For most women, the choice to have children is not a choice but the non-choice. If you’re straight and not celibate, chances are that you will end up pregnant. And since Irish women don’t have abortions (*cough*), pregnancy inevitably leads to a child, wanted or not.

Charting and ovulation predictor kits and checking cervical mucus be damned. I think we missed ovulation. I rang our donor but he was busy that evening. We made plans to go ahead a bit early and go the next morning. However, if I actually ovulated when I felt that pain, the next day was far too late.

If you’re thinking of starting a family, you’ve probably had a look at websites aimed at people who are trying to conceive. For women who don’t routinely have sex with men, getting pregnant requires some planning, so we have a lot to learn from women who’ve had trouble conceiving, despite their sperm-on-tap existence.
When you find [...]

When you’re lesbians and want a family, everything is about trust. Because our family will be invisible in the eyes of the law, and our lives are not predefined by traditional roles, our intentions need to be clear and spelled out. We need to explain ourselves to each other. And we need to be careful [...]

We all know gay people are adopting and raising children but no one seems to talk about the logistics of it. How? Where? Who? What? It’s in the interest of making things a bit more manageable, and dispelling some myths that some friends decided to set up the website IrishPinkAdoptions.com.

So, you have your donor, you’re doing your thing and month after month nothing. Zero. Nada. That damned line is looking mockingly at you. What have you done wrong? What could you do better? Is there something wrong with you/your partner/your donor?

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.

For those of us who want to have children, there are several ways of going about it. If you’re interested in fostering then here’s the second part of an interview which will hopefuuly answer some of your questions