Chapter 11

The solicitor was keen to acquaint me with those aspects of English law that covered surrogacy. I met a QC in Chambers to find out more. The laws on surrogacy had not been tested in English courts. It is not that it is illegal; it is just that agreements on the subject are contractually unenforceable. The surrogate mother would have every right to keep the baby. British law on egg donation is that such provisions cannot be bought. It would be a question of making private arrangements for a woman to be artificially inseminated and for her to produce my baby with her own egg—no one else’s. If she were already married, I would not be the father.

The only option was to take advantage of the freer climate in California. Nevertheless, I would receive no help from the courts in this country so far as the Californian contract was concerned; whatever papers were signed in California would have no meaning in the UK. Tina would sign away her parental rights, but such a waiver would be irrelevant here.

In theory, Tina could claim the baby as hers. It would not matter that she was not the biological mother. She could even claim child support from me. All she had to do was arrive in the UK. Tina had to know her legal rights in this country and I told her them. She assured me that there would be no problem. She already had all the family she wanted. It would be my baby.

Rather than bring the baby in from America with a US passport and have to go through the process of applying for residence, I needed to find out if Tina would be willing to deliver the baby over here. I told her I would arrange for her sons to go to school. I took her to see a prestigious local prep school. She fell in love with the house, its sunken formal gardens and its grounds sweeping along to Watership Down. She thought it would be a great opportunity for her boys. I was sure of it, too, having set up several international educational programmes. Everything was going swimmingly.

It was clear that Tina would be an ideal surrogate. Almost as an afterthought, Vivian suggested, just in case the birth happened to be in the US, that I should take out a US-health insurance policy with an American company that also enabled one to cover one’s dependents at birth. I took her advice and arranged cover before anything was started. It was very cheap. A single Englishman living in England was statistically unlikely to acquire unhealthy American dependants.

The IVF clinic Vivian worked with was The Smotrich Center for Reproductive Enhancement in La Jolla, California. Before anything could happen, I had to have a blood test to ensure that I was not harbouring any nasty diseases.

The trouble was that, to have a blood test, I had to have a referral from my doctor. To get a referral, I would have to disclose why I wanted a blood test. I was not sure that a doctor could refer me for a blood test in order to proceed to what may, for all I knew, have been an illegal act. I certainly did not want to make anyone in this country aware that I was embarking on a surrogate pregnancy programme. It was a dilemma.

How about becoming a blood donor, Vivian suggested? They would surely test my blood first and I could use this to show Dr Smotrich I was clear. A few enquiries revealed that there was a blood donation session in Hungerford the following day. Imbued with a feeling that although my aims were selfish, I was also doing also something good, I drove there, filled in the forms and waited hours to deliver my armful.

‘We can let you have a certificate saying you are a blood donor’ was the response to my request for some sort of statement as to what the blood had been screened for. That was not what I had in mind. In fact, when I ran through the list of diseases, I found that several were not in the test.

I then asked a hospital in Windsor if they would accept a referral from a doctor in the US for a blood test for insurance cover. No problem. All he had to do was to fax his request. I asked Dr Smotrich to do this and he faxed me back a copy. ‘Please draw the following tests for Ian Mucklejohn’ it read. A list of various hepatitis and HIV-related tests followed. The last line read ‘semen analysis with morphology’. What a giveaway! I contacted the Smotrich Centre. They agreed that they would analyse my frozen sample and would re-fax the hospital with a list that excluded the semen analysis in the hope it would be seen as an error. Back came the revised fax. It was identical to the previous one except that the words ‘semen analysis with morphology’ had been scratched out and the words ‘please disregard semen analysis’ were inserted.

I expected a phone call from the hospital at any moment to enquire about the exact purpose of the tests. But instead, the only one who contacted me was Smotrich who wrote ‘I received the blood work today. I will be meeting with Tina on June 12th to start her on the first set of medications and with your donor on June 19th to start her on Meds. I anticipate the actual procedure to be the first week in July. Take care.’

I was clear to proceed.