Jessica Kern’s story | “We want to know who gave birth to us and what they are like.”
My name is Jessica Kern. I am a product of a traditional surrogacy. This is where a surrogate is hired to both donate her egg and carry the child to term... As a product of surrogacy I can tell you firsthand what we children of donor conception go through. Children...
Brian C.’s story | “I don’t care why my parents did this. It looks to me like I was bought and sold.”
My name is Brian and I am the son of a traditional surrogate, a biological father, and an adoptive mother. I think all of you here need to know how I feel about surrogacy. I have read a certain popular surrogacy board since I was 16 and I am almost 18 now. I was...
Becky’s story | “Maybe my father simply couldn’t bear the fact that I was another man’s child.”
My parents separated when I was very young — still a baby — and I was brought up by my mother with very little financial or emotional input from my father, though I did see him regularly throughout my childhood. Nevertheless, by the time I was 18 I had pretty much...
Alana Newman’s story | “After a wrenching divorce, I never again saw that ‘dad’ of mine.”
I remember the first time I struggled to understand the ethics of a case involving reproductive technologies. I was five years old, folding clothes in my bedroom with my mom. She told me that my dad was not my biological father. My biological father was an anonymous...
Nate’s story | “My mom and dad had children with their new spouses, but neither step-parent treated me the same as their own children.”
My first memory is of Halloween when I was a year and a half old. My mom put me down in front of the fireplace and turned to make some food in the kitchen. Then my dad came over and put an orange smiley-face lollipop in my hand. I didn’t know what I was looking at...
Allison’s story | “My step father was a different, changed man…toward his own children.”
My father left my mom with four kids and never came back. We had not seen him for approximately 4 years when he died suddenly. My mom remarried a couple of years after my bio dad left. The man she married is still my step father to this day, forty years later. He...
Jennifer Johnson’s story | “When my parents divorced, my family ceased to exist.”
I have a lot of experience with divorce, far too much to ask of any one person in my opinion. My parents divorced when I was three and went on to subsequent marriages, divorces, different children, a lot of back and forth between “two homes,” and a lot of chaos. By...
James Lopez’s story | “I grew up seeing my father kiss and cuddle with two different women.”
I grew up in a household living with not only my mother and father, but also my half-brother and his mother. My father had two kids: one with my mom (me) and one with another woman (my half-brother, who was three months older than I). When my mother was not there, I...
![Denise Shick’s story | “To my [transgender] dad, my siblings and I were mistakes.”](https://thembeforeus.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/maxresdefault-400x250.jpg)
Denise Shick’s story | “To my [transgender] dad, my siblings and I were mistakes.”
My biggest concern at age nine was how to keep my daddy’s secret, the one he revealed to me as we sat alone on a hill near our home. In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman. As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided...
Melody’s story | “I would come home from college unexpectedly and there would be a woman in my mom’s bedroom.”
Exploring yourself is never an easy topic to wrestle with and explain to others. I had a pretty normal childhood, I guess. We moved a lot and I was an only child. My parents were married for 20 years and then at the age of 15, my mother decided the marriage was over....
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Them Before Us is made up of ordinary adults who are committed to putting the needs of children at the forefront of the battle surrounding the very foundation of our society - marriage and family. Are you an ordinary person too? Does your simple blood boil when children are expected to conform to the lifestyle of adults because you understand, maybe firsthand, how hard that is on kids? And are you tired of culture framing adults as victims when we all know that kids are the ones who have to pay the price? If so, we are your people.
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