Sunday, February 10, 2013

[Israel] - Crowd Sourcing Funding for Surrogacy Attempt - One Tel Aviv Gay Couples Story

Now this is a novel approach to funding the expensive process of surrogacy.  A gay couple in Tel Aviv, Israel have turned to a "kickstarted" style method to raise funds to pursue surrogacy.  An interesting approach!

[Source: Original Article]

Gay couple turns to the Web for a babyTel Avivians use Mimoona funding platform to raise money for a surrogate pregnancy - by RENEE GHERT-ZAND

These days, crowdsourcing seems to be the way to go to fund your project. “Kickstarter” and similar websites, like the Israeli “Mimoona,” are the place to go if you want to bring something new into the world — even a baby.

Liran Altman Kadury and Yuval Kadury Altman, a gay couple from Tel Aviv, have already spent $120,000 trying to start a family by surrogacy. One surrogate miscarried twins, and the pregnancy carried by another surrogate failed to thrive. But the would-be-fathers are not willing to give up their dream of having a child. Having borrowed money from family, downsized their lifestyle and depleted their savings, the men are now going for broke.

They’ve swallowed their pride and launched a Mimoona campaign to raise NIS 250,000 ($67,640), the amount they will need for several more tries with a surrogacy agency in another country. 




The YouTube video Kadury and Altman put online in conjunction with their campaign has gone viral, getting over 50,000 views in less than two days. As of the publication of this article, they have already raised NIS 31,703 from 319 donors.

Kadury and Altman have been together for 12 years and were married seven years ago in a union unrecognized by Israeli law. They’ve been trying to start a family for the past six years. With the doors to adoption (both domestic and international) and Israeli surrogacy effectively closed to gay couples, the only recourse is to engage a gestational surrogate in the United States, India, or a few other countries.

Saying that it was too painful to ask the public aloud for financial assistance, the couple chose to convey their plea by writing it on cue cards they flash in front of the camera. “Every human being has the right to start his own family,” one of the final cards says.

When the project is to create a human being, there are no prizes for donors. Contributors at all levels simply get a “Thank you for bringing us closer to being a family.”

[Source: Original Article]

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Doctors at Kiran Infertility Centre that gets around 120 foreign nationals for Surrogacy say the move will be a drain on the economy. Dr Samit Sekhar, chief embryologist and surrogacy and IVF program director, said that as per the new directive, except a foreign "man and woman" who have been married for a period of at least two years, no one else will be eligible to have an Indian surrogate bear their child.

"A lot of couples who come to us are heterosexual couples but unmarried. In foreign countries, marriage can be an expensive proposition and several couples refrain from it. To deny them the right to have a baby is not correct," says Dr Sekhar. He adds that reproductive tourism is a win-win situation for everybody as people who cannot conceive get a child and a surrogate earns about Rs 2-3.5 lakh.