,” and found he loved being a parent — so much so that he pursued a second surrogacy arrangement just after the twins turned a year old.

In the time since he had brought his daughters home, though, India had banned foreign surrogacies to all but married heterosexual couples. The agency assured Sangpan that they could get around the new law by having the Indian surrogate give birth in Nepal. So he signed another contract, didn’t tell anyone, and “forgot about it,” until he got the call that the woman was pregnant — and, shortly thereafter, that she had miscarried. “It was sad, but also a little bit of a relief,” he says, explaining that he’s met a boyfriend in recent months, and for now is happy to focus on growing his relationship — and, of course, on raising his twins.

“The best part of parenthood is just having a purpose,” Sangpan says. “Every day I wake up and I’m reminded that this is why I’m here on this planet. Everything I do is centered around them.”

Video by Alan Sangpan below: