Contact us

Home

FAQ

Surrogacy Support by Telephone

Surrogacy Book

Looking for a Surrogate Mother or an egg donor?

This book is a moving real-life account of one woman's struggle with infertility and her journey through surrogacy to have the family she desperately wanted.

Click here for more details

Legal fight leaves triplets in limbo

Corry, Pa.- It's quiet, too quiet, inside the cramped little house on this Pennsylvania hillside. The afternoon sun brushes through pink lace curtains, casting a soft glow on three empty high chairs. Baskets upon baskets of toys sit unused.

Danielle Bimber pads through the cluttered area in bare feet and heads down a short hallway toward the nursery. This is where the Bimber boys sleep.

Their names - Matt, Mark and Micah - are spelled out in puffy fabric letters on the walls, just over their cribs.

A mobile dangles over Micah's unwrinkled sheets; toys cling to rails in Matt and Mark's beds.

Bimber says she would give anything to hold the boys right now, to just scoop them up and cuddle.

Their cherubic faces smile at her from photos scattered around the home. A framed saying dots the wall next to one picture: "A son is a little heaven on earth."

Right now, Bimber's heaven is 112 miles away and across the state border in Ohio.

The 8-month-old triplets are in Kirtland, sitting up and rolling over on another set of hardwood floors.

The boys wear different clothes there, and they eat different food, too. Different names - Easton, Lance and Shane - lovingly are tossed their way.

This is their life with their biological father, James Flynn, and his fiancée, Eileen Donich.

It's an alternative world, of sorts, a court-ordered parallel universe that's in place while a custody tug-of-war yanks at the three boys.

Pulling one way is Bimber, 30, a surrogate from depressed Corry, Pa., who - by contract - carried and delivered the triplets but has no genetic connection to them. Pulling the other way is Flynn, 62, a well-paid college professor and first-time father who wanted a family but found a fight.

Both say they're best qualified to love and rear the triplets.

It's up to a judge to decide.

The potentially precedent-setting case sits in Pennsylvania's Erie County Common Pleas Court, where custody proceedings are scheduled to reconvene on Thursday, July 29. Judge Shad Connelly heard a full day of arguments and accusations during the first day of testimony this month.

Meanwhile, the boys spend time at each home as part of a custody arrangement established in court.

Connelly already has named Bimber as the babies' legal mother, an opinion issued in April after other hearings. In that same decision, the judge expressed concerns about Flynn and his 60-year-old fiancée's fitness as parents, a notion the couple call ludicrous.

A social worker who assessed the couple said she would recommend them as prospective parents. In a report submitted to the court, she wrote that the boys seem to be developing an attachment to Flynn, and she called the couple's home warm and welcoming.

Last week, Flynn sat in his fifth-floor Cleveland State University office and reflected on what he termed "an ongoing nightmare." A thinning thatch of reddish hair drooped over a pair of sad eyes.

"It wasn't supposed to happen this way," Flynn said. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."

Strained relationship

Bimber expressed interest in carrying a child through the agency's in-vitro fertilization or embryo-transfer programs, meaning the baby in her belly would possess no genetic relation to her. She said she was ready to help a couple turn into a family.

"I have easy pregnancies and have always felt so bad for people who can't have children," Bimber wrote to explain why she wished to be a surrogate. "I feel it would be a great gift to someone."

SMI accepted Bimber and added her to its roster of potential surrogates. Soon after, the company matched Bimber with Flynn and Donich. The Lake County couple approached SMI after failing to conceive a child on their own or through fertility treatments.

By August 2002, Bimber, the couple and an egg donor identified in court documents only as J.R. signed a surrogacy contract drafted by SMI Director Steven Litz. The four people involved then passed medical and psychological tests.

Only one question seemingly remained: Would Flynn and Donich be welcoming a boy or a girl into their year-old, $465,000 home on tree-lined Eagle Road?

Doctors fertilized the donor's eggs with Flynn's sperm, and in April 2003 they implanted the resulting three embryos in Bimber. A May test confirmed a pregnancy, and a follow-up examination revealed a surprise: triplets. Doctors set a due date of Dec. 3.

The calendar pages turned swiftly. On doctor's orders, Bimber - growing larger by the day - quit her job as a Curves fitness instructor in June to go on bed rest. At Bimber's request, Flynn and Donich agreed to pay her a $1,000 monthly stipend to compensate for lost wages and added expenses.

The support money - paid in $500 increments every other week - pushed Bimber's compensation for carrying the triplets to $24,000 by the time she delivered by Caesarean section.

Bimber spoke primarily with Donich during the pregnancy, usually by phone. Visits were few, and the bond that's typically nurtured between surrogates and intended parents didn't grow with the maturing fetuses. Twin buds of dislike and distrust sprouted between the sides.

Phone calls went unreturned by Bimber. The surrogate's money requests chafed Flynn. Bimber's doctor asked the couple not to attend appointments, much to their disappointment.

On the day of birth - Wednesday, Nov. 19 - the strained relationship collapsed.

Joy turns to anger

The call came too late for Flynn or Donich to witness the births, an intentional act by Bimber, who wanted her husband to be her lone guest in the delivery room.

The first baby drew a breath at 9:57 a.m. The second followed a minute later, and the last arrived at 9:59 a.m. Together, they weighed almost 17 pounds. They were healthy but with minor medical problems typical of their five-week premature status.

Flynn and Donich arrived at day's end. They stayed about an hour. Flynn, worried about the boys' condition and nervous in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit environment, watched but didn't hold the babies. Donich briefly cradled one of the boys.

The Kirtland couple's quick departure and minimal contact with the boys unnerved Bimber, and she grew more upset the following day when the couple didn't return. She called Litz at SMI to express her concerns.

It would be six days before Flynn and Donich came back.

The couple spent the time preparing to bring the boys home. They hurriedly bought a minivan, car seats, clothes and necessities. They had delayed the purchases out of wariness: Doctors had warned them that all three babies might not survive.

Donich kept in contact with the hospital, checking on the triplets' condition and making appointments with doctors. She and Flynn started filling out medical-insurance paperwork.

Doctors discharged Bimber on Saturday, Nov. 22, three days after the delivery. Before she left, she arranged for Flynn and Donich to have access to the babies. She expected the couple to come and take custody of the triplets.

But neither Flynn nor SMI filed court papers with the hospital, a standard procedure to give him legal custody of the triplets. Flynn blames the oversight on SMI; Litz, the agency's director, said Flynn is trying to deflect blame from his poor parenting.

Whatever the reason, the inaction left the surrogate in control of the boys.

Bimber's worries festered while she recovered at home and the babies - at this point still unnamed - remained in NICU.

Donich, sensing this, told Bimber during a phone call that the couple had visited the triplets after the surrogate left the hospital. Bimber, however, quickly learned they hadn't.

The surrogate made a decision: "Someone needs to protect those babies."

On Tuesday, Nov. 25, Bimber raced to the hospital from her home 40 minutes away. She made her way to the babies in the NICU and found a nurse. She asked her to get hospital administrators, doctors - whoever she needed to revoke the couple's access to the babies and start the process to take the children home.

In tears, Bimber looked down at the infants.

"I'm going to give you guys a good life," she promised them. "This is crazy."

That night, Flynn and Donich arrived at the hospital in their new silver Grand Caravan with three baby car seats. Security met them in NICU, and the hospital staff told them Bimber had taken the babies.

Fury swept over Flynn.

"I want to see the kids," he yelled. "You can't do this. This can't be happening. Those are my kids."

Accusations on both sides

In the following months, disdain between the two sides mounted along with legal bills.

"I've found a new level of hate," Flynn admits.

Flynn accuses Bimber of holding the babies ransom in hopes of regular paydays for the next 18 years. He's already under court order to pay Bimber more than $23,000 in child support this year. That is more than double the $11,452 in total income the Bimbers reported on their 2003 tax return.

Last July, Bimber filed for bankruptcy to erase more than $50,000 in debt she said accrued during her previous marriage, which ended in December 2000 after six years and two children. She married Douglas Bimber, 36, in January 2001 and delivered Julia, their only child together, a month later.

Corry, where the Bimbers live and grew up, is an impoverished town struggling to regain its footing in the rippled landscape of southeast Erie County. The local school district reports 45 percent of its 2,500 students come from low-income households.

"She's an opportunist who's taking advantage of a situation," says Flynn, who earns more than $135,000 a year heading the Department of Operations Management and Business Statistics at Cleveland State.

But Bimber says she's driven by love, not money.

The family's financial situation is not as dire as it appears, she says. Her husband operates an appliance-repair business that his father started years ago. She describes the household's budget as tight, but not crippling. They recently started building an addition to their modest ranch home. She's driving a new Yukon XL, a pricey SUV.

"If he stops this custody fight, I wouldn't take a dime more," Bimber says. "They treated those kids like they were mail-order, not human. I just want to give these kids a loving home. The day I decided to bring them here, I made them that promise."

Flynn, however, says he's not going away.

Establishing a family this late in his life, leaving a legacy, is important to him. He has invested more than $165,000 arranging the births and battling for custody. He said he would exhaust every resource for the boys.

"I'll spend every cent I have on them, and then I'll find ways to get more money to keep going," Flynn vowed. "This will not stop, not until I get my kids. I'll never walk away. I'm not perfect, but I'm their father . . . and I'll be a good one. I just want the chance."

back to top