Slate’s Emily Yoffe this week opined that “out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe” and marriage is the solution to childhood poverty and economic growth. Lauren Bruce at Offsprung has already taken her to task for her assertions, and notes that gay families are out of luck in Yoffe’s scenario. I’d like to add a bit […]
“It was a party in my fallopian tubes.” That’s how Orange County mom Cristine Gaiennie described what happened during the fertility treatments that led her and her partner Patsy Lovell to welcome quadruplets into the world on March 3. They already have a two-year-old son. I swear I didn’t know about this when I joked
There’s a new online registry for donor-conceived children, their parents, and sperm, egg, or embryo donors to find each other. Donor Offspring Matches (DOM) has just launched as an alternative to the older Donor Sibling Registry (DSR). DOM has one advantage over DSR, though: it is free, whereas DSR charges $40 per year. Is this
Oregon moms Sally Sparks and Heather Dugas had their second child on February 10, 2008, six days after they registered as domestic partners under the state’s new law. At the hospital, however, they ran into administrative complications. The clerk did not put Dugas, the non-biological mom, on the birth certificate, but instead gave her a
For my third contribution to Robin Reagler’s blog carnival, here’s Some/thing Blue: the Web site of Donor Home Delivery. A reader wrote to ask if I knew anything about this company. The Web site says it helps couples with distant known donors ship sperm safely from one place to another, ensconced in a “test yolk
If you’re a single mom or potential single mom of any orientation, or even a partnered lesbian looking for insight and advice on getting pregnant, you should put Louise Sloan’s Knock Yourself Up (reviewed here in December) on your reading list. If you’ve already read her stuff and liked it, or want to get a
Dr. Nanette Gartrell is the principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS). “Longitudinal lesbians?” you may ask. Parse it differently, however, and it’s a multi-year, repeated study of a group of lesbian moms and their children, the longest-running and largest investigation of its kind. Dr. Gartrell was kind enough to take time
A publicist sent me a copy of the Happy Baby, Healthy Mom Pregnancy Journal by Robert A. Greene, M.D. and Laurie Tarkan. I was looking forward to reviewing it, and glad that a general pregnancy publication from a mainstream press (Clarkson Potter, part of Random House) was reaching out to lesbian moms. The combination book
A few miscellaneous items for your reading pleasure, collected over the holidays: Abigail Garner points out an article from the Connecticut Journal Inquirer, profiling 13-year-old Rebecca Lazarus, the daughter of two gay dads and an active advocate for LGBT families. Also in Connecticut, the Hartford Courant featured Elizabeth Kerrigan and Joanne Mock, lead plaintiffs in
In the seasonal spirit of “good will towards men,” here are two recent articles about gay dads: When a single mother of four young teens died, leaving her children with no other relatives and no family friends who could take them in, the two brothers and two sisters were at risk of being split into
