The Queer Family Podcast – LGBTQ Families & Queer Parenting Stories · Jaimie Kelton – Queer Parenting & LGBTQ Families'.

Surrogacy, Parentage Orders, and the Legal Side of Queer Family Building

·52 min·3 clips

A New Jersey parentage order took a week, while Boston took four months.

1. The Queer Family Podcast episode centers on surrogacy, parentage orders, and the legal side of queer family building. 2. Jamie, the host of The Queer Family Podcast, interviews attorney Alexander Paikin of Paikin Law because he is both a New York lawyer and a parent through surrogacy. 3. The episode asks what intended parents need to know before starting egg donation, surrogate matching, and court paperwork. 4. Paikin says he is a real estate, commercial litigation, and complex transactions attorney, married to his husband since 2009, with a four-and-a-half-year-old son named Zach and another child expected in about two weeks. 5. He explains that he and his husband married in Connecticut when New York still did not allow same-sex marriage, then later recognized their marriage once state rules changed. 6. Paikin says he always wanted children, considered adoption, and eventually chose a route that would give one child a biological connection to him and one to his husband. 7. He describes selecting an egg donor through RMA of Connecticut, where a marketing email led to a free meeting in Manhattan with Dr. Leon Dieris. 8. He says they thought the process was linear and lost a year because they looked for the surrogate after fertilization instead of in parallel. 9. Paikin recalls choosing a donor based on medical and family history, background, photos, and a short video, while trying not to obsess over eye color or hair color. 10. He says the fertility clinic then asked, “who’s your surrogacy agency?” and he and his husband realized they had not secured a surrogate. 11. Paikin says their surrogacy agency helped prepare them for escrow, maternity clothes, and daycare reimbursement, and he credits their surrogate, Ashley, with knowing every step ahead of them. 12. He says Ashley researched insurance, forms, forums, and intended-parent issues so thoroughly that he nicknamed her “tech support” after Zach was born. 13. Paikin notes that Ashley’s New Jersey state insurance covered almost everything, while he was surprised by how much better it was than his husband’s school-teacher coverage. 14. He describes delivery at Voorhees Medical Center in South New Jersey as unusually smooth, with room service, nice facilities, and a private room for the parents after birth. 15. He contrasts that experience with Boston, where the parentage order took about four months and nearly required him to go to court in person. 16. Paikin explains that Massachusetts recently adopted a new surrogacy statute, which now requires strict compliance and made their older agreement go through a lengthy human review. 17. He says the county also changed judges and clerks during the review, which added another layer of delay to the process. 18. The conversation is casual and conversational, with Jamie asking follow-up questions from his own family’s fertility experience and Paikin responding in practical legal terms. 19. People considering surrogacy, IVF, or queer parentage planning would get the most out of this episode. 20. Listeners wanting pure family banter without legal detail could probably skip it.

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