And for me it was very suitable for a child who is about to grow up on a warming planet whose future is in danger. In 2021, in the throes of COVID, Bulbul welcomed her second daughter, Gaia Mine, with the same surrogacy partner. In 2019 her first daughter, Emi Jules, was born through a surrogate mother.
“If I want to become a parent, I should just try to find the shortest route at this point because, you know, it’s not fair for kids to have a geriatric parent. But the process for single people, especially relatively older gay men, he says, has been difficult. Cenk had both of her daughters through the same surrogate using donor eggs and her own sperm to create the embryos that were implanted. So he returned to Turkey and completed his compulsory military service, before returning to the United States – this time to New York – where he completed a doctoral program.Ĭenk takes Emi to the grocery store and then prepares her for bed. “Īlthough he was finally able to label his romantic feelings, he still felt lost. So I realized I was gay, but I was kind of scared, confused. “At that point, in 1994, you weren’t seeing many gays the campus. “The things I felt as a young man, but I didn’t know what they were because there were no public examples where I lived in Turkey and not even at Carnegie Mellon Bulbul says of his time exploring the Internet while graduating from Pennsylvania. He arrived in the United States in 1994, the dawn of a tool that would help him, and countless others, understand the emotions they still didn’t have the words for: the World Wide Web. NPR spoke to three men, single gay fathers, who have chosen to become dads through surrogacy after years of dealing with their identities, their families and the technological advances that have made trips like this possible.Ĭenk Bulbul is originally from Turkey. Cenk had both of her daughters through the same surrogate using donor eggs and her own sperm to create the embryos that were implanted.įatherhood comes in many different forms, from dads who are there from your first steps, to those you meet later in life. Cenk Bulbul, a single father by choice, with youngest daughter Gaia Bulbul in New York, NY.