Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 2, 1993 TAG: 9308020060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A Huntington Beach, Calif., couple will have some explaining to do when their daughter asks them where she came from.
The girl will be the product of the world's first known five-parent surrogacy arrangement. The child will be the adoptive half-sister of her birth mother. And her birth mother's father will be her adoptive father.
The fertilized egg came from the biological parents of the child the couple adopted almost two years ago.
The five-parent arrangement appears to the first of its kind. Fertility expert Dr. Ricardo Asch, who keeps tabs on developments in the field worldwide, says it has never been done before.
"I'm sure this is the first. These circumstances are very, very unique," said Asch, a professor and director of the infertility program at the University of California, Irvine. "It's nice. As long as they are happy, it's good."
The motivation for the arrangement is unique. The couple has one adopted child and wanted to adopt another child from the same birth parents so both children would have similar traits and common background.
Thus John, 53, and Jo-Lynne Seeger, 42, contacted the birth parents of their first adopted child, Nathaniel, who is now almost 2. The birth parents are unmarried and now live in different states.
"We felt it would be less confusing and more beneficial for the baby to have a genetic relationship with Nathaniel and the birth parents," said John Seeger, a strong proponent of open adoption. "Everyone involved is very supportive of this."
The birth parents declined to have a second baby, but offered to provide some embryos by donating eggs and sperm, fertilized in the laboratory.
Next problem: Jo-Lynne wasn't able to carry them. That's when Seeger's adult daughter from a previous marriage, Jolene Stone, 30, volunteered to be the surrogate. She is due in early September.
"Jo-Lynne is a wonderful mother," said Stone, a homemaker in Salmon, Idaho, mother of five and stepmother of two more. "Her desire to have a child was so strong, I could not see any reason she shouldn't be a mother. I'm just really glad that I can help. I'm really glad that I can help her fulfill her dreams."
When the baby - expected to be a girl - is born, Stone will legally be her mother. But after the adoption is complete, a massive relative shift will take place. Stone will become her half-sister. Jo-Lynne and John will become her parents, and her sisters and brothers by birth - Stone's children - will become her nieces and nephews. Get it?
John Seeger called his group-effort baby "a unique event in the history of man."
"It's a little bit like an `I'm my own grandpa' kind of thing,' " John Seeger said.
Jo-Lynne Seeger, who is in Idaho awaiting the birth of her second adoptive child, said: "To tell you the truth, I marvel at how unaffected I seem to be. It's surprising to me how comparatively normal this seems. . . . I hope this can lighten the hearts of other infertile people."
The Seegers said they didn't want arbitrarily to adopt a sibling for Nathaniel. They feel the biological parents should have a close relationship with the adoptive parents and the child.
They had already cultivated that relationship with Nathaniel's parents and felt it would be confusing and difficult to bring in another set of parents. They hope the biological parents will have the same relationship with the new child.
"I would say it's one of the more unique experiences," said adoption expert Sharon Kaplan Roszia, who met the Seegers through a course she gave at Tustin, Calif.-based Parenting Resources, an adoption counseling firm she co-founded. "It's a very rich, unique and lovely story."
And it might not be the last. When Nathaniel's natural parents donated that embryo, they donated a few extras.
"We have two embryos still frozen," Jo-Lynne said. "So who knows?"
by CNB