Essay On Homosexual Parenting On Children

Literature Review

“Homosexual parenting on children”

Introduction

Homosexuality is a sexual attraction to his or her own sex. It was approved, banned, punished in different countries, at different times. Today same sex marriage is acceptable in 25 countries in the world. In 2014 the England and Wales became the first countries in the UK to accept same-sex marriage1 the next thing to consider for every married couple is of course to get a child of their own. There are few options to get a baby and these are adopting, via surrogate, for lesbians donor insemination. Most couples would adopt their child because surrogacy is very expensive, and donor insemination is only for woman. Most of the people, they might prefer the original style of family,

287) of children in lesbian families remains a focus for current work on lesbian families (e.g., Wright, 2001), including children’s own reflections on their experiences (Paechter, 2000). Saffron (1998) outlines the ‘advantages of having a lesbian mother’ (p. 35) for children. She argues that given that most children will be heterosexual when they grow up, ‘the greatest gift a lesbian mother can give is freedom from prejudice and from the fear of homosexuality’ (p. 38). For lesbian, gay and bisexual children having an openly lesbian mother is a distinct advantage, making it easier for them to be comfortable with their sexuality. Children in lesbian families also gain a tangible sense of women’s emotional and financial independence from men, they develop an understanding of family that challenges traditional understandings, and they learn to accept

With regard to the law and child custody, the consensus appears to be that while individual lesbians may still loose custody of their children (the highly publicised case of Sharon Bottoms for example, Gover, 1997), and ‘the threat of a custody battle over the issues of sexual orientation remains a powerful one in the lives of all lesbian mothers’ (Arnup and Boyd, 1995, p. 83), custody is now much more winnable and is no longer the urgent political issue that it once was (Donovan, 1997). Lesbian feminists now feel (politically) able to work on issues other than child custody. This means that custody battles between lesbians and their ex-spouses are now of lesser concern. They have been eclipsed by a focus on ‘intracommunity’ custody battles (Kendell, 1998) between lesbian and gay family members (e.g., between lesbian mothers and sperm donors/fathers or between biological and social mothers) and other legal issues concerning planned lesbian families (Arnup, 1994), including fostering and adoption righs. Intracommunity custody battles, it is argued, raise fundamental questions about the nature of parenthood and the meaning of family (Kendell, 1998): do they, as Gavigan (1995) asks, ‘entrench or undermine dominant notions of family’ (p. 102)? Courts, in the US particularly (where there is a large number of planned lesbian families), struggle with custody and visitation disputes between formerly