Ahead of Lesbian Visibility Week, we dive into the world of adoption, surrogacy, and fertility
BY NANCY KELLEY, IMAGE BY DIVERSIFYLENS
The story of the LGBTQIA community and parenting can be a particularly painful one to tell because the idea that we are dangerous to children has always been at the core of homophobic, biphobic and transphobic beliefs. As a consequence, fighting for equal protection for our families and equal access to family formation has been a long, bitter battle – one which is not over yet.
Despite this, LGBTQIA people have always raised children, and we have raised them well.
How common is parenting in our community?
Parenting is one area of life where the choices and experiences of LGBTQIA people vary quite starkly. A clear example of this is the Census data on ‘couple families’ (people in relationships who live together) which shows that 39% of opposite gender couples have children, compared to 23% of queer women in couples and just 6.5% of queer men in couples.
There are of course a range of factors that might explain this gendered difference, some to do with how accessible family formation is, others to do with gendered expectations and stereotypes about parenting and childcare. Whatever the drivers, these are significant differences, not just between the LGBTQIA community and the cis/het majority, but within our community.
Sadly the data on trans and non-binary family structures from the 2021 Census, isn’t readily available, but high-quality studies from the US indicate that the population of trans parents in the UK is likely to be pretty significant. Just under 19% of trans people in the US are parents.
As with cis LGBQ+ people, looking at this US data, we can see that there are very significant differences within the trans community. Over half of trans parents are trans women, compared to just over a third who are non binary, and just over ten percent who are trans men.
While most LGBTQIA doesn’t have children, a significant minority do. LGBTQIA parents have diverse experiences of family formation and parenthood, and when we think about queer parenting, we should think of it as an issue that has particular relevance to LGBTQIA women and non-binary people. So far so good.
Family Formation
When we think about LGBTQIA people forming families, we often jump straight to talking about access to fertility care, adoption and fostering, or surrogacy.
But we should start at the beginning. Lots of LGBTQIA people can and do become parents the old-fashioned way – by having sex and getting pregnant. For those of us who don’t have that option, barriers to becoming a parent are still significant.
Fertility preservation
Trans healthcare can have significant impacts on fertility. This means when trans and non-binary people access trans healthcare, they should have access to good quality information, advice and support about fertility preservation and reproductive health. That could mean storing eggs, sperm or embryos prior to treatment, and should always mean getting accurate information about the fertility impacts of HRT, as well as the risk of unplanned pregnancy for trans people on HRT.
Unfortunately, good quality information, advice and support is not what trans people in the UK get. There are no clinical guidelines from NICE and funding for fertility preservation is not universal. Perhaps most worryingly, the fertility impacts of trans healthcare are very commonly used as an argument for further limiting or ending access to care, which means that disinformation is widespread.
We know from US studies that trans people are no less likely than cis people to want to have children in the future. The healthcare pathways already exist that can support trans people in that goal. But we are a long way away from providing equitable access to that healthcare here in the UK.
Fertility treatment
When LGBTQIA people access fertility treatments our outcomes are significantly better than for cis/straight peers because, for most of us, fertility is not the issue. Donor insemination is more likely to work, and IVF is more likely to work. This is all good news.
The bad news is that we often can’t get access to fertility treatment because the system discriminates against us. That’s because access to NHS-funded fertility treatment is still based on demonstrating infertility. In practice, this means that LGBTQIA couples can be expected to demonstrate ‘infertility’ by going through up to 12 cycles of privately funded donor insemination.
The government committed to ending this discrimination in the 2022 Women’s Health Strategy. But NICE guidelines remain rooted in infertility, which means that in many health boards, LGBTQIA women and non-binary people can be asked to pay for up to £25,000 of private healthcare before they become eligible to access IVF treatment on the NHS.
The average pre-tax earnings for someone in full-time employment in 2023 was £34,963 *before tax. The price of admission to parenting is simply too high for most of us to pay.
Adoption and fostering
Since 2005, when the Adoption and Children Act (2002) came into force, LGBTQIA+ people have had the same right to adopt and foster as cis and straight peers, and the number of LGBTQIA+ adopters has been growing rapidly ever since.
The most recent government data available shows that in 2022, 540 out of 2,950 adoptions in England were to same-gender couples (a year-on-year rise of over 17%). This means that 1 in 6 adoptions placed children in LGBTQIA families.
In fact, this is likely an undercount, as the way the data is collected excludes single LGBTQ+ adopters, as well as bi and trans people in different gender relationships.
We’ve come a long way: legalising adoption for same-gender couples, and steadily working to reduce the discrimination experienced by LGBTQIA people in the adoption and fostering process (a big shout out to New Family Social here).
But we’re not quite there. Homophobia, biphobia and transphobia still influence adoption and fostering practice across the UK. Perhaps not quite as obviously as they did in 2021 when Jenn and I adopted for the first time and were openly and repeatedly asked about how we would ‘make up for’ the fact our children would be raised by two women (!). But prejudices still persist, particularly for trans prospective adopters. And as long as this is the case, children who need and deserve the best quality long-term family placement risk losing out.
(As an aside, I would like to note that I have resisted the urge to bore on about how great my children are here and I deserve a badge for it.)
Surrogacy
Surrogacy remains relatively uncommon in the UK, and the publicly available data on surrogacy is imperfect, as it relies on records of parental orders being granted (parental orders transfer legal parental status from the surrogate to the intended parents). Data published by the Nuffield Council for Bioethics shows that the number of parental orders granted by courts in England and Wales increased from 117 in 2011 to 424 in 2021, around half of which involved surrogates based outside of the UK.
Research by the University of Kent and the charity My Surrogacy Journey indicates that over the same time period applications for parental orders from the same LGBTQIA intended parents have also been rising, and these now account for around a third of all applications.
Surrogacy is a contested area of public policy, and critics of surrogacy often focus attention on gay and bi men, leveraging homophobia to support their argument. But there is a growing body of evidence about surrogacy, including surrogacy in the UK that paints a nuanced picture of the reasons people choose to act as surrogates and their experience of surrogacy. And the Law Commission has brought forward proposals for wide-ranging reform of surrogacy law in the UK, to improve the system for children, surrogates and intended parents. For LGBTQIA people who are interested in becoming parents through a surrogacy process, this reform is much needed.
What about the children?
However winding our road to parenthood is, LGBTQIA people have always raised children and we will always raise children. We raise them as parents, as aunties and uncles, as older siblings, as part of our chosen families. And we raise them well.
Because after decades of research studies from all over the world, the evidence is clear: there is no need for LGBTQIA people to ‘make up for’ being queer parents. Our children do just as well as the children of straight and cis people. In fact, on some of the measures that really matter, like quality of family relationships – children do better. The kids really are alright.
Lesbian Visibility Week
22 April – 28 April 2024
This Lesbian Visibility Week we will be celebrating the power of sisterhood by uplifting incredible LGBTQIA women and non-binary people from every generation, in every field and in every country around the world. One community, so many brilliant individuals. This year we are building on Lesbian Visibility Week’s incredible success with unified not uniform – a global campaign celebrating the power and diversity of our community. As ever, our aims are to build public understanding of LGBTQIA women and non-binary people’s lives, to increase lesbian visibility and to create a legacy that benefits our community everywhere.
You can find out more and get involved at: lesbianvisibilityweek.com
DIVA magazine celebrates 30 years in print in 2024. If you like what we do, then get behind LGBTQIA media and keep us going for another generation. Your support is invaluable.
