As soon as Howard Wax and Robert Pooley began dating, they talked about how much they wanted kids. When they were ready to start their family, they began sifting through the options: surrogacy, adoption, donor eggs. In the end, they decided to use eggs from one donor, and sperm from each dad.
Robert Pooley (left) and Howard Wax with Sarah and Marcus.
Wax and Pooley didn’t want to know the sex of their twins. “I felt like the whole process is: Here’s a check and here’s the egg donor. There’s not a lot of romance and mystery,” Wax says. “The gender of the kids is the one thing I didn’t want to know.”
When Sarah and Marcus were born, the men stood outside the delivery room waiting to meet them. “They took the babies, cleaned them up and delivered them to us one at a time as they came out,” Wax says. “The first one was a girl and we opened her up like a present. The second was a boy. They seemed like different people immediately. His eyes were open all the time; he seemed thoughtful.”
Wax, now a stay-at-home dad, and Pooley, a Chicago physician, know it’s not going to be easy to protect their children, but for the most part they’ve found nothing but support from the people around them.
“Our family’s going to be what it’s going to be, and hopefully that’s enough,” Wax says. “I don’t feel like I have to answer to the critics. Anybody can criticize, but where does that get our kids?”
“It’s up to us, society as a whole, to always support parents,” Pooley says, “because in the end, what we (all) want to do is raise good, decent children.”
