When Nature Rewrote the Script: One Program’s Story

A few years ago, a couple of dads from Hungary reached out to Pogotowie Repro. They researched the LGBT surrogacy process in detail, including program conditions and pricing, then said honestly that they weren’t financially ready yet. This kind of pause is a common situation: couples decide for themselves when to return to the program, once their finances allow it. A few years later, the couple reached out again, this time ready to start.

A Standard Program With a Clear Goal

They chose the standard package: one egg donor cycle with two embryo transfers, without a guarantee. Donor selection focused primarily on intelligence and education level. The parents were confident their child would be a son and had already chosen a name, a school, and a university for him. At the same time, they were clear about one thing: whatever the outcome, they would accept and love the child unconditionally.

The embryos were transferred to a professional surrogate mother who had already completed three successful surrogacy programs.

The Surprise Effect

During PGD, the parents chose not to find out the embryo’s sex. They wanted to preserve a fully natural surprise until birth. The embryologist and reproductologist selected a single embryo for transfer based purely on developmental quality, with no reference to sex.

As it turned out, that decision paid off completely. The surprise the couple hoped for arrived in full — a single screening confirmed both the number of babies and their sex at once, overturning everything the couple had expected.

A Natural Trait of the Embryo

As with every patient, the couple was informed in advance about one property of early embryo development: an embryo can split even after implantation. This means that transferring a single embryo can, in rare cases, still result in a twin pregnancy. It’s an uncommon but well-documented scenario in reproductive medicine — studies place the rate at roughly 1.6% to 3.5% of pregnancies following blastocyst transfer with PGT.

The First Signals

The very first attempt succeeded. The pregnancy test came back positive, and bloodwork showed an unusually high hCG level — an early hint that twins might be on the way.

Confirmation on Ultrasound

The first ultrasound showed one clearly visible embryo and one fainter, “ghost” image. Two weeks later, heartbeats were confirmed in both. The embryo had split, exactly as the couple had been warned it might.

Two Daughters Instead of a Son

The next screening delivered the biggest news yet: instead of the son they expected, the couple was having two daughters. It took them some time to adjust their expectations. When they returned to the clinic, they’d reframed how they saw it: raising daughters was exactly what they were meant to do.

At every follow-up screening, roughly every three weeks, they still asked the doctor if maybe one of the babies would turn out to be a boy. But identical twins share the same genetic material — the same sex, appearance, and blood type. Nature had simply split one planned child into two identical ones.

Life Two Years Later

The birth went smoothly, without complications. By the time their daughters were born, the couple had fully embraced their new reality. Today, the girls are about two years old, and their dads say they can no longer imagine raising sons instead — or missing the chance to become fathers to these two daughters.

For more on what each stage of the process looks like, see our step-by-step journey to parenthood for LGBT couples.