Remember the Essex gay dads and their five children? Now they’re planning all-girl triplets

Dec 10, 2016 by Jill

By Claire Ellicott and Sarah Arnold, Mailonline:

As Britain’s original ‘gay dads’, they are used to breaking taboos.

Now Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, who in 1999 were the first gay men in the UK to father children through surrogacy, have decided to have triplets to add to their four sons and a daughter.

And, to ensure they have three girls to create a gender balance, they are using embryo sex selection. The process is illegal in Britain so the couple are having eggs tested in the US for implantation into a surrogate.

The pair, who claim that there is ‘too much testosterone’ in their family, will next week ascertain the gender of ten spare embryos that have remained frozen at a US fertility clinic since their last pregnancy six years ago.

This means the triplets would effectively be quintuplets as they are from same batch of embryos as the couple’s six-year-old twins, Jasper and Dallas. The twins’ biological mother is a Brazilian model whom Barrie, 48, and Tony, 52, spotted on a catwalk and persuaded to donate her eggs for £50,000.

Despite the Drewitt-Barlows’ claim that the triplets will complete their family, their daughter Saffron, 17, said her fathers are ‘way too old’ for more babies. Barrie rejects this, adding: ‘There is plenty of life in me yet, look at Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, no one is saying they are past it.

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