Teaching Non-LGBT Families a Thing or Two About Family Creation

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Your Gamete, Myself,” that explores issues surrounding conception via an egg donor. The author, Peggy Orenstein, has written with about infertility before, notably in her memoir Waiting for Daisy, but somehow overlooks a vast resource on this subject: LGBT families.

Polly at LesbianDad calls her on this, noting that it’s not just a matter of LGBT visibility, but of our community having deep expertise on this topic:

Any family that is, at its biological level, dependent on some kind of community outside its nuclear unit — be it with the help of an adoption agency, the help of a fertility clinic, or the generosity of friends, acquaintances, or strangers as donors — is an open family, not a closed one. This quite obviously is an area in which LGBT family folk are immensely practiced. Queer family-making begins with sharing, and can only happen when we open ourselves to others. Because of this, we have a hell of a lot to teach heterosexual family-makers about not just making peace with that fact, but understanding it for the gift it genuinely is. In other words: we’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers, and therein lies the strength of our families, not their weakness.

I agree with all of the points in Polly’s excellent post, but will offer one clarification. Not all LGBT families are “intentional” ones where both partners decide to have children together, using the shared contributions of kind strangers. In fact, Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute of UCLA, has found that such families are “not the typical gay parent household.” A significant number of same-sex families have children from an earlier opposite-sex marriage, he says. (See also my post last week).

I don’t think it was Polly’s intent to suggest otherwise, but it bears repeating, especially since intentional parents tend to represent only the white, more affluent part of our community, according to Gates. This also does not negate any of Polly’s on-target insights about those of us who do pursue queer family making with a little help from outside the nuclear unit. Furthermore, her point about parental authenticity applies even in cases of LGBT families with children from previous straight marriages. The non-biological partner may come to feel just as much a parent as the biological one (though this is in some cases dependent upon the age of the children when the new relationship starts and the children’s relationship with the former spouse). In cases of previous relationships, too, we have to learn to reach beyond a traditional conception of the nuclear unit, given visitation and joint custody.

I’ll also give one additional comment of my own, as someone who donated an egg to my partner. Orenstein wonders “Would I have felt less authentic as a parent than my husband,” if she had used a donated egg, “or would my gestational contribution have seemed equivalent to his genetic one?” For my partner and me, however, egg donation was in fact the equalizing process by which we both contributed physically to creating our family. Not that any physical contribution is necessary to “authentic” parenthood, of course. I offer our experience merely to share one more facet of egg donation that Orenstein missed. Polly shows without a doubt that non-genetic, non-gestational parents are indeed as authentic, committed, and loving as those once bound to their children by umbilical cords or sharing little twists of nucleic acids. Parents, both LGBT and not, would do well to read her words.