Gay couple turns to the Web for a baby
Tel Avivians use Mimoona funding platform to raise money for a surrogate pregnancy
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
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.”
