Spread the Word!!

About 9 million children in the US have at least one gay parent
and one in five lesbian-couple households include a child under 18

REUTERS: Portland, OR. Thursday, May 27, 2004

      "I love my lesbian moms," read a hand-lettered sign which a teenager held up to motorists passing a county building in Portland, Oregon, where gay couples lined up to get marriage licenses.

      The message, prompted by the heated national debate over gay marriage, underscored a growing phenomenon -- lesbian couples having babies and raising families.

      According to the Family Pride Coalition, a national advocacy group for gay and lesbian families, some 9 million children in America have at least one gay parent and one in five lesbian coupled households include a child under 18.

      "I wouldn't call it a baby boom exactly. It has been steadily growing all along," said Aimee Gelnaw, a lesbian mother of two and executive director of the coalition.

Fast-Growing Segment

      Using artificial insemination to get pregnant, lesbians are four times more likely to have children than gay men.

      "Same-sex couples and single women are 40 percent of our business and it is the fastest-growing segment," said Marla Eby, vice president of marketing at California Cryobank Inc, Los Angeles, which ships semen nationwide.

      The earliest lesbian-couple families often included children born into heterosexual marriages before the mothers "came out" as lesbians.

      In the 1980s many sperm banks opened their doors to unmarried women, making unconventional families more feasible.

      Gay pride celebrations have started to include child-centered events with face painting and play activities. Gay parents can flip through the glossy magazine And Baby geared to their families.

Choosing a Donor

      The first step for lesbian would-be parents is choosing a sperm donor. Gay rights groups say the matter goes beyond weighing physical and mental attributes. Legal issues can arise, such as whether the donor would let the child know his identity, when he or she comes of age.

      Once the baby is born, couples often take legal steps to protect their families. In the states that allow it, the non-biological mother often adopts the baby so the names of both mothers can go on the birth certificate.

      Unlike heterosexual married couples, lesbians often have to draw up complicated wills and directives to protect their families should one partner die or the relationship end.

      The fragility of these families was brought home in a story line of the television show ER in which a female doctor and a female fire-fighter have a baby together. When the firefighter dies, her parents -- the biological grandparents -- refuse to hand over the infant boy to his other mother.

      "The story line is very significant in my own life," said ER executive producer Dee Johnson, who has two sons with her female partner of 10 years.

      Gelnaw relocated while she was adopting her partner's baby. When a judge declared the adoption "provisional" Gelnaw had to fly back several times for follow-up interviews.

      "I have a master's degree in child development and I had to prove I was a fit parent. I had to sit there with this caseworker and tell her what we feed Dewey [their daughter] for breakfast," Gelnaw said.

      Despite greater acceptance generally, vocal opponents of same-sex parenting remain. "We do not support gay marriage, gay adoption or gay people becoming parents," said Michelle Ammons, director of communications for the Christian Coalition. "We don't support bringing children into the gay lifestyle."

Good Parents

      As a result, lesbian mothers sometimes move to "friendlier" states or communities, including Seattle and Portland.

      Many lesbian couples also consider that their children's well-being before they conceive, including the impact of not having a male role model in the home. Couples also worry that their children would be teased at school or the playground.

      "We would have never had Carson if we had thought she would be bullied or have a hard time," said Liz Viggiano, a Portland nurse, rocking her 10-month-old daughter to sleep.

      Studies show lesbian parents are doing a good job. "Absolutely, these kids do fine," said Dr Nanette Gartrell, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, who is in the 18th year of a study on lesbian families created by donor insemination.

      Sometimes the children themselves put the whole controversy into perspective. Gelnaw said her son Zack decided on his own to stop giving interviews by the age of 12.

      "Time magazine wanted to talk with him. He usually enjoyed doing the interviews, but we discussed it and he said `No, I don't want to do it. I'm just a kid with parents, there is nothing to talk about.'"

Web pages often are transient things; they can vanish forever with no notice. For this reason, I am "permanizing" pages of value that I discover, so they can be found in this website for decades to come. In these permanized pages, I always give full credit to the original source by including the originating ("source") URL within the page. This is one of those pages.      -- Craig Chilton

Source where this was found:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/05/27/2003157200

Related Article:
Can being raised by gay parents cause a child to grow up gay?
http://www.ChristianEgalitarian.com/Gay-Parents.html

My Own Follow-up Comment, as of April 5, 2009

      The above article focusses primarily on lesbian parents, both singles and couples. But it should be remembered that as this first decade of the new millennium nears its close, same-sex marriage now is fully legal in three states, now that Iowa is on-board. At this writing, Vermont may soon do the same, but unfortunately, that state has a bigoted governor who has sworn to veto the legislation, and the legislature is five votes short of being able to override that, if he dos so. It's probably a certainty that it same-sex marriage soon will be legal again in California, despite the narrow passage of Proposition Hate, on 11-4-08. Because in March, 2009, an ABC News Poll found that so many Californians had already come to regret their having turned their land into "The BIGOTRY State," that if the referendum were to have been held again then -- just a scant four months later -- instead of passing by 4%, the heinous measure would have lost by 1%. It's only a matter of time, now. And same-sex married couples who got married elsewhere are fully recognized as being married by that state. The BEST thing that can happen would be the same sort of emancipation for same-sex couples to be conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court that it accorded to interracial couples in 1967 ("Loving vs. Virginia") -- in line with the 14th Amendment.

      About 18,000 couples were legally married in California before the $70,000,000 campaign of the LDS and RRR Cults caused the Golden State to revert to its former "Bigotry State" status. It took that much money and time to spew sufficient hate-propaganda and lies into the state to successfully CON gullible people of limited mentality to get to the polls and vote "yes" for that loathsome measure... and eke out a "victory" for the forces of hatefulness by a mere 4% margin. It is noteworthy that an almost identical proposition passed by 22% just a mere 8 years earlier, in 2000. Obviously, if trends mean anything at all, the next time Californians vote on this topic, that should spell the END of the line for the bigots. Forever. The sooner, the better!

      In this country alone, there now are tens of thousands of legally-MARRIED same-sex couples in the USA, and those households having children isn't by any means limited to the lesbians. Married or cohabitating, there are millions of gays that have kids, and many of those are single parents. There are several legal ways that they can obtain them. For example, via adoption, in all states except Arkansas and Florida. And via surrogate mothers. Lesbians can utilize IVF and artificial insemination -- and can also be surrogate mothers for gay men. And it gets better! Because some day in the not-too-distant future, human cloning will undoubtedly get on track, become legalized, and then become commonplace. Science never stops in its tracks. This is almost surely inevitable. So all things considered, the future looks very BRIGHT for gays and their egalitarian allies -- and appropriately BLEAK for the bigots. Today's homophobic bigots need only to look back at what happened to the equally-bigoted and -ignorant Segregationists back in the mid-1960s, and consider the way society regards them today -- to have a preview of the outcome for themselves and their loathsome and sociopathic agendas. Bigots always ultimately lose. Fittingly, history will NOT be kind to them.    -- Craig Chilton

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