Dads Ben and Daniel Bowman are part of PeopleTV’s new Family Portrait video series on “the diversity of modern families.”
The dads, who live in Los Angeles, are fathers to fraternal twins whom they had via surrogacy. Their doctor used one embryo created with Ben’s sperm and one from Daniel’s—and they both developed. Daniel explains his surprise at this unexpected outcome: “Our jaws hit the floor. To think we both were going to be genetically represented—and, suddenly, Ben and I were going to be blood-related to each other in a way I thought probably never would happen being two guys.”
In the six-minute video, we also meet the friends who helped them out during their first few months as new dads and are now the chosen “aunts and uncles” of their boys.
The six-episode series overall seeks “to debunk the ‘typical American family’ stereotype’ by highlighting the genuine kindness and resiliency of the human spirit,” says People. Other episodes look at a grandmother parenting her child and grandchild; a woman who became a mother as a teen but continued her education and healed a difficult relationship with her own mother; a couple raising three sets of twins, adopted and via IVF, all with the same birthday; a multi-racial, cross-cultural, and multi-lingual blended-family; and a couple who started their family through embryo adoption.