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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. No matter how hard we tried we just couldn't get pregnant jokes my guest Mark Daly in the

opening sentence of his new memoir. It wasn't a fertility problem it was that

Daly's spouse was his husband. They both wanted to have children which meant their choices

were surrogacy which they were ambivalent about, private adoption which could take

years or foster children. In 2016 they chose fostering. They soon became the foster parents of two

brothers, three months and 13 months old. Daily and a spouse Jason fell in love with the children and the boys thrived.

But when the boys birth parents decided to fight in court to get the boys back, Daly was

alarmed at the possibility of losing the children he loved. He worried about them being returned to their

birth parents who were dealing with mental health and addiction issues and seemed to be indifferent to

their children and even worse neglectful. Through the ups and downs of his family's story,

Daly writes about the larger foster care system

and the ways in which it's a dysfunctional bureaucracy.

Daly started consulting for child welfare nonprofits before fostering.

Although he thinks the system failed him, he recognizes the importance of foster care and founded the organization

The Foster Parent.com, a national platform to connect

interested families with foster organizations.

He also founded One Iowa, the state's largest LGBTQ organization.

He was a communications director for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

His new book is called Safe, a memoir of Fatherhood,

Foster Care, and the risks we take for family.

...