ThatsBearlyArt Creator Shares His Inspiring Journey Towards Surrogacy

Ben Deane-Schierloh is a Philadelphia based artist with a vision and a mission. He created his brand and online store, ThatsBearlyArt, as a unique and inspiring way to raise money for his and his husband Frank’s ongoing journey towards parenthood and he shares his no holds barred account of it all below.

Featuring adorable and comical designs, ThatsBearlyArt is comprised of bear themed prints, tees and stickers that are sure to tickle your funny bone while making people stop to take notice. The fact that the money earned goes towards helping a bear couple start their family makes it all the sweeter.

Read on to learn all about Ben’s inspiring story and find out how you can help him realize his dream.

John Hernandez (JH): Hi Ben! Thanks for joining me. Tell me about your husband. Where did you meet? How long have you been together and when did you decide to start a family?

Ben Deane-Schierloh (BDS): Thanks John!My husband is Frank Deane-Schierloh. We met at West Chester University of PA in 2010, when he was a Senior and I was a Freshman. We started dating after knowing each other only a week, and everyone said we were crazy. Fast-forward to now, and we recently celebrated 14 years together in September, and our 3rd wedding anniversary in August before that. As for deciding to become a family, I have wanted to be a parent since before I can remember. There’s even home video footage of me in England (where I’m from originally) being asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and my response was “I want to be a Mum.” So it was always a passion of mine to parent. Frank came to it later, after his own father passed away in 2018 and realizing the profound impact his Dad had on him and his family in general.

JH: Tell us about non-genetic surrogacy. What led you there as opposed to say adoption? How did you meet the couple that donated an embryo to you?

BDS: So, we found our current path almost by chance (although with a lot of research and information too). We had initially been looking into adoption, which was what I had always imagined for myself aspiring to be a parent all these years. In reality, adopting a newborn in our state was going to be expensive…and turns out, there are a lot of risks to adoption. While it’s a wonderful and amazing process, unfortunately there are a lot of scams and fraudulent people out there too willing to take advantage. We’d heard more than a few tragic tales of gay couples preparing the nursery and going to the hospital expecting to come home with a baby, only to have the birth mother change her mind, or another complication occur.

Still, this was our path until a friend of ours put us in contact with a lesbian couple they knew who had done IVF and were looking to donate embryos. We had met in person at a party once before, but we started a conversation on Facebook messenger of all places to learn more about their journey: one was a trans woman, so they had used their own sperm and the other’s eggs to fertilize embryos. They had finished having children and wanted to donate their unused embryos to another queer couple in need, as the embryos were highly graded and likely to result in a successful pregnancy.

We started doing the research: was this possible? What would be the cost compared to adoption? What are the pros and cons? In the end, we realized that surrogacy (at least in our state) would offer much more protection for our family, both legally and financially. This was very important to us in tumultuous political times to make sure we end up with as iron-clad a parental connection as possible, legally. In addition, surrogacy gives us much more agency in the pregnancy stage/journey, and lets us experience that journey more closely than many adoption journeys (we’ll get to be in the delivery room, for example).

In the end though, we honestly just took this opportunity falling into our laps as a sign, and took the leap to embark on this unusual path of non-genetic surrogacy. We will have no biological connection to our child, but we’re staunch believers that family is much more than blood (hence the adoption path initially). We like to say we’re “adopting pre-pregnancy.”

JH: Will the couple also see to gestating the embryo or will you need to find someone to carry the embryo?

BDS: So no, the couple transferred the rights to the embryos to us entirely. We will need a surrogate / gestational carrier to carry the child for us, and we are in active rotation with the Surrogacy Center of Philadelphia currently (we’ve been in active rotation, meaning our profile is being sent out to surrogates, since November 2023), after being on their waitlist for 2+ years prior to that. It’s been a long journey, and while there’s been so much paperwork along the way, the hardest part is actually having that all squared away, since it’s now just a waiting game for a match with a carrier.

JH: How expensive is surrogacy? 

BDS: Surrogacy can be wildly expensive, but it varies per situation. Oftentimes, for two men pursuing surrogacy, they will encounter higher costs than a lesbian couple, for example, as finding an egg donor is much more expensive than a sperm donor, plus cis men have no option to carry the child themselves and require a surrogate. We’ve known gay couples that have spent upwards of $175K in our state on surrogacy, not including regular medical costs of pregnancy and childbirth. For us, the cost is expected to start around $80K since we have been donated embryos. This made surrogacy MUCH more achievable for us financially and brought it closer to adoption (approximately $60K for newborn adoption in our state).

JH: What other challenges have you encountered on this journey? 

BDS: How much time do you have? Honestly, any queer person that tries to become a parent is a SUPERHERO. This shit is HARD. There are so many legal hurdles, financial hurdles that seem insurmountable, and on top of it all you have societal hurdles and pressure/backlash.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve tried to fundraise or ask for donations from family and friends on social media, and every single time someone has called us pedophiles…it’s extremely disturbing to see that sort of twisted homophobia so rampant, but it’s out there, and it’s pervasive. Even to get to the point we’re at now, we’ve had to pay lots of legal fees to ensure our families’ legal status in the future, and we will continue to do so (Second Parent Adoption and Embryo Donor forms, establishing a Will and Power of Attorney for Healthcare and Finances for each other). There’s also the standard envy that any couple going through IVF will feel, seeing friends and family having babies with much more ease (the amount of coworkers’ baby showers I’ve had to attend or organize is crazy, while in the same time we feel we’ve made no progress).

Financially, things have been hard for us, squirreling away every dollar to go towards this goal, sacrificing vacations, nights out, and more to try and attain this dream, unsure if we’ll ever actually get there before the government strips the right to IVF away or something else horrible. My day job unfortunately offers no support of surrogacy or adoption financially (true of many workplaces, sadly), and even the healthcare of our eventual carrier is not covered by our company insurance plan, so there will be insurance hurdles once we have a match.

We had a pretty crazy HIPAA violation at one fertility clinic where they never acknowledged us as the embryo holders, and instead kept cutting us out of the conversation to talk to the original donor couple (so we were unsure if we even still had embryos for a while…) Also, we were accepted into a financial aid program with a well-known non-profit that helps gay men become parentswhich could have helped us immensely, only to then be told that actually we no longer qualified because we were “too far along in our journey” aka we already had embryos…which was the starting point of our journey. It was extremely disheartening to feel misled in that way, especially after we had excitedly told our communities about our acceptance into the program, AND after they had made us pay for tickets to a conference…

We’ve felt somewhat ostracized from the traditional surrogacy crowd, and simultaneously so from the adoption crowd, because our journey is quite unique (even though it’s something I find absolutely beautiful, that our child will have queer bio parents and queer parents at home). Unfortunately, we just don’t fit into either camp/path towards gay parenting.

Lastly, there’s a feeling of helplessness. Even starting my own business to raise money for this cause and to help educate people about the struggles, I still witness queer folks who view parenting as “too heteronormative” or don’t support the folks in their own marginalized community fighting so hard to start families. And it’s such a shame, because I think we as queer people have a lot of love to give; unconditional love that is perfect for a child. We can accept children for who they are, not who we want them to be, because many of us have experienced that same struggle within our own families. So it hurts to see queer folks not supporting those of us that want to create positive loving families.

JH: Tell us about ThatsBearlyArt and how it factors into your surrogacy journey?

BDS: ThatsBearlyArt is my small art business which soft-launched around Halloween 2022, and officially launched in early 2023. I primarily make t-shirts and art prints with designs that are punny, suggestive, nerdy and quite frankly, stupid. My goal is to make people laugh, and find ways to combine nerdom with queer, sex-positive celebration in my designs. The highest compliment is people walking by my vendor booth at an event  busting out laughing (well, technically the highest compliment is them purchasing something, but you get my point). I sell in person at various events, and also at my online store (www.thatsbearlyart.com). In addition to my stock of designs, I also do commission work, whether that’s portraits in a variety of styles (cartoon, semi-realism, etc), custom emojis, pet portraits, or NSFW portraits. I’ve been lucky enough to design the 2024 Philadelphia Pride Logo (“Be You”) and some fursona emojis for a prominent sex-therapist in the Pup scene, among other amazing commission opportunities, and I’m always open to more. My commission portfolio is available here and my NSFW commission portfolio is viewable here. Whether it’s shirts, prints, or commission work, I’m extremely proud to say that 100% of proceeds from the business go directly to our surrogacy journey, if not back into the business itself. It’s the reason I started the business, and it continues to fuel my passion and work ethic.

JH: Well Ben its beautiful work for a beautiful cause. Thank you so much for your candor. I wish you the best of luck.

BDS: Thank you so much!