baby

The Tinder-style app that's helping people who are looking for an alternative way to have a baby.

There are dozens of people hoping to swipe and find a co-parent on the new tinder-like app, Just A Baby.

Karl is looking for a surrogate.  Rebecca is looking for a donor with brown hair.

Liam is already a dad to an 18-month old and happy to help someone else have children.

Amanda wants to co-parent.  Steven is a single dad and wants to give his child a sibling. Lucina has had a partial hysterectomy but wants to help a family by donating her eggs.

Just a Baby is a new space for people who are looking for an alternative way to have a baby.

“It’s just about a baby. It’s for people who want to have a baby. That’s who it’s for,” says Australian co-founder Paul Ryan.

The new app caters for potential co-parents, sperm donors, egg donors and surrogates and has endless possibilities for modern families.

Julia Dunne is a 29-year-old small business owner and was enticed onto the app out of curiosity.

“The thing I liked about the app was that it just shows you the community, the conversation, the kind of things that are going on,” she said.

“Like in the same way you might download Tinder and have a geez through it and just see if it was anything that might interest you but you don’t necessarily use it to commit to it, you are just casing the joint.”

Listen: Getting the sperm into the egg. Post continues…

Although the Sydneysider is just having a look around, she is serious about the app’s potential.

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“You don’t know who’s going to be there you don’t know what you’re going to find,” she says.

“Right now, I can not imagine that somebody on the internet is going to make my life happy and satisfying and I’m going to want to bring a child into the world with them, but at the same time I can’t imagine somebody in the flesh world doing it either. So I’m happy to keep that open.”

The 29-year-old says the app is a space that couple help take the taboo away from non-traditional ways of parenting.

“There are people out there who are interested in doing this, there are communities of people doing this, there is support for people doing this. There are conversations to be had. There are counselling services. It’s just a conversation that really needs to be more robust.”

The app’s co-founder says people that not in a heterosexual monogamous fertile relationship face challenges if they want to have children.

“One of the big barriers is social stigma. I really want to break that down and make it a lot more normal rather than it being the exception,” says Ryan.

“Rather than being the person that is kind of weird because they are having a baby in a strange way. I really want to break that down and go it’s not really strange at all. Everybody’s doing it.”

The app caters for couples like Deb and Nina, who have faced challenges on their baby journey. Image supplied. 

The app is already popular with a diverse range of people and ages and has a host of varied potential co-parenting options.

Ryan says coming to a co-parenting arrangement on the app, with legal guidance, may be a better decision than making a deal with long-term friends.

"You really need to get legal advice and a lot of people are not doing that because a lot of people are having a baby with an old friend," he says.

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Part of Just a Baby's set-up is that it steers users toward legal advice and fertility services so co-parents can get adequate legal planning, family counselling and fertility advice.

It's an app with no screening process for who can join.

"I don’t think it’s up to us to vet people and I don’t want it to be up to us to vet," says Ryan.

"If I introduce you to someone else then that’s up to you two to vet each other and to choose if you want to have a baby."

 "Just like any dating app if you meet a nasty person of a dating app then ultimately that has to be your responsibility to take care of yourself. I strongly believe that people need to take responsibility themselves but we do want to help people with that vetting process."

For 29-year-old Dunne, the app is considered and responsible.

"When I first heard about it I thought it was like Married at First Sight on TV - this cheesy stupid thing where people are devaluing something that should be taken seriously then I had a bit more of a look into it and I thought 'this is interesting because it is not doing that'," says Dunne.

"It is just the very beginning of a long process and it admits that and points people in the right direction of legal support and counselling," she adds.

Although Dunne isn't on the app for an immediate end game of a baby she's glad there are new possibilities for co-parenting children that may not be considered normal.

"[The app] takes some of the taboo off it. There are so many different recipes for happy families and there are so many ways to fuck it up and I'm not saying this guarantees that you won't, but I just think people need to talk about this a lot more."