Family matters
Sydney’s Joshua Penn and Benjamin Palmer share their intimate surrogacy story. First, the roller-coaster of bringing their threeyear-old son Brooklyn, born in the US, into the world, and more recently their daughter Blake, also born Stateside, but in the midst of the global pandemic.
On the eve of Father’s Day, Sydney’s Joshua Penn and Benjamin Palmer share their intimate surrogacy story. First, the roller-coaster of bringing their three-year-old son Brooklyn, born in the US, into the world, and more recently their daughter Blake, also born Stateside, but in the midst of the global pandemic. By Katrina Israel.
One of the things I love about Ben is that from day one I said: ‘If you don’t want children, then I’m not for you,’” recalls Joshua Penn, 34, of his first date with fellow Sydneysider Benjamin Palmer, 37, after meeting at a friend’s birthday dinner some nine years earlier. “I’m extremely close to my family and it’s a non-negotiable for me,” Penn continues, “‘so if that’s not something you want, then I won’t go on a second date with you.’”
“This was right at the start,” says his now husband of seven years, laughing. “It’s something I’d always wanted,” adds Palmer, “but I’d never really met anyone on that same path. And obviously, at that stage, I hadn’t looked into the depths of how that would happen.”
Flash forward to 2021, and their family now includes three-year-old son Brooklyn and four-month-old daughter Blake, both carried by the same surrogate in the US. Theirs is an exceptionally personal and highly emotional story, shared in the hope that their experience will help others on their parenthood journey. The pair knew that no stage of this process would be easy, but what they hadn’t anticipated was that their daughter would be born on the other side of the world in the middle of a global pandemic.
But let’s start at the beginning of their union. In 2012, Penn had only recently returned to Australia following a two-year stint in New York City doing his MBA and working as online editor for US Harper’s Bazaar, while Palmer was in advertising in Sydney.
“Coming from New York, it’s much more common over there,” reflects Penn, now co-owner of Belinda International. “There were two men pushing prams all the time where I was living.”
After getting engaged in Hawaii, the couple was married in the south of France two years following their meeting. “I proposed,” smiles Palmer, who is now founder and general manager of Double Bay’s Palmer & Penn interior store. “I appreciated his frankness and honesty up-front because some people would get scared off by that.” That was September 2014, and by the following January they had started their surrogacy journey.
At that point, Brooklyn bursts in. Tennis is cancelled due to the rain. “We’re just talking about how you were born,” smiles Penn. “‘Where were you born? In whose tummy?’ He knows he was in our surrogate’s stomach.” Penn sighs, “It was one of the most surreal experiences.”
And while the actual pregnancy was smooth sailing, they had quite a few hurdles getting there. “We had a geneticist look at family history and we lost our first egg donor because they were susceptible to muscular atrophy,” says Penn. “We’d actually done an egg retrieval at this stage, so we had gone
so far down this path,” adds Palmer. “I just felt deflated from the whole thing. Then you have to start again.”
“I would say the hardest part of the journey was choosing an egg donor,” reinforces Penn, “because you are essentially picking half of your child’s genetics.”
With a new donor on board, of the 22 eggs collected, they both fertilised 11. And, as anyone who has done IVF will tell you, they were very lucky to end up with seven viable embryos from that one round.
“The doctor said: ‘Whose would you like to put in first?’” recalls Penn. “And we said: ‘The healthiest embryo and a boy first,’ because in America, you can gender select.” He pauses, adding: “We weren’t going to find out whose sperm it was.” Then one morning, their lawyer sent them an email saying they had to know who the biological father was for some documents. “This is one month before birth,” clarifies Palmer.
“I remember saying to Ben: ‘I thought we weren’t ever going to know!’’’ Penn recalls. “You’d have a hunch, but wouldn’t know for certain. We had to email the doctor that morning, and for Brooklyn our son, he wrote back:
‘Josh, you’re the father!’ I thought this is so strange and I remember looking at Ben and his face and demeanour remaining the same, equally as positive and happy and I remember thinking to myself, had the doctor said, ‘Ben, you’ll be the father,’ would I be as happy? It made me love you even more,” he smiles.
“In the background, we had always gone, ‘Whoever it wasn’t would be the second so …’” Palmer adds.
“So for our daughter, Ben is the father,” smiles Penn.
Their surrogacy journey wasn’t a straightforward one either. “We lost two surrogates,” recalls Penn, explaining that one turned out to be too old to carry, while another suffered a family crisis. “It’s a roller-coaster ride,” he continues, “such a test of emotions and our relationship.” Ultimately, both children were carried by the same surrogate, who has two of her own children, the second in between theirs.
Through their experience, did they gain a greater understanding of why women choose to do surrogacy? “I think there is such a negative connotation around surrogacy, and people thinking we are exploiting women, and I’m sure that is the case in a lot of scenarios,” laments Penn. “But if you turn that upside and look at it from the perspective that there is a person out there who is willing, as our surrogate calls it, ‘to pay it forward’, and give people the opportunity to have a family when they couldn’t normally – she’s like an angel. There is no other word I have for her. She said to us she did it purely to help another family have children.”
Flash forward to 37 weeks and the pair, accompanied by Penn’s parents, touched down in the US, awaiting the birth of their first child. “We were all in the room, my parents and Ben were down the end where the child comes out. I attempted that and it was a bit much,” recalls Penn.
“Josh fainted,” smiles Palmer. “It was an experience for all of us,” continues Penn. “There was this moment when Brooklyn came out and they asked us and passed Brooklyn to the surrogate, and she was holding Brooklyn, and I remember looking at her face, too, wondering how she was going to be? She was really great. She gave Brooklyn a kiss, and a hug, and then she passed him back to us. Then she was holding onto her partner and her daughter like saying, ‘I love you guys.’ And I remember thinking how difficult it must be.”
“She was very much like, ‘What do you want this scenario to look like?’” recalls Palmer, “which I thought was just amazing. I think the whole time she’d been preparing herself. She said she didn’t feel as connected because it wasn’t her embryo.”
“It’s amazing that there are people out there who can do that,” reflects Penn. “To watch her give us the baby, it gives me goosebumps remembering the moment. That was remarkable.”
After Palmer cut the cord, the nurses did the normal health checks and just like that, they were parents. “We had our first night with Brooklyn and it was a blur,” he smiles, adding that they had a hospital room next door to their surrogate. “That night we didn’t sleep at all.”
They stayed on for a week in San Francisco. “I thought we can’t just have a baby and say bye,” adds Penn. “They came to our hotel, we went for dinner. It was really nice family bonding time.” They admit that throughout the pregnancy, their psychologist cautioned them for being as close as they are with their surrogate. “We both look at them as family,” he adds of the couple.
Then it was on to LA for another few weeks to organise the birth certificate, passport and social security card. “It’s a lot of paperwork,” recalls Palmer.
“They get dual citizenship by descent, but the first passport Brooklyn got was American,” explains Penn. The new family then flew back to Australia and life resumed as Brooklyn’s dads, until their son’s second birthday when they decided to try for Blake.
“This one was more difficult,” begins Palmer. “It was at the start of Covid. Our surrogate had been on hormones and was ready to do an embryo transfer, and they closed the hospital. So she had to come off the hormones and we waited, and then a month or two later, they were like: ‘The hospital is back open, we don’t know how long for. Do you want to slot in a transfer?’” It was April 2020. “They put one in and it didn’t attach,” relays Palmer. “It was all very stop-start, stop-start. Then they opened up again and put another embryo in,” continues Palmer. “And I’m also thinking: ‘Am I even able to get to the US if we get pregnant?’”
“At that point, our government announced we aren’t allowed to travel,” recalls Penn. This was coupled with the news that they were pregnant.
“We spoke to our surrogate and, in the event that I couldn’t get there, we could give her temporary custody of Blake until we could,” remembers Palmer. “I felt confident leaving her with them – she is an
“It’s amazing there are people out there who can do that. To watch her give us the baby, it gives me goosebumps remembering the moment. That was remarkable”
amazing mother of her own children, but we would miss out on that really special bonding time.”
“I was also worried because there was no foreseeable timeline for when it was going to end,” says Penn, and there still isn’t. With the pregnancy moving to term, their lawyer applied to the government for a special humanitarian exemption. “Ben was approved – the biological father got the exemption,” clarifies Penn.
“Because of Covid, they said only one of us could go,” adds Palmer.
“So I stayed at home with Brooklyn for eight weeks, while Ben went overseas to get our daughter, which was in itself a challenge as well.” At three, Brooklyn was well aware of his father’s absence. “He kept saying, ‘Where’s Dada?’ He wouldn’t go to sleep. I think he had separation anxiety. Even now, when he goes to sleep, he will say, ‘Dada Ben, are you going to stay here?’ Every time Ben comes in the door, he says, ‘Dada, take your shoes off.’”
“We FaceTimed every day,” says Palmer, “but he ended up crying at the end of it. It was such a catch 22.”
At 36 weeks, Palmer boarded the plane in April 2021, this time solo and with a mask and gloves on for the entire flight, followed by 10-days’ quarantine in San Francisco. “I was hypervigilant about everything; I was sanitising my seat on the plane. I was a nut job about it, but I was there on my own. If I got sick, there was no one to look after Blake. I did, like, 16 tests over two months. It was lonely, but if I tested positive, I couldn’t go to the hospital to attend the birth.”
Blake was born, with Josh on FaceTime, on April 21, and then it was a race to get all the necessary documentation to return. “I had to get the birth certificate, but the records office was closed because of
Covid, so it was just all these additional things. I couldn’t get a US passport this time because it was four months’ processing time. I had to apply for the Australian citizenship in LA through the embassy.” He says with a smile: “I remember sending a photo to Josh – I was on the floor of my hotel room with mounds of paperwork around me. It was a nightmare. There were days when I thought, ‘I’m going to be here for months.’” Eventually he found help at the Australian consulate and assistance in speeding up the sign-off by a delegate in Canberra.
An international flight with a newborn is stressful enough, let alone during a pandemic. “Being our second child, I felt way more relaxed about how to look after her, but all the heightened stress of Covid on top of that was a lot. She was amazing on the flight, but I got a lot of questions. People just kept asking me where the mother was. They were really in my face about it: ‘Why is there no mother travelling with a newborn?’” Once on the ground in Sydney, Palmer found himself unexpectedly allocated to a quarantine hospital. “I had two nurses on our floor, a 24-hour dial-in paediatrician as Blake was only five weeks old,” he recalls. “I was really lucky as I actually got a local Sydney nanny to come in and quarantine with us,” adding, “she had to be negative and quarantine the whole two weeks with me.”
Reunited only a few weeks ago, the couple is still processing the experience, but are united in their gratitude for their children. “Every person’s family is different and this is who we are,” reflects Penn. “I just hope people will think of surrogacy in a better light,” he continues. “For us, it’s been the most incredible journey and we have lifelong friends from it. If we can help to break down the negativity around it, I think that would be lovely because there are really good people out there.”
As for Palmer and Penn? “We still have four really good embryos,” smiles Palmer, as they approach their first Father’s Day as a family of four. “We’re not sure if we are finished.”
“People just kept asking me where the mother was. They were really in my face about it: ‘Why is there no mother travelling with a newborn?’”