A gay male couple from South Africa are
believed to be the first in the world to have triplets, including
identical twins, using a surrogate.
Additionally DNA from both men was used
to fertilize two eggs, one of which split.
The babies – Joshua and the twins Zoe
and Kate – were delivered prematurely on July 2 at Sunninghill
Hospital in Johannesburg. All three required constant monitoring.
“When you are gay, there is always
the thought that it just may not be possible to be a parent no matter
how much you would love to be,” Christo Menelaou, one of the dads,
told
Sky News.
“It's very hard to be accepted for
adoption [in South Africa] and we were told we would always come
after heterosexual couples. And then we just never thought we'd ever
find a person who would want to be surrogate to a gay couple.”
The couple, friends and neighbors of
former Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, were introduced to their
surrogate, a married woman with three children, by a key state
witness in the athlete's murder trial.
Doctors advised the couple to terminate
two of the babies to give one baby a better chance of survival.
Advice they did not follow.
“We feel so blessed. We really do,”
an emotional Theo Menelaou said.