Two men and no baby

The sorrow of involuntary childlessness is profound. The award-winning novelist Patrick Flanery and his husband knew this pain. Their craving to love and nurture a child left them with an intractable emptiness.

Flanery has no siblings; his parents lived abroad, and he had a difficult relationship with his father. So his desire was to create the close-knit family he never had. I sympathised deeply with the couple. Their tenderness and dedication to parenthood is obvious, but when they investigated the options open to them,  they found most doors if not actually locked, then spring-loaded shut.

Despite Flanery’s sensitivity, he occasionally shows lapses of insight, as when he admits resenting those female friends with one child whom he asked to be surrogates, who told him they never wanted to give birth again, only to change their minds. He must have realised that once they’d recovered from the ordeal of childbirth, the urge to have — and keep — another child would be as strong in them as it was in him.

Flanery shows a similar lack of understanding when, having looked at the restrictions on surrogacy in the UK, he wonders how adopting a child who’s been forcibly taken from its birth parents can be ethically any less compromised than surrogacy. Free of the subjective fog, he should have seen how in the first situation the move is purely for the benefit of an already existing child.

Having found surrogacy unfeasible, the couple moved towards adoption. From the start, there were warning signs that it would not be easy. A social worker told them that it was not a problem that they were gay (they hadn’t asked); and, on discovering that Flanery was a novelist, joked that a previous gay client wrote pornography — as though that were the norm for gay writers.