Seeking Sperm: Accounts of Lesbian Couples' Reproductive Decision-Making and Understandings of the Needs of the Child

Same-sex couples and their children have been the subject ofsignificant international attention over recent years, includingdebates about planned parenthood in the context of same-sexrelationships (Donovan, 2000; Dempsey, 2004; Luttichau, 2004;Vonk, 2004; Ryan-Flood, 2005). Drawing on a qualitative studyof lesbian parent families in the UK, this article contributesfurther to these debates through a discussion of respondents’accounts of their reproductive decision-making. I discuss thesocio-legal discourses around the legitimacy of the lesbianparent family created by donor insemination and examine howrespondents react to these discourses. I identify an overarchingpreoccupation within these accounts which is concerned withaddressing the needs of children. The dominant notions of howbest to meet children’s needs established in contemporaryUK family policy pose considerable tensions for the lesbianparent family. In seeking to resolve these tensions, parentsin my study reinterpret and develop different understandingsof how best to meet these needs. Their accounts reveal the complexityof the considerable efforts of families raising children infamily forms that fall outside the normative order to addressthe needs of the child, and the disjunctions between everydayunderstandings of children’s needs and those constructedthrough policy and family law.