Family Planning in Lesbian-Headed Families Created by Donor Insemination
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Unconventional Conceptions: Family Planning in Lesbian-Headed Families Created by Donor Insemination Dissertation zur Erlangung der Würde einer Doktorin der Philosophie vorgelegt der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel von Lisa Katherine Green von Chicago, USA Genehmigt von der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, auf Antrag von Herrn Professor Dr. Udo Rauchfleisch und Herrn Professor Dr. Thomas Gehring. Basel, den 20. Juni, 2006 Der Dekan Professor Dr. Kaspar von Greyerz v Abstract This study aimed to systematically describe the decision-making phase of family formation in German lesbians planning to parent via donor insemination, to assess the issues pertinent to each mother role and those involved in donor type choice using a retrospective, structured questionnaire. Data was collected from 105 self-identified lesbian women, 55 of whom were birthmothers and 50 of whom were social mothers. The process of planning a lesbian-headed family created by donor insemination is, in many ways, unique to this family form. First of all, each woman has to successfully come-out and develop a positive self-identity as a lesbian and develop a committed lesbian relationship (in the case of planning a two-parent family). The decision-making phase of family building, which took 2 years on average, includes working through issues that are common to the decision of parenting shared by heterosexual couples as well as lesbian specific issues. The following lesbian specific aspects of family planning were identified in this study. Lesbian women must actively confront (internalized) societal taboos of lesbians and gays having children and develop strategies for handling homophobia. They must also develop a positive attitude towards a lesbian-headed family. In the absence of or outside of legally sanctioned relationships, women planning to parent in lesbian relationships consider the event of relationship dissolution or death of the birthmother for both the social mother and the child. The lesbian couple also decides what model of family they intend to build. In the absence of traditionally defined roles, the lesbian couple must negotiate and define the birth and social mother roles for their family. In the absence of terminology for the birth and social mothers, the lesbian couple must decide what they want the child to call them. Lesbian women must decide on the method by which they want to become parents. If a lesbian couple decides to become parents by conception, then they must negotiate which of the women will conceive (first). Another decision to be made regards that of donor type choice, i.e. how to get sperm and to what degree the male it stems from should be known to and involved in the life of the lesbian couple and child. Prospective lesbian parents must decide if, to what degree and in what way they intend to include men in their child’s lives. In contrast to heterosexual family planning, lesbian prospective parents are choosing a non-normative path and, correspondingly, are faced with the issues of resources, challenges and eliciting support for their family decisions. 104 of the 105 participants planned a two-parent family with their lesbian partner. The allocation of mother role between the two women occurred via the decision over which vi woman would bear the (first) child. The obvious difference between the mother roles lies in the biological fact that the birthmother goes through insemination and the physical work of pregnancy, childbirth and probably nursing where as her partner becomes a mother without it. The other major difference between the mother roles is that the birthmother role is culturally defined where as the social mother is culturally and legally (prior to stepparent adoption conclusion) non-existent. However, these differences do not impact the couple full force in the decision-making phase; they are anticipated and first strategies for handling upcoming difference is made, i.e. plans for equal parenting, and ‘mother’ terminology. In fact, during this phase, the roles seem more similar than different as the women make all the parenting decisions together. The women in this study chose different donor types in planning DI: anonymous donors (n=42), identity-release donors (n=22), known donors (n=39) and unknown, fresh sperm donor (n=2) to conceive their first-born child. The decision as to which type of donor the couple wants may be conceptualized as a balance act between protecting the lesbian couple and LDI family unit boundaries in our social and legal context, on the one hand, and attitudes towards father related issues, on the other, such as, the degree to which the women think it is acceptable or damaging for a child not to know its biological father, and whether they felt the desire to know one’s ‘roots’ is biologically determined or socially imposed. The attitudes of mothers who used identity-release and known donors conformed more with heteronormative attitudes while those of mothers via anonymous donors did not. Although different donor types were chosen, all women were able to identify positive and negative aspects of their donor choice attesting to the fact that there is no blanket solution for everybody, only solutions for individual couples. Future research needs to assess the development of the LDI family by phase through the all stages of family formation in order to deepen our understanding of these families’ transition to parenthood and passage through the life cycle. The information assessed in such studies would provide information future LDI mothers may need before they embark on motherhood as well as prove useful to professionals in a variety of disciplines who are educating and /or providing services for members of LDI families. Acknowledgements The Beginning: My partner and I were among the first handful of lesbian couples in Germany planning children in isolation of one another back in the early to mid 1990’s. The two of us had countered all odds of a binational relationship, already conceived one beautiful child through donor insemination and were in the midst of a mother role switch. Only it didn’t happen. Not like we expected it to anyway. Our second child kept us waiting...until we no longer believed it would happen. It was out of the despair over a ‘lost’ child who had not yet been conceived that the idea for Unconventional Conceptions was born. In the meantime, we got lucky...twice ☺...but the realization of this project has become even more important as our children age and we encounter more and more agencies of mainstream society that so desperately need information about our families. The realization of this manuscript has only been possible due to the help and support of many people. The obvious place to start is my life partner, Moni, who has encouraged me endlessly for eight years even though we never knew if this project “would lead anywhere” and our children, Lena, Dylan and Mia, who are both a complete distraction as well as the source of my passion to strive for change in the interests of children of LGBT parents. You are the loves of my life! I would also like to mention another essential ingredient in the working-mother-of-three-does-a-PhD. puzzle: Lotte (Oma) Herrmann who assisted us with seemingly endless childcare particularly in this past year of writing and Gerhard (Opa) Herrmann for putting up with it! I would also like to thank my mother, Christine (Grandma) Green, for producing so many elaborate and statistically intricate tables on which to base my results. I would like to thank my supervisor, Udo Rauchfleisch, for his openness to and interest in my work, also for the past eight years ☺, as well as, Thomas Gehring for being a supportive and constructive co-supervisor. I would also like to thank Suzanne Johnson & Elizabeth O’Connor, authors of The Gay Baby Boom, and Lynn Shelley-Sireci & Claudia Ciano-Boyce, authors of Who’s Mommy Tonight?, for sharing the questionnaires they used in their research with me. To realize a project of this magnitude, a lot of moral support was vital to my continuation. A primary source of this support came from the lesbian parenting group LesKids, who has become our family of choice over the past 10 years. In the absence of an on-site dissertation support team, Polly Kienle and the Netzwerk für ausländische Doktorandinnen at the University of Konstanz were very helpful. I also appreciated the patience of those who listened to my grumbling about how things aren’t going and believed in me nonetheless: my parents, and Beate Hübner, Jeanette Howe, and Jutta Tiefensee. And finally, I would like to thank all the women involved in the success of this study: Elke Jansen and the Lesben- und Schwulenverband Deutschland (LSVD) for allowing me to access their ILSE/LSVD network in the search for participants, Sabine Krüger for helping recruit in Cologne, Manuela Torelli and Stephanie Gerlach for helping recruit in Munich, and most of all, all the women who shared their experiences with me by participating in this study of family formation in German LDI families. Table of Contents i List of Tables iv Abstract v 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1 Perspective 1 1.2 Terminology 1 2.0 Early Research on Lesbian Mothers 7 3.0 Literature on Planned Lesbian Families 8 3.1 Parents 10 3.1.1 Psychological Adjustment 10 3.1.2 Aspects of Lesbian Parenting 10 3.1.3 Lesbian Couple Relationship 11 3.1.4 Division of Labor 12 3.1.5 The Social Mother 13 3.2 Children of Planned Lesbian Parents 15 3.2.1 Socio-emotional Development 15