Elton John and husband David Furnish are proud parents of two sons, Zachary and Elijah, both born via surrogate.
However, during an appearance on Dua Lipa’s new podcast, Sir Elton revealed that in 2009 they had tried to adopt a child from an orphanage in Ukraine they visited, but were turned down.
The rock icon recounted the story for iHeartRadio’s “Dua Lipa: At Your Service”.
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“I was carrying this little boy around for hours. We had a press conference at the end and they said ‘You seem very fond of this little boy. Would you think of adopting him?’ and I went ‘I’d actually love to!'” he recalled.
“Of course, not thinking about social media, it went around the world straight away,” he continued. “It was ‘Elton John wants to adopt two children.'”
However, he noted that he and Furnish were deemed ineligible to adopt due to their sexuality.
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“Because I was gay I wasn’t allowed to anyway,” he explained.
“After that happened, David said, ‘Well, what do you think about having kids?’ I always said no but this little boy was telling me something. He was saying ‘C’mon you can be a dad,’ and that’s when we decided to have children, because of this little boy in Ukraine.”
