Gedalia Braverman makes parenting look easy. He weaves through the Costco aisles pushing a double stroller in front of him with one hand, while pulling a shopping cart behind with the other. People slow down to look at his gorgeous 11 month-old twins, -a boy and a girl, and they stop and stare just long enough for Braverman to make his way through.
Because all of his attention is on the stroller at the front, he is completely oblivious as he almost hits a shopper behind him with the shopping cart when he makes a turn. As he nears the completion of this errand, the twins start getting restless, so he quickly collects the last items from his shopping list.
He arrives at the checkout line and just as he’s done unloading the items from the cart, the twins start crying, screeching, in fact. While the cashier is adding it all up, Braverman deftly prepares two bottles of formula.
He takes two empty bottles from his large baby bag and puts them next to the checkstand conveyor belt. He pulls out a bottle of water, fills each of the empty baby bottles, adds some powder formula, screws the tops on, and gives them a shake.
The twins are still screeching, and Braverman tries to calm them down. “I’m making a bottle, OK, no crying, you see that I’m making it, right? You know that I’m making it. Very good.”
Despite the chaos of having the babies crying at the checkout line, with all eyes on him as he frantically prepares the bottles, Braverman keeps his cool and uses a calm tone when speaking to his children.
Braverman turns 50 this December. He is a gay single father, and he couldn’t be happier.
His twins were born thanks to the modern technology of assisted reproduction, and with the help of his friends.
In last June’s newsletter for Pacific Fertility Center, the clinic that helped Braverman become a parent, he describes the story of his journey.
“They say it takes a village to raise a child. In my case it took a village to create a child. Thanks to a loving gestational surrogate, and longtime friends as both egg and sperm donors, my dream of parenting has come true,” he writes.
“I knew I wanted children from the time I was a child, and I started thinking of planning on becoming a parent when I was 18,” remembers Braverman. In fact, he had it all planned out. He would go through college, work for a few years, and start having children at 30.
“I think it’s a lot of heterosexual people’s plan. Not necessarily a lot of homosexual people’s plans. Maybe today…But in the 1970s it wasn’t necessarily something that people thought about. Or they thought about but didn’t talk about. So this was always a plan for me,“ he said.
However, many obstacles would get in the way of his plan throughout the years. For starters, in 1985, when Braverman was 24 or 25 years old and living in New York, he was diagnosed with HIV. Because there was no test to confirm the presence of antibodies until 1985, he believes it’s “very possible that I was infected several years earlier.”
And so he gave up his dreams of fatherhood. Most of the people around him who were infected were dying within a year or two. “I continued my life as though I was going to live, but didn’t really know how long I had,“ he remembers.
Eventually Braverman reached the age of 30, and seeing as how he remained alive much longer than he had expected, he felt new hope, and in 1990 he moved to San Francisco. “At the top of my agenda was starting a family, because I felt I had a good chance I wasn’t gonna die, so I restarted my process in 1990.”
In the early 90s he registered with the city of San Francisco to become a foster parent and went through the training.
However, there is always a chance that a court might decide a child needs to be taken from the foster parent for a variety of reasons.
The conditions of foster parenting discouraged Braverman. “I didn’t want to have children come into my life who were probably going to leave my life.” So he decided that if he was going to become a parent, he would have to look into other options.
Because of his HIV status he was excluded from regular adoption at many agencies. There is no actual regulation prohibiting HIV positive people from adopting. The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits adoption agencies from discriminating on the basis of disability, and lists HIV among the conditions that constitute protected disabilities.
While agencies cannot discriminate against a person based solely on a disability, they must ensure that a child's long term needs will be met. Despite the advances in medicine that now allow HIV positive people to live healthy lives indefinitely, some adoption agencies still regard the infection as a life-threatening condition, greatly reducing the chances of parenting through adoption for this population.
Because of these obstacles, Braverman even contemplated international adoption at one point. But once again, life would take him on a different path.
He was an HIV and AIDS grassroots activist, and for some time, the work engulfed his life. Later on he started his own business as a general contractor doing home renovations, and in the course of ten years or so one business evolved into another. “Next thing I knew I was 45.”
At the time he was 40, Braverman was in a happy relationship, but his partner did not want to have children. “Originally he said never, and then after... a few years he said he would consider it. But his heart wasn’t in it,” he remembers.
At one point, he was so content in his relationship, he thought maybe he could do without having children. “But I really wanted to have children, it was really always my life’s ambition.”
About three years ago, Braverman finally made up his mind that it was time to start a family, and in the summer of 2007, when he and his partner knew they would be splitting up, he started doing research on assisted reproduction.
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