Conception
Last night Lo and I started our family. In theory, perhaps, if not yet in egg-meets-sperm reality. We crept in late, through the side door, to our local fertility centre’s information night, a compulsory experience before you can make an appointment with a specialist.
As we entered, we exchanged cheeky smiles with the only other lesbians in the room, our friends S&L, and took our seat next to one of the many garden variety heterosexual couples (except I quickly realised that there was nothing garden variety about these people, given their reason for being here). A man with sweeping, grey hair was speaking about the clinic’s work to a set of powerpoint slides.
At first, I instinctively felt cynical and wary of this man and his patriarchal, heterosexual medical model approach to fertility – warning men not to wank before donating sperm and women to remain lying down after insemination – but then another doctor, a leggy blonde with a warm smile and classic chignon, with a name not dissimilar to Dr Heavenly, went on to introduce the next slides and, in doing so, apologised for the penis and vagina nature of some of the material outlining the centre’s commitment to working with same sex couples. From my seat, I beamed one of those ‘thank you’ smiles that we members of marginalised groups use to great effect, I guess when we’d rather be leaping to our feet in applause for someone who has acknowledged our existence but know we’d better not.
As the seminar progressed, I started to see Dr Heavenly and Dr Big Gray Hair and their contemporaries as the heros they were. If it were not for the brave, pioneering and radical work that they had done in the early days of fertility treatments, in the face of severe criticism and judgement, Lo & I would not have the options for starting a family that we do. When we left the centre, we felt validated and awash with the options before us. We floated on the emancipatory promise of science – the everyday miracle that fertility treatment offers us homo folk. There is something entirely pro-feminist and radical about the options available to us for designing our family. We know that men will have to be in there somewhere, either inserting the speculum or jacking off for our benefit in a privacy room but we also know that we hold such choice and options before us.
For us, by virtue of where we live, we will be able to have a child who has both parents’ names on its birth certificate. We will be able to retain our five star lesbian status without having ever to have to experience the feeling of warm sperm running down the insides of our leg. By starting our family, Lo and I are doing what we believe in, knowing that the road ahead will not be an easy one. Knowing that we will have to justify our decision to form our family intentionally, to a design that continues to be scrutinised. But knowing that we are doing a right and brave thing that has been done in so many different ways by the global community of GLBT families. And I am so excited about being part of that.
