Men Having Babies Launches Family Building Benefits Database for the LGBTQ+ and Infertility Communities

New York, NY, January 16, 2025 --(PR.com)-- A growing number of employers offer family building benefits ranging from $10,000 to $80,000 (and beyond) towards adoption, fertility treatments, and surrogacy. MHB is working to increase awareness and transparency about the availability of such benefits, to encourage more employers to offer them to gay couples and singles, and expand coverage to surrogacy-specific costs as well. Gay intended parents will now be able to search for the benefit offered by their workplace, and by other companies in their field. From multiple indications from its members, MHB expects that this new search tool will also impact career decisions of prospective parents. Indeed, market research conducted for RESOLVE: The National Infertility Organization, demonstrated that family-building benefits are considered as crucial for efforts to improve attraction and retention of employees.

The development of the new searchable database, and ongoing work to expand coverage and keep the information up to date, is made possible with the help of grants from EMD Serono and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). ASRM’s 2024 Patient Advocacy Grant that MHB received was created to provide support to health advocacy and educational initiatives. The ASRM grant will also partially fund the creation of an advocacy toolkit to help men who work at companies that do not currently offer inclusive benefits, or if these benefits do not apply to surrogacy, and / or exclude overseas employees.

To be considered "inclusive," family building benefits should extend to “all those who are in need of reproductive assistance,” according to the 2023 definition of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), which were advocated by MHB along other community partners.

The new database and upcoming toolkit, along with MHB’s legislation advocacy, financial assistance and educational activities, are part of the organization’s focus on overcoming the financial barrier gay men face when seeking to grow their families via surrogacy. For a similar reason, in 2023 MHB introduced Surrogacy Advisor, a complex new directory that allows search and comparison of services providers. More recently MHB added the cost-comparison feature, facilitating and encouraging surrogacy providers to disclose their costs allows intended parents to make informed decisions, and also encourages competition that can hopefully lead to lowering costs.

“Realizing that the organization’s financial assistance program can only help a limited number of intended parents every year, we decided that we should increase our efforts to offer transparency and encourage competition in both the fertility market and the race by employers to attract and retain valuable employees,” said Poole-Dayan. “And indeed, we increasingly see companies upping the ante with more generous and more inclusive family-building benefits. Just recently, Grindr announced they will offer up to $300,000 to cover employees’ family building through surrogacy and IVF, challenging other companies to follow suit.”