In Search of Doctors, Donors and Daddies: Lesbian Reproductive Decision-Making

Abstract

Lesbian parents disrupt normative assumptions about the linear connection between heterosexuality and parenting. The most common representations of motherhood in Western society take place within a heterosexual matrix. Lesbians are actively discouraged from parenting by legislative prohibitions that restrict them from access to adoption, fostering and assisted reproduction. This is reflected in popular assumptions that a lesbian identity is incompatible with parenthood. During fieldwork in Sweden, I was introduced to a middle-aged Swedish man who enquired about my research topic. When I explained that I was interviewing lesbian mothers, he replied in a puzzled voice: ‘Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction?’ Although new reproductive technologies have developed at a rapid pace and despite the advances of the lesbian, gay and bisexual movement, including at that time almost daily articles in Swedish newspapers about homosexual parenting, procreation/ reproduction often remains linked to heterosexual sexual activity in the popular imagination, as this example illustrates. In fact, alternative insemination is a straightforward process and requires little or no medical assistance. It is also the case that some lesbians become parents through fostering or adoption. Nonetheless, the fact remains (but perhaps not for much longer, given recent developments in gynogenesis¹) that in order for a woman to become pregnant, a donor is required.