Why Are We Breeding?

Feature, By Christian Taylor, 12th September, 2007

The spotlight on gay parenting continues this month. All families – not just gay families – take many forms, and while it’s hard to argue against gay couples fostering and adoption children, things get a little blurrier when it comes to us having babies of our own.

As the gay rights movement in Australia moves into a new, more mature phase, it’s becoming glaringly obvious that as a community, we no longer want the same things. Once upon a time we were bound by a desire for acceptance – wanting to be treated with respect was a similarity that bound and galvanised us. Now that many of our civil liberties have come, the wishlist has grown. Some of us still want cultural preservation and privacy, others want the doors flung open. Some mourn the loss of the ghettos, others celebrate it. Some want marriage rights, others want self validation and the freedom of not being defined in such terms. We’re a diverse bunch, popping up in all walks of life – that we’re breaking into smaller groups is hardly surprising.

These days, when it comes to the gay rights agenda, parenting is definitely right up there. We want to start creating our own families – indeed many of us already are. Gay men and women are coming together in a variety of ways and some of these arrangements are working beautifully. For others, they’ve become incredibly complicated. While the parenting urge is an understandable one, where do we draw the line?

About a year ago, Tom fathered a child with a lesbian couple. Despite all the promises and the communication beforehand, they weren’t far into the pregnancy before he realised that he wasn’t going to be an equal partner the arrangement. “You can talk about things until you’re blue in the face, but you don’t know how you’re going to respond until it happens for real. At first they kept me in the loop, but around the third, fourth month I was already being phased out. They were calling it their baby, they were always too busy to see me, I felt really used by the whole thing.” Tom says that he barely sees his daughter now. “When you’re a single gay man trying to fight for space in a lesbian relationship – well, it just gets too hard. I really understand first hand now how big the difference is between lesbians and gay men. It’s huge.”

There’s no doubt that we can make brilliant parents. It has been said that children raised by gay mums and dads are just as well adjusted as anyone else and there’s no reason why this wouldn’t be the case. Fostering and adoption for gay couples certainly makes a lot of sense. These children are already here – they need love and support, and there are many gay people out there who have plenty of that to offer. While we can foster in Australia, adoption is only permitted in WA and the ACT at this point. But what about those of us who actually want to breed, and have children of our very own?

If there’s order in nature, if everything happens for a reason, then there must be a purpose to being gay, a reason why we’re built the way we are. Surely it’s more than just an anomaly. Why do we have this deep seated desire to pair up with the same sex? Perhaps this is a question we’ve stopped asking ourselves. Of course, there are many different theories out there. Some say we are nature’s way of making sure that there’s a portion of the population sitting outside of the pro-creation machine. Many feel that those who aren’t raising children are free to channel their energies elsewhere, be it creatively, charitably, innovatively – contributing to society in other ways than making up the numbers. Others feel the gay community sit on the fringe as a support network, as an overflow.

Regardless of where you sit with this, biologically when you boil it down, it’s hard to deny – there’s only one true way to make a baby and everybody knows it.

Modern science has created massive grey areas in so many fields of endeavour – leaving us with confounding moral quandaries. We’re living in an age of unprecedented choice. We want it all. We’re consuming at an alarming rate – living on credit, buying our plasma televisions. Will the future see more and more gay couples using scientific measures to dance around the actual act of having straight sex to make babies of their own? Perhaps. But are these the rights we should be fighting for? Like anything, these agendas can be pushed too far, and they can backfire. While many of us would be happy with civil unions, others insist on pushing for marriage – one of the oldest institutions in the world, the foundation that our society is built on. Likewise, we could push for full adoption rights, and many would feel this is enough. We could have our families – not because we want 2.3 kids and a mortgage, not for the status that it would give us, not for some need to tick the ‘baby’ item off life’s to do list – but for the contribution we could make to the lives of these individuals, and to society as a whole.

Perhaps we need to realise our innate biological limitations and argue for the rights which are actually owed to us. We could proudly fulfill our purpose, while being a great support to so many out there in a variety of ways without going down this path of pretending. That being said, regardless of the legislation that stands in our way, gay people have been finding ways to make babies for years, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. But when it comes to requests that we ask of our governments, there has to be a line drawn somewhere. At the end of the day there are many ways we are equal to our heterosexual counterparts. Unfortunately, making babies isn’t one of them.

Should gays and lesbians be given access to IVF? Vote now in the forums.

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