Friends of a gay couple from Auckland are raising money to help them bring “triplings” home from Mexico to New Zealand.

Triplings are three babies born from the sperm of one man and one egg donor, but are carried by different surrogates. In this case there were two surrogate mothers and three of the four implanted embryos were successful.

Grace Nixon, a friend of the men, has set up a givealittle.co.nz page saying the couple need funds because one of the babies had medical complications after birth and required hospital care costing the couple NZ$118,132 (£56,000).

“The problem now is that they are stranded in this third-world country with little or no finances left and another month or so of bureaucracy to get through,” she wrote.

“We now hope that with your help they can move things along and get their beautiful new family home to the safety of New Zealand.”

The sick baby boy has made a full recovery and is now with his parents, his brother and sister, the givealittle.co.nz post says. The babies are less than a month old.

The GayNZ website reports the couple - who asked the New Zealand media not to name them - have spent four years saving to pay for bringing the children into the world and their adoption agency has abandoned them.

The family are in Mexico and unable to leave because they reportedly cannot finance a 800km journey in order to obtain passports for the children and undergo DNA testing to prove parentage.

“We have spent every cent we have left to bring these three beautiful Kiwi babies into the world. We now need to get ourselves and the three babies out of this dangerous country and back to the safety of New Zealand,” GayNZ reports the men saying in an online plea for help.

“Although I should be feeling blessed as a proud father, instead I feel ashamed, embarrassed, humiliated and humbled to be compelled to send out this post to my respected friends and colleagues.

“It’s very hard to hold my head up in a situation where I fight for the underdog and now I need other people to support me.”

Mexico recently banned international surrogacy for homosexual couples, but the website said the surrogates were pregnant before this law passed.

New Zealand’s ministry of foreign affairs and trade said there was nothing it could do to help as this was an international surrogacy case.

AAP contributed to this report