Owen’s Sibling Journey

Owen was our beloved son, our little warrior, and beautiful boy, who was tragically taken too soon after contracting meningococcal disease, with our finally goodbyes to our warrior just over a week following his 1st birthday in March 2023. Our names are Leigh and Justin Khoo, and we are the proud parents of our Owen from Melbourne, Australia.

Owen was born via surrogacy in Cancun, Mexico, on the 8th of March 2022 at 8.30am via c section, arriving early at 29 weeks gestation or 11 weeks early, weighing in at a tiny 1.44kg. Owen was a strong, brave and resilient boy from when he arrived earth-side, overcoming many medical obstacles, including being blind from birth, due to a diagnosis of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). We loved seeing and helping Owen navigate and see the world through his own beautiful way and we will forever cherish and reflect on the precious memories we will hold close to our hearts with him.

Our love for Owen continues to grow day by day, even in the darkest times of our grief and the great loss we could have never imagined, though we both have so much more love to give and are planning on giving Owen a younger sibling in the future, though this dream and goal seems all to unreachable at present given the hurdles we need to undertake.

As gay parents and people, we have already faced incredible challenges in order to grow our family prior to Owen being born, with 4 years of planning, having to undergo legal meetings, insurance, counselling sessions, medical reviews, excessive government paperwork and financial savings and hardship to start our journey to parenthood.

Growing our family in love and honour of Owen, and our goal again to proceed through a surrogacy journey to have a sibling for Owen, would mean the world to us and our family. With funds raised, this will help us pay for surrogacy agency fee services, medical bills, unexpected/unplanned pregnancy associated costs, legal advice and papework review etc.

There is no expectation to donate to us, we just wanted to share with you all, that if you do just want to share this post with others and help Owen's story create more awareness around Meningococcal and ROP blindeness, we would appreciate this is so much.

Lots of love and gratitude,

Justin, Leigh and Owen Khoo

To see more of our journey or find out more about us as a family and our adventures, our instagram handle is @twodadsonebaby .