AssetID: 55606964
Headline: "Haters called me a paedophile": Man paid £90k to have son by surrogate and raise him alone as a single dad
Caption: WORDS BYLINE: Sarah Ingram While most of his friends were thinking about college and careers at 18, Ted Buras was already dreaming of becoming a dad. As a teenager, he had already picked out his son’s name. “I was going to call him Chase. But when the right situation never presented itself, I gave that name to my dog instead”, he laughs. Life did not unfold as Ted had planned. Now 47 and living in Denver, Colorado, Ted spent much of his adult life assuming fatherhood would come as part of a relationship. But his longest relationship did not result in a baby and when that relationship ended he never met the right person. As 40 approached he was forced into a reckoning. “I had to have that conversation with myself. Do I continue hoping a relationship is going to happen, and that it’s going to be with someone open to starting a family, or do I risk the possibility that it never happens and then it’s too late?” Deciding he didn’t want to “give so much power over something so important to some person that may or may not exist” he decided he would go it alone and have a baby. His friends and family said he would make a great dad, but determined not to rush into a life-changing decision, he spent a year in therapy making sure he was doing the right thing for the right reasons. “Therapy got me to the point where I truly did not feel like I needed somebody else,” he says. So he began the long, arduous surrogacy process. “It was stressful and full of anxiety and heartache,” he says. Ted used an agency to help match him with both an egg donor and a surrogate, but the early stages were rocky. His first semen analysis came back, in his words, “absolutely terrible, in every conceivable way”. He was put on fertility medication for almost a year which played havoc with his hormones. “I felt like I was pregnant. I was eating like crazy. I was hyper emotional,” he says. There were delays with medication and transfer failures, and the emotional and financial pressure was immense. Ted spent around $120,000 (£90,000) on a process that would leave him with just one shot, which is all the money he had made from property in his thirties. Using Ted’s sperm and a donor egg, doctors produced four viable embryos, one of which was male and possibly the son Ted had always wanted. But he knew the risks were high and he couldn’t become fixated on gender. “I started imagining having a girl, thinking of girl names. I had to get into that mindset,” he says. Eventually he was matched with a second surrogate, a woman in Kentucky whom he describes as “beautiful, kind, and so supportive”. Medically, everything lined up, but when the date for the embryo transfer finally came around, Ted was on a remote 10-day backpacking trip in the Arctic. Because of the earlier delays, the timing had shifted unexpectedly. Ted had signed paperwork in advance making clear which embryo should be used. But from “the literal middle of nowhere” he received an email from the clinic asking which one to transfer. “I was panicking,” he says. Armed only with a satellite device and a numeric keypad, he painstakingly typed out his reply: “THE BOY!” A few days later, in a tiny airport after days off grid, he received a photograph from his surrogate. It showed a pregnancy test showing the faintest of faint lines. Ted began to cry. “It was one of the happiest moments of my life,” he says. Ted didn’t know it at the time but the hardest part of his journey was over. He flew out to Kentucky for important appointments and spent time with his surrogate and her family, once even joining them for Christmas activities. His son, Beaumont, known as Beau, was born in Kentucky in the early hours of 25 April 2020, just as Covid restrictions started to lock down homes, hospitals and businesses. Ted had driven across the country and spent two weeks alone in an Airbnb, quarantining so he could be at the birth. Restrictions meant only one person could join the delivery, and his surrogate and her husband chose Ted. “I always imagined I’d never want to be in the delivery room. And I was so happy that I was. It was such an amazing thing to see and be a part of.” He was the first to hold Beau and to have skin to skin contact. “It was an amazing moment. Indescribable,” he says. Then came the strange isolation of new parenthood during the pandemic. Friends and family who had planned to help could only wave through the glass at first. Yet miraculously Beau took to the bottle, slept well and was a generally contented and easy baby. “I was never sleep deprived, ever. I know how rare that is,” Ted says. He formed a small family bubble with Beau, his parents, brother, sister in law and their children and they remain close today, providing him with childcare whenever he needs a night out or a rest, but Ted says being a single dad has surprisingly been easier than he anticipated. “Beau is nearly six and in kindergarten. He’s brilliant, funny, and so unbelievably caring. I could have never dreamed of being blessed with being a father to such an incredible little human,” he says. Ted does not try to play mother and father - seeing himself as “just a parent" - and he works from home, both in the family business and as an app developer, so he finds the work/parenting juggle manageable. Once, when Beau was about three, he asked where his mum was. Ted explained that families come in many forms, and the subject has not been raised since. There have been ugly moments, after Ted posted online about his surrogacy experience. He was hit with an online harassment campaign that saw strangers posting Ted’s address and phone number, sending unpaid pizza deliveries to his home and accusing him of being a “paedophile”. It was frightening enough for him to change his number, install security cameras and warn police in case of malicious reports. But he refused to disappear. “I’ve also had people contact me telling me what an inspiration I was to them. I didn’t want these people to take that away from me and them.” For all the cost, fear and uncertainty, Ted has no doubt it was worth it. “I would do it a hundred times over” he says.
Keywords: feature,photo feature,photo story,real life,real life story,human interest,Ted Buras, single Dad, surrogacy, parenting alone
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