For Jake and Gary, a gay Salt Lake City couple, starting a family means saving $100,000, traveling to Los Angeles, picking an egg donor, meeting with a surrogate mother and talking to an attorney. And that's before the child is born.

But the 26- and 35-year-old business executives are matter-of-fact about their clinical path to fatherhood. They have few options in Utah, where adoption is not a legal alternative for gay couples. And a proposed bill meant to legalize surrogacy deliberately leaves out gay and lesbian couples and single parents.

Having children who are biologically linked to them is the only way the two men figure their family will not be at risk from legal assault by meddling relatives or the vagaries of Utah lawmaking.

"There's space in our life. Love is what we have. Why not give that to a child when there are so many children with so many needs?" Gary asks.

So they scrimp. Only $95,000 left to go.

Surrogacy has been essentially illegal in Utah since 1989, when lawmakers recoiled from the "Baby M" scandal.

In that landmark case, Mary Beth Whitehead was inseminated with William Stern's sperm at a clinic in New York and agreed to turn her baby over to Stern and his wife at birth. Stern would pay Whitehead $10,000 at delivery. But when Whitehead gave birth to a baby girl in 1986, she decided to keep her. The resulting legal battle and emotional theatrics - at one point, Whitehead handed the baby out a window to her husband and told him to run for it - captivated and horrified the country. Stern ultimately was given custody and Whitehead was granted visitation.

Then-Rep. Kelly Atkinson, D-West Jordan, responded with legislation to prohibit payment for surrogacy.

"They were charging $30,000 per baby. Michigan was a baby factory," Atkinson says. "You can engage in surrogacy in the state of Utah; you just can't make any money off it."

The result has been that a handful of childless Utah couples, gay and straight, and surrogate mothers go out of state - to Idaho or California or Hawaii - for in vitro fertilization and delivery.

Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, carefully drafted the Uniform Parentage Act to ease that restriction on surrogacy and help Utahns conceive biological children. But he's pragmatic about his conservative Republican colleagues, who launched the successful constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between one man and one woman. So he excluded gay couples and single parents, which means they still would have to go out of state to have children.

In the past four years, four Utah gay couples have gone to Los Angeles-based Growing Generations to have children.

For about $100,000, Growing Generations arranges for egg donation, finds surrogate mothers and provides "pre-birth parental judgments" that name both same-sex parents in gestational surrogacy contracts. In effect, those judgments replace traditional birth certificates that list a child's mother and father. They are supposed to be honored in every state.

"Surrogacy affords singles and couples the highest legal protection - if they do it in the right state - and gives them an opportunity to be as involved as they want to in the process," says Stuart Miller, Growing Generations CEO.

"We would have loved to adopt," says the gay father of two 1-year-olds who spent 18 months and $125,000 arranging for his children. "But we would not take the risk of having the baby taken away."

Given Utah's political climate, the man apparently has reason to worry.

Paul Mero, president of the deeply conservative Sutherland Institute, says he is not convinced that now is the time to lift Utah's prohibition on surrogacy.

"Surrogacy is such a delicate issue anyway," Mero says. "If this is a brave new world way to build families, that gives me pause. There are a lot of children in this state and throughout this world who could be adopted. There are ethical questions involved in all of this. It's hairy."

Hillyard's bill, which has passed two committees and is headed to the Senate floor for debate, also is falling flat with civil rights groups and even surrogacy advocates.

The Organization of Parents Through Surrogacy, based in Illinois, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah have warned that a law limiting surrogacy to married couples could be challenged on constitutional grounds.

ACLU Utah director Dani Eyer says Hillyard's bill unfairly singles out a segment of the state's population for lesser rights.

"It's obviously an effort to separate a portion of the community from the basic fundamental rights involved in family relations," Eyer says. "It's another attempt to institutionalize the last acceptable form of discrimination."

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Tribune reporter Kirsten Stewart contributed to this story.