Relatedness across overseas borders: Conceiving transnational surrogacy in gay father families
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last decade, an increasing number of Italian gay men wishing to become parents have been forced by law to pursue surrogacy abroad. As a consequence, they experienced physical distance from the surrogate mother and their developing child for the entire pregnancy. To date, surrogacy in gay father families has mainly been studied in relation to changes associated with the transition to parenthood (Bergman et al., 2010), motivations for seeking extraterritorial surrogacy (Norton et al., 2013), kinship, gender and economic implications (Murphy, 2015; Riggs, Due, 2014). The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature by exploring how Italian gay couples deal with their transnational surrogacy process. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling within Rainbow Families. Couple and individual interviews were carried out with thirty Italian gay partnered fathers who conceived their children through transnational surrogacy in America or in Canada. Fathers (Mage = 44.75; SDage = 5.79) were well-educated professionals, with middle to high socioeconomic status. Children were aged between two and six years (Mage = 3.56; SDage = 1.15). An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2009) was performed in order to identify the emergent themes in the narratives. Findings indicated that three inter-related themes \nmay be helpful to understand the meaning-making of the surrogacy process through time: 1) the loss of the sense of control over the pregnancy; 2) the role played by the surrogate mother in facilitating fathers to feel connected with their developing child and in building their family; 3) the close relationship with the surrogate mother during the pregnancy and after the child’s birth. The present study sheds light on the impact of restrictive legislation on daily family experiences and allows both clinic staff and mental health professionals to support more adequately prospective gay men who seek parenthood via transnational surrogacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".