British professor, Stephen Scott, director of research at the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners has said that his research leads him to believe that lesbians make better parents than a man and a women. As you can imagine this has been met with some contraversy but it does give LGBTQ parents some well needed back up in their quest to be recognised as equal to their hetero counterparts.

When you are going through this insemination process you’ll be amazed by people’s reactions. Fair enough, you needn’t tell a soul, but us being us, we are open about it. Most people are great; interested but not really needing to know the literal ins and outs of the process. Then there are those others who come out with some of the most ridiculous, ill-informed crap you’ve ever heard.

Now we come to the delicate etiquette of the sperm donor’s arrival. You don’t read about it in a Jane Austen novel that’s for sure. Being the honest, up-front girl that I am, I just decided, “to hell with it, this is a weird situation so what’s the point in pretending?”

You need a doctor who is on your side not just for when you’re trying to have a child but when you are actually giving birth. In Ireland no doctor has to let the non-bio mother into the delivery room. It’s your GP and the midwife’s call. So you have to have a sympathetic doc, it’s vital.

I’m still seething at Brenda Power’s gobsmackingly ill-informed and homophobic ‘article’ in yesterday’s Sunday Times. How can she pass judgment (phrases like “get-up” “carry-on” ) on a Parade she didn’t attend? How can the Sunday Times see fit to publish such an unresearched article – what next? Reviews of theatre from a production shot? Reviews of concerts from hearsay?

Fostering children is a really worthwhile thing to do and a few upcoming conferences might help prospective LGBTQ parents to get the answers they need on this subject.

We had been discussing this with friends as we were both sick of what seemed to the secrecy around same sex parents. We would see same sex families but have no idea how they did it. It was none of our business of course and god knows we weren’t going to go up to a complete stranger and ask where their baby came from!

As soon as you tell people you and your partner are looking into this, they will ask you all of the above, ad nauseum. People mean well but they honestly think you haven’t stayed awake at night worrying about how whether your sexuality will mean that your child is bullied in school?

From April 6th 2009 bother parents will be automatically named on a childs birth cert if they have undergone IVF treatment. This new UK law is a step in the right direction for parenting

My partner and I have been together since the 20th century. Imagine! As with any relationship, when things start to get serious, conversation leads to serious things; grown up things like where do you want to live, do you want to travel, is marriage something you look towards, do you want to have kids some day? There’s nothing more natural in the evolution of any loving relationship.