Baby Daddies: a Gay Guide to Surrogacy in Canada
A clear, compassionate, and occasionally irreverent guide to building an LGBTQ+ family through surrogacy—written by someone who’s done it a couple of times.
Surrogacy in Canada is often described as a “journey,” but that makes it sound far more romantic than it is. In reality, it’s a complex, emotionally demanding, legally regulated process that requires patience, planning, money, and a very strong stomach for uncertainty.
Baby Daddies exists because there was no single, practical guide that put all of this in one place—especially for gay men and other LGBTQ+ intended parents navigating Canadian surrogacy law, medicine, and systems not designed with them in mind.
How This Book Can Help You
Baby Daddies brings clarity to the Canadian surrogacy process by combining lived experience with legal and practical guidance. It helps intended parents understand not just what’s possible, but what’s allowed—and how to move through the process with confidence.
Rather than treating surrogacy as abstract theory, the book walks through the real decisions, documentation, and emotional realities involved in building a family through gestational surrogacy in Canada.
Get the Baby Daddies Companion Toolkit
As a reader of Baby Daddies, you receive free access to the Baby Daddies Companion Toolkit—a private, downloadable collection of practical tools referenced throughout the book.
The toolkit includes:
- Donor and surrogacy agreement checklists
- AHRA-compliant reimbursement declarations
- Loss-of-work income documentation templates
- Medical Expense Tax Credit (METC) checklist and calculator
- Mileage and parking log sheets
- A surrogacy-specific birth plan template
- And additional planning tools
These resources are designed to help you organize, track, and manage your surrogacy journey with confidence, not guesswork.
When purchasing the book, be sure to use a valid email address. Your toolkit link will be sent to that address after purchase.
About the Author
Shaun Chaimovitz is a gay dad who’s been through the surrogacy journey himself. He came out of it with two beautiful boys, a mountain of notes, and a determination to make the process clearer for others. Drawing on lived experience, expert insight, and over two years of research, he offers a candid, compassionate guide written specifically for LGBTQ+ intended parents.
About the Book
Surrogacy in Canada is one of the most ethical and legally stable systems in the world—but it is also under-explained, under-documented, and often inaccessible to LGBTQ+ families without insider knowledge.
Baby Daddies brings the entire process together in one coherent place: from foundations and law, through medical and emotional realities, to birth, finances, and life beyond surrogacy.
Smart, practical, queer-inclusive, and written with heart, Baby Daddies is an essential resource for anyone pursuing surrogacy in Canada.
“Surrogacy is an amazing process, but it’s complicated as hell. Between the medical jargon, legal processes, and the occasional existential crisis, you will want a guide that keeps it real.”
My partner and I were lucky enough to stumble upon this book early on in our surrogacy journey, and even after talking with friends who have had children through surrogacy, and doing our own research, I have to say this book has become our go-to guide. Not only is it based on the author’s own lived experience, it is thoroughly researched, accessible, personable, and provides a map through the many paths and twists and turns to building a family. Not only that, the author even reached out to us after our purchase offering to answer any questions and his support and encouragement. If you’re curious about surrogacy in Canada or already on your journey, this is a must read!
As intended fathers currently navigating our own path to parenthood through surrogacy, Baby Daddies has been an incredibly valuable resource.
The author takes a process that had previously felt overwhelming, fragmented and intimidating, and makes it feel understandable—and, most importantly, surmountable. The book strikes a rare balance between being genuinely practical and deeply human. It simplifies the Canadian surrogacy landscape without oversimplifying the realities involved, giving us a much clearer understanding of both the road ahead and the actionable steps required along the way.
Even after doing a considerable amount of our own research, the book brought several important considerations to our attention that we simply hadn’t thought of yet. At the same time, it helped organize and clarify many of the things we already knew, transforming what sometimes felt like an enormous collection of legal, medical, financial and logistical tasks into a pathway we could actually envision ourselves moving through.
Perhaps most valuable has been the confidence it has given us. Surrogacy inevitably comes with uncertainty, but having such a comprehensive resource—written specifically with LGBTQ+ intended parents in mind and grounded in lived experience—has made us feel far better equipped to navigate it.
For anyone considering surrogacy in Canada—or already somewhere along that path—we would wholeheartedly recommend Baby Daddies. It doesn’t just explain the process. It makes becoming gay fathers feel that much more tangible, achievable and real.