Should Lesbians Be Having Babies?

I want to preface this argument by stating very clearly that I think lesbians make as good, if not better parents than anyone else, not least because they need to put a lot more effort and thought into having children than your average straight couple or single woman does. I am not in any way having a go at lesbians who have children through relationships with men or adoption, I only want us to look more closely at the increasing trend for lesbian couples to have babies, how they go about it and how far we should go to have children.

The inherent 'right' of all women to have a child seems to be a topic currently on many people's minds, at least judging by recent media coverage which tends to expound a view that it is the right of all women to have a child and they should be prepared to go to any lengths, and any expense necessary to have one. It also compounds the society held belief that a woman is not a 'real' woman if she can't/won't have children, and that it is our biological nature to have children. Well, a few points to think about on the biology front:

It is our biological nature to have children when we are very young, ideally in our teens, or early twenties at the latest. Modern Western society has deemed this undesirable, saying that we don't want our daughters marrying and having children that young, that they should have an education and careers and lives outside of child bearing and rearing. I think the vast majority of people would agree with that. However, this has led to a trend of women waiting until they are very old (in biological terms) to have children, when it is harder to conceive and the chances of problems with pregnancy and birth are increased.

The fact that we have the technology to allow women to have children though all sorts of 'unnatural' procedures including artificial insemination, IVF and even surrogacy, does not necessarily give us the right to do it. One of the problems I had with The Baby Race programme was that all the women featured seemed to think it was natural to want children and have them regardless of how old they were and by whatever means necessary, but they completed disregarded the fact that in itself what they were doing was not natural. Most of them were having fertility problems because of their age, not because of medical conditions. If they were so desperate to have children why did they not have them earlier when it would have been no problem? Also all the women in that programme were single. What does that say about the role of the family? I'm not for one minute saying that a family should be a man and a woman and 2.4 children, but should we be encouraging single women to have children, just because they want one? Children are not a commodity - you shouldn't be having one just because everyone else you know is having one, or because your clock is ticking and if you don't have one now you never can.

Then there is the moral question: Is it morally and ethically right that affluent woman in the West should pay vast amounts of money for complicated fertility treatments, using up valuable medical resources, be they private or public, when that money and effort and expertise could be directed into curing cancer, or improving or saving the lives of millions in the Third World affected by HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB etc? I can appreciate that for some women not being able to have a child can be traumatic and lead to depression, but on the whole childlessness is not a medical condition we need to 'fix' and shouldn't be seen as such. I believe that there is a worrying trend in Western medicine and society to 'play God' by creating babies artificially, keeping alive very premature babies who then go on to have many medical problems, and by finding ways for people to live longer and longer regardless of their quality of life. Why are we so afraid of death? (That's a whole other debate topic, but it's something to think about.)

A slightly flippant point perhaps, but we are biologically designed to store up fat for times of famine, which in the modern Western world at least hardly ever happens, but does that mean we should all allow ourselves to become unhealthily obese because that is our nature? If you're saying it's the biological nature of a woman to have children, that is what you're saying about obesity.

Is it our nature to have children? Some people are just infertile, the way some people get cancer and some don't, or some people have red hair. It's unfortunate for those people, but to what lengths should society be going to treat it? Also, I don't believe all people make good parents. Unfortunately it seems that often those who would make the best parents can't have children, and those who make terrible parents get pregnant just by looking at a man, but that's life in all its wonderful diversity! Gay men make just as good parents, but the only way gay men can become parents is either with a woman or through adoption. Why should it be different for lesbians, just because we have wombs?

Lesbians cannot have children naturally, unless they do have one naturally, i.e. with a man. Why do we not just accept this, as many other childless women do, and put our energies into other things? Why do we not set an example for other childless couples and adopt? And indeed campaign for adoption and fostering for lesbian and gay couples to be much easier and more acceptable? Why are we not content to be excellent aunts, or godmothers, or babysitters for friends? Why do we also believe we have a right to have children at any cost? I don't believe we do. Many people seem to have a problem with civil partnerships saying that it apes heterosexual marriage and why do we want to be just like straight people? Well, why do we? Why do we want our 2.4 children just like everyone else? If we accept that homosexuality is a naturally occurring, biologically determined situation, why can we not accept the natural, biologically determined fact that two women (or two men) cannot make a baby together and get on and do something else with our lives?

Lisa Carter (From Velvet Issue 8)