“Science Led to Gay Families”? Not Exactly

An article for CNN yesterday ran the headline “Science led to gay families: Law should follow.” I’m the last person to argue that our families shouldn’t have equal legal rights—but the headline is overstating science’s role and inadvertently perpetuating a dangerous myth about same-sex parents.

The article’s author, Debora L. Spar, is president of Barnard College and author of The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception. She’s right that assisted reproduction has helped many same-sex couples have children, and their “legal status has not yet caught up with their lives.” I thank her for her assertion that “it is kids who deserve the same rights afforded their friends and classmates—the right to grow up in a legally sanctioned family, regardless of who their parents are and how they came into being.” She seems like a great ally.

At the same time, she writes of “the science that enabled families headed by same-sex couples to exist at all”—overlooking the first generation of queer parents who often had children in opposite-sex marriages before coming out. She rightly notes that adoption has not always been a legal option for same-sex parents, but makes it sound like same-sex parents would not exist if it weren’t for assisted reproduction. Fewer of us might exist, but we would exist nonetheless.

Even today, analyses of U.S. Census data from the Williams Institute at UCLA contradict the popular view of same-sex couples raising children they conceived or adopted together, and “suggest that offspring of lesbian and gay parents are more often the product of different-sex relationships that occur before individuals are open about their sexual orientation.”

Evidence also suggests that many Black and Latino same-sex couples are among those who have their children in earlier opposite-sex relationships—so focusing only on couples who create their children through “science” not only limits our view of the many ways we create our families, but may also limit our view of same-sex parents’ racial diversity.

Assisted reproduction also costs more than many other ways of starting a family. Focusing on it as the primary method of same-sex family creation may also therefore blind us to the many same-sex-headed families facing poverty.

Additionally, focusing on same-sex parenting as high-tech risks reinforcing the impression that same-sex families are newfangled and lack a track record—as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito seemed to think when he recently asked, “You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution [same-sex marriage] which is newer than cell phones or the Internet?” (I offered a fuller response to that one last week.)

I do not mean to be too critical of Spar. I appreciate her support and sense of equality. I feel obligated, however, to point out that she’s only showing a narrow aspect of a much bigger picture. Science didn’t lead to gay families. Love did.