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U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu, freshly gold-medaled and halo-haired, has captured America’s heart. Her story is an inspiring one: she retired from skating at age 16, during the COVID-19 pandemic, after she realized how much she liked not having to live and breathe skating 24/7. Two years later, she decided to return to the sport on her own terms. She’d choose her choreography and costumes, have control over her meals, skate when she wanted. That approach translated to effervescent joy on the ice—and a gold medal. Alysa Liu did it her way, and it paid off.
Though not a figure skater, Alysa Liu’s father, Arthur Liu, has bucked tradition in his own way: He is a single father by choice. A political refugee and a lawyer, he decided at age 40 to start a family on his own. He has since fathered five children through a pair of surrogates and anonymous egg donors.
Though not as rare as having a gold medal, becoming a single father via surrogacy is a pretty select distinction—so select, in fact, that it’s hard to ascertain the exact numbers. Research shows that in the U.S., single-father households have increased roughly fourfold since 1960; the total number as of 2016 stood at about 2 million single dads—or 17 percent of all single parents—living with children under 18. The majority of those fathers were divorced, separated, or widowed. So being a single father by choice is a rarer phenomenon, and doing so via gestational surrogacy, in which the surrogate mother bears no genetic link to the child she carries, is rarer yet. But Liu isn’t the only single father via surrogacy in the spotlight—TV host Andy Cohen and singer Ricky Martin have each spoken publicly about their decision to go this route.
A lot of research around men using surrogacy has been devoted to same-sex male couples, a group that has had to weather decades of unfounded accusations that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Surrogacy, of course, is the subject of heated discourse across all family structures. But the particulars of Arthur Liu’s pathway—single father by choice via surrogacy—have been largely understudied and, despite those high-profile examples, receive little public attention. In 2022 Portuguese psychologists Henrique Pereira and Colleen Beatriz described the phenomenon of single fathers starting a family this way as “a social event that lacks visibility”; they argue that this causes them to be not only overlooked in society but also marginalized as individuals.
Indeed, part of the problem is access: In many countries, it’s challenging to pursue surrogacy as an intended single parent. For instance, in the United Kingdom, the surrogate starts as the legal parent of the child, and couples must formally apply for parentage; it’s only recently that the law was updated so that prospective single parents could do this as well. In the U.S., surrogacy laws are on a state-by-state basis. Some states (for example, Alaska) issue prebirth orders of parentage only to married couples with genetic connection to the baby; others (for example, Kansas) issue these orders to married couples regardless of genetic relationship. Whereas in Arizona, a single person with no genetic relationship can gain parental status only by filing for adoption after the baby is born. California, where the Liu family lives, is known for being a highly surrogacy-friendly state.
But the concept of a single father by choice also requires a reimagining of what it means to be a father, the continued shift away from the old idea of dads wanting to put food on the table but be otherwise uninvolved. Indeed, statistics show that coupled fathers are more involved than ever: Since 2015, they’re on average spending 2.5 hours more a week with their children. The gap in time spent doing chores between married men and women has shrunk by 40 percent in the past two decades. And these days dads represent nearly a fifth of stay-at-home parents. In a small 2017 survey of Italian single men with families created by surrogacy, 78 percent of the heterosexual men had tried to conceive in past relationships, and 80 percent, regardless of sexual orientation, would have preferred to have had a child with a partner. But they all decided to go it alone anyway, for the opportunity to start a family.
