Brian Dowling and Arthur Gourounlian have revealed they’re still fighting to get their names on their daughter’s birth certificate.
The couple welcomed their first child – a baby girl named Blake Maria Rose, on September 1, 2022.
Brian’s sister Aoife acted as their surrogate.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, Brian said: “Surrogacy is a controversial thing.”
“When I said we were pregnant, we were criticised for that: ‘Oh, you’re taking rights away from women’, using those words in that space… Before people realised it was Aoife, the response was horrendous.”
“Then, when we announced that it was Aoife, that quietened down. That softened it a bit. But surrogacy is very controversial for various reasons. I think the surrogacy took it to a different level of vileness.”
“And I think it gave homophobic people the chance to attack us in the guise of concern – concern regarding my sister, concern regarding my child. When Blake was on The Late Late Show with us, a woman attacked us – ‘Oh my God, keeping Blake up so late…'”
“People always come for us,” Arthur added. “We’re in the limelight, we promote things – because everybody has to work – Blake sometimes will do sponsored things for baby food brands, and we get – ‘Oh you had a baby just to exploit her…’”
“That money goes to her account. It makes me angry, but I have to just brush it off. Brian gets more angry than me.”
“I just think anything that involves someone’s family, there should be a line – children are off guard,” Brian continued.
“It really put Aoife in the firing line as well. And we’re just so lucky that Aoife is in Blake’s life; they have a great relationship.”
“But when we shot the documentary, I said to Arthur: ‘Are we absolute fools, to be opening the door to our house?’ But I’m so happy that we did, because families in Ireland now are not like families when I went to school in Ireland in the 1980s.”
“Families now could be same-sex parents, they could be biracial, single parents, different cultures, different races.”
Arthur explained: “And at the same time, although those comments are there, 99% are so nice, so supportive, so many beautiful messages.”
“Our family is not accepted here in Ireland,” Brian heartbreakingly said.
“We’re still fighting.”
“A normal legal right for any child born in Ireland is that their one legal document that they have for the rest of their life is the birth cert, and we’re still fighting to try and get one of our names on that birth cert. How is that right?”
