San Diego — Will Halm spreads his hand over the bulging sphere of Elizabeth's stomach. His eyes search the ceiling as he feels for movement.

"He turned right around yesterday," says Elizabeth (last name omitted for privacy). "That hurt."

"Can't feel any kicks yet," says Halm.

"Daddy's getting anxious," says Elizabeth.

Both daddies, says Halm, are anxious.

Luc, the already-named baby boy growing inside Elizabeth's womb, is destined to enter a family of two daddies and no moms. That's because Halm, 46, lives with Dr. Marcellin Simard (also 46), and Elizabeth is bearing the child for them. She's one of the few surrogate mothers willing to carry children for male gay couples.

Young Luc looks set to become a poster child for the fight for gay rights. Halm will not say whether he or Simard is Luc's biological father, but it's likely he'll be asked the question a lot: last month Halm, a Los Angeles attorney, became chief executive of Growing Generations, a surrogacy agency for gay and lesbian couples based in Beverly Hills.

Today a Japanese TV crew has come to the San Diego home of Elizabeth and her husband Daniel. The crew was alerted by a June 25 New York Times story. Surrogacy, says the Japanese TV director, is not commonly accepted in Japan. You can see this is going to be another "only in America" story.

As they set up and clip a mike on Elizabeth, her five-year-old son Daniel Jr. comes up and lies against her. He puts his head on her tummy.

"Who's in there, Daniel?" his mom says.

"Will's baby," says Daniel, matter-of-factly.

"And...action," says the director. The camera rolls.

"What you are doing is not usual," the reporter says to Elizabeth, kneeling beside the camera. "Do you think that American society now is going to welcome a child from a homosexual couple?"

"I don't think society will ever be ready," Elizabeth says. "And that's a sad thing. It's happening, but I don't think that society in general is going [to accept] this kind of thing."

Elizabeth will get about $15,000 for her nine months' labor, but she says she's not doing it for the money. "If you broke it all down it would be less than minimum wage. So no, money isn't a factor." According to Growing Generations' literature, a 40-week pregnancy is roughly 6720 hours; $15,000 works out to less than $2.25 an hour.

So why did she do it? "My sister is a lesbian," Elizabeth says. "She had fertility problems. Five years ago we discussed my being a surrogate for her. But then she was diagnosed with leukemia. It just wasn't a good time. And I thought, 'Well, if I can't do it for my sister, why can't I do it for someone else?' My husband and I have four kids. We don't plan to have any more. And I enjoy being pregnant."

In 1996 Elizabeth bore a child for a heterosexual Israeli couple and then was approached by Halm and Simard, who wanted her to have a baby for them.

That was a problem for her husband Daniel. "When she said, 'a gay couple,' I'm thinking of the Hollywood stereotype movie tight-shorts queen-type of homosexual prancing around. Then Elizabeth said, 'Why don't we just go meet with them and see what happens? If it doesn't work out, we won't speak of it again.' "

Daniel has come home for lunch. He's in camouflage uniform. He has the tanned face, straight-back bearing, and crewcut of the professional military man. He didn't mind the idea of surrogacy per se. "I'm not a hard-core fundamentalist," he says. "If Elizabeth is willing to do this for a couple that can't do it, that's fine. To me there is no greater joy in a relationship than being a parent, raising your sons, raising your daughters. And it takes a certain individual to be a surrogate. Someone with a strong will. Emotionally strong. Elizabeth has all that."

Still, when Elizabeth raised the idea of providing a child for Halm and Simard, Daniel said no. "The thought did cross my mind.... What are two gay men going to be able to provide for a child when it comes to a life? But then I sat down and reconsidered my thoughts because my first wife was bisexual herself. I had experience with the emotional ups and downs, the support you have to give her desires, and how you deal with that in the household."

"And my father and mother were married," cuts in Elizabeth. "We were 'normal,' and yet I have a sister who's lesbian."

"So [we've had] firsthand experience in dealing with [homosexuality]," Daniel says. "It's not something strange or foreign."

In the end Daniel agreed to meet the gay couple who wanted to rent Elizabeth's womb. It was a dinner.

The clincher, Daniel says, was the surrogate-born daughter Halm and Simard brought with them, two-year-old Malina. "I just fell in love with her," says Daniel. "And I realized that these two men weren't the stereotypical comic-strip image of homosexuals. One of them was a lawyer, the other was a cardiologist. You could see both were excellent parents. And this daughter of theirs was just...adorable. I realized then that if these two men could put as much time and effort and love and care into this girl, then if Elizabeth wants to carry a baby for them, I'm all for it. It isn't about them being gay, it's about them being excellent parents."

Daniel's military buddies sometimes have a hard time understanding. "They think it's unusual. Helping out someone with a child is far beyond the normal. And then when you bring up the gay issue, it's 'Oh my goodness. Now you're really crazy!' "

Baby Luc's birth in September will mark a significant moment for Halm and Simard beyond parenthood. It will telegraph victory in their eight-year battle for the right of gays to become parents just like heterosexuals.

"Before we had our daughter Malina," says Halm, "I could find no agencies that would work with gay couples. There were a lot of medical practitioners as well as mental health professionals who didn't know how or didn't want to work with gay couples. My partner and I made every mistake in the book. And they were costly mistakes. They cost years. There wasn't really anyone who could help us. We connected with women who were really not suitable candidates, who after a couple of attempts at artificial insemination dropped out of the process. There wasn't a commitment. We were fairly desperate. In the end two of our friends helped create our daughter."

Halm drafted his own contracts for the surrogate and egg donor who helped create Malina. "I developed a commitment," he says. "I wanted to make sure that I helped guide other gay men through this process."

That's when he discovered Gail Taylor, a lesbian mother and surrogacy expert who in 1996 had started Growing Generations for fellow lesbians wanting kids.

"I found out about her, we met, and we just thought [my joining] was a natural fit," he says. "Now we're the only surrogacy agency in the world that exclusively serves the gay and lesbian community. It was a landmark event for my life. Because all of a sudden I was now professionally involved in this cause, which to me has always been a very personal one. Creating a family became a more public event."

That was one of the first big questions for Halm and Taylor's new partnership: whether to seek attention from the media or to stay discreet.

"We had to do a lot of soul-searching," he says.

But it soon became clear they had to take the public road. "We decided that we wanted to be role models for a lot of gay men and women who think they cannot create families because they are gay. We want to change their minds and have them see the possibility that they can raise families. Especially a lot of gay and lesbian adolescents who are out there and feel like, 'Okay, I have to give up on creating a family.' "

One small but significant legal shift occurred recently in L.A. Two months ago a Beverly Hills lawyer, Andrew A. Vorzimer, persuaded a court to list two gay men on the birth certificate of a baby girl conceived through artificial insemination. The decision is being considered a legal precedent.

Halm realizes that taking the high-profile road runs the risk of a backlash. Many opponents say offering money for surrogacy exploits financially unstable women. Others find the idea of paying to create babies smacks of buying commodities.

"You're exposing kids to an unhealthy environment," Steve Schwalm, a senior policy analyst for the Family Research Council, told the New York Times recently.

Halm doesn't buy it. "There've been 40 studies over the last 20 years which have shown unequivocally that children of gay and lesbian parents are healthy, well-adjusted children," he says. "I don't think my sexual orientation is going to have any bearing on [my children's] sexual orientation. Most gay people I know had straight parents."

One fact is undisputed: right now this is a game for the rich. How much to grow one baby? Growing Generations' price list says $41,350, and that's minimum charges for a traditional use of a surrogate mother who uses her own eggs. The fee includes tests for such diseases as hepatitis and aids. A sum of $240 is even set aside for "criminal history inquiry fees" to check out the surrogate and egg donor.

The "third-party reproduction," or "gestational surrogacy program," costs more: $52,150. This uses eggs other than the surrogate mother's. It's a popular choice. If you're a gay male, and it's your partner who's giving the sperm, and you want some of your family's genes in the child, your sister may agree to donate the egg. The surrogate just offers a womb to grow the embryo.

Many think this is the beginning of an explosion in this business. Certainly Halm says his company is already busy. "This year we plan to help about 50 prospective parents create families. Most are from outside of California, from around the country as well as internationally. In many countries [surrogate] services are not available, so we have clients from Europe as well as Australia."

San Diego is turning into a maternity ward for the program. "We have clients and we have a lot of our surrogate mothers and egg donors residing in San Diego County."

It's mid-afternoon. The Japanese film crew turns up at Alvarado Hospital. Dr. David B. Smotrich welcomes them and rustles them down to the lab where "the miracle" happens.

In the lab, Dr. Julie Carver-Ward shows how baby Luc was created. She sits in front of her $50,000 micro-manipulator, a kind of giant microscope. She jiggles a joystick in her left hand. It moves a tube that held Luc's donor-mom's egg "200 microns across" by suction. In her mouth Carver-Ward cradles a second tube, which leads to a long fine needle. When Luc was created, the syringe held the sperm, she says. Looking through the magnifying eyepieces, she pierced the egg with the needle and simply "blew the sperm in."

This time around has been different for Halm and Simard. For Luc's conception, they were able to scan dozens of potential mothers' profiles, which told them everything from eye color to reasons for donating their eggs.

Smotrich, a reproductive endocrinologist who specializes in fertility problems, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization, has offered his services to Growing Generations. Smotrich was a welcome change. "We needed a doctor in San Diego because both our egg donor and Elizabeth resided here," says Halm. "We had found a couple of doctors here who were either not willing to work with gay couples or put restrictions [on us as gay men], which I thought were discriminatory." Halm says one doctor insisted on a six-month quarantine period for the sperm of gay men to cover the possibility of dormant HIV. "Heterosexuals also contract HIV," he points out.

Halm and Simard are Smotrich's first gay male couple, but it's not a problem. "My opinion about homosexuality is not important. Any morality issues should be raised with ethicists and rabbis and priests. What is important is that children have loving parents."

What about the children? Some ask how fair it is to place the children at the sharp end of this social experiment. What do gay parents tell their kids about the role of their mother? How will the children explain to their friends why they have two fathers?

"We gave this years of thought," says Halm. "We knew our children would be facing some issues they wouldn't if they were raised by a conventional family. We didn't want our children to be raised in an atmosphere of shame. We felt if we gave them love and support and were open, that they would be able to handle the prejudice that they faced in the outside world. But mostly we're hoping that in 10 or 20 years, this will simply not be an issue. We are pioneers. There will be challenges. But we hope our children will look back at us with pride. That we went through this and we persevered and we did this in the face of a lot of adversity."