There’s a growing trend of men who are purposefully becoming single fathers through the use of a surrogate.
Yan Dekel, a community manager for Men Having Babies (MHB), a nonprofit that provides parenting/surrogacy services primarily to gay men, knows all about it.
MHB facilitates over a million dollars’ worth of services annually to help #gay men who otherwise couldn’t afford having biological children through egg donation and #surrogacy. Learn more about GPAP at our upcoming New York conference https://t.co/9hjFPEKHa1 pic.twitter.com/UF3393oERj
— Men Having Babies (@MenHavingBabies) August 5, 2025
He told The Atlantic in an interview that in the past few years, he’s seen “a radical change” in the number of single men who show up to the nonprofit’s parenting/surrogacy conferences.
“As recently as 2021, Dekel [said], only a few single men would show up to a typical conference,” according to the magazine. “Now the ‘singles session’ tends to bring in about 50 men. In some cities, that represents a whole quarter of all the conference-goers.”
What type of single men are pursuing this? Ones like Charlie Calkins, who grew up expecting to someday be a father himself but was unable to find the right partner.
“I spent a lot of my early adulthood going, when everything’s right, it will happen,” he said. “I’m definitely a the stars will align kind of person. And then one day it hit me: They were not aligning.”
That’s when he decided to seek out a surrogate so he could become a single father.
“Now he’s living in Durham, North Carolina, with a 7-year-old son and a daughter who’s almost 2,” The Atlantic notes.
“I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I was just so confident and comfortable with the fact that I wanted to be a parent,” Calkins said. “And I was going to love being a parent, which I do.”
He’s not alone.
Batya Novick, a therapist who runs her own practice, said that in the past year and a half, she’s seen an increasing number of single male clients who’ve given up on dating and want to have a child.
She added that these men are pursuing single fatherhood “in the face of defeat versus the face of choice.”
“She’s seen [these men] struggle with a feeling of failure for not finding a wife, with ‘latent grief’ as they adjust expectations, with isolation as they search for anyone around them having families in nontraditional ways,” according to The Atlantic.
According to family-planning experts who spoke with the magazine, this trend started during the COVID pandemic.
The pandemic prompted a “reorganization, reprioritization of what’s really important in life,” Jennifer McHill of the Maryland fertility clinic Creative Family Connections said.
Meanwhile, norms have been changing, according to MHB founder Ron Poole-Dayan, and this has created a “reinforcing phenomenon.”
“The more single dads you see around you, the more likely you might be to become a single dad yourself—and the more likely you might then be to inspire someone else’s choice,” The Atlantic noted, explaining Poole-Dayan’s thought process.
That said, this movement faces growing opposition from an army of critics who are against all surrogacy, especially the type that involves gay men.
Horrific.
After a viral video of two men kissing a little baby boy who they bought via crowdsourcing, IVF and a surrogate, internet sleuths discovered one of the men was a registered sex offender.
No vetting process is required for surrogacy. Anyone with money can buy a child.… pic.twitter.com/AkBYxJLy5I
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) July 29, 2025
The concern from critics, besides the potential for sexual abuse, is that surrogacy is commoditizing both women (the surrogates) and children.
According to a study in the National Library of Medicine, feminists in particular have “critically queried surrogacy” and claimed it’s a form “of reproductive prostitution or the trafficking of women and babies, and part of a broader patriarchal and capitalist system in which men were seeking control over women’s bodies.”
“It’s turning women into commodities,” Swedish journalist Kajsa Ekis Ekman told reporters in April. “Just like the West has outsourced production of goods to other countries, we are now outsourcing reproduction. The surrogate is not the person manufacturing a mobile phone to be sold. Being sold here is human life itself.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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