Lesbian mothers should be on birth certificates

[SapphosRock]

Great article from Kathleen Stock.

unherd.com/2023/07/lesbian-mothers-should-be-on-birth-certificates/

It is surprising to me that anyone who supports women's rights would oppose lesbian parents having equal rights to straight parents.

From the article:

Naming a second lesbian parent on a child’s birth certificate is a family-friendly move. Arguably, if you squint a bit, it’s even a socially conservative move — though agreeing probably depends on whether you take, as your baseline, a society where lesbians will have children anyway; or whether you think of it as a cultural aberration that could, with discouragement, be stopped. Either way, putting a second lesbian partner on a birth certificate officially defines and legitimises her parenting relation within the family, allowing the burdens and joys to be shared between two adults, and adding a second layer of protection for the child. Family stability is important for good childhood outcomes, and this measure seems to provide some.

@excellenfish that's interesting

There is no point in engaging with @TangledRoots because she is only interested in ideological purity, and has no actual input for what her values look like in the real world. This is a thread about birth certificates.

statements like this:

…the certificate doesn’t bestow parental responsibility.

The registrar records who are the parents and that document can be used to legally prove the fact of their parenthood.

Contradict themselves. She is basically arguing that there is a natural law that gives genetic parents parental responsibility, and no one else. While this might be true in an anarchist society, anthropological reports of societies without written records generally show more flexible views of familial relationships and who is responsible for the children.

the fact that In the U.K. (and most countries) the birth certificate is both a record of parentage and also the thing that confers parental responsibility is well established weather or not she wants to accept it. Her insistence that it’s not has completely derailed this thread.

She’s also not concerned with birth certificate “fraud” in straight couple because she claims it’s rare. Only in lesbian couples, because it’s a “gateway.”

However, the numbers are really easy to look up. In 2012 (latest year I can find numbers for in all these categories)

there were:

348 babies registered to lesbian couples
4,100 babies born via gamete donation
812,970 burn total
4,080 with likely incorrect paternity (based on the 2008 study which established incorrect paternity at .005 percent )

so about 350 babies with lesbian birth certificates

about 8,000 with incorrect genetic paternity

If this was about the birth certificate being a true record of parentage, the bigger number would be addressed first.

@Triplemove yeh, it is just is a very bizarre argument. I go back to my previous statement that at best they are being ignorant and at worst prejudiced. Otherwise why would they not try and tackle the real, evidence-backed, issues first.

Married female partner on the birth certificate has been the case since 2009, surely that “gateway” worry would already have come to pass? Or if not then why not and when will it be a worry?

surely that “gateway” worry would already have come to pass?

It has already come to pass.

Since this ideological/semantic shift that ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘parent’ are not words to describe biological relationships, there are activist moves to have mothers recorded as fathers on birth certificates, efforts to normalise surrogacy, efforts to have the purchasing adults registering the birth and the surrogate mother denied any parental responsibility, or the right to change her mind, for her to be completely invisibilised and not part of registering the child she bore.

I have heard the argument that because ‘lesbian mothers are just the same as any other mother’ ie- biologically unrelated women in a relationship with the mother are equally the mother as the mother, or in other words biological relationships have no intrinsic value or importance to a child, then a man who calls himself a mother is equally the mother - they even use the ‘porridge and bath time’ argument in just the same way as PPs in this thread.

I have heard other arguments using the ‘unrelated woman is equally a mother’ to justify why a child doesn’t really need a mother and being raised only by men is no different to a child being raised by their mother.

The gateway has been opened.

The problem is using equality arguments for biological processes and phenomena. I causes unreasonable demands and morally dubious State practices to meet those demands. It’s already gone too far.

“Everyone has the equal right to be viewed and treated as a woman and have a birth certificate saying that they are female.“

“Everyone has the equal right to create a family”

”Everyone has the equal right to breastfeed their children (and of course ‘their children includes children they are not biologically related to)”

”Everyone has the equal right to have their name on a child’s birth certificate”

etc.

Biology and nature are not a ‘rights’ issue. Some people have better and worse luck biologically, but it is not up to the State to equalise these differences as a matter of ‘rights’.

I see ok, you think because some people say that xyz which is wrong should happen it means that abc which isn’t a problem is now a problem.

Aside from the fact that I disagree on a number of the concerns you have, I don’t think they’ve got anything to do with the fact that same sex female couples can both be on a birth certificate as mother and parent.

My wife won’t carry our babies, she won’t donate her eggs either, she will be no less of a mother than I will be. Just because I would grow and birth the baby, doesn’t mean the baby will be less attached to my wife than to me, that’s not how attachment works. If we took shared parental leave and I decided to take the minimum amount of maternity leave due to finances (not the case for us but could be for people we know due to the woman being the higher earner) then it’s possible the baby’s primary attachment could be to my wife rather than me. Biology is not the be all and end all of a family relationship.

And I don’t think that a baby raised by two fathers is any worse off than a baby raised with a mother and father, just a mother, or two mothers, I t’s all dependent on how well those fathers respond to the needs of the child. That’s what makes a secure attachment. And that’s evidence based. I’m specifically not saying how those fathers became fathers because it could be from a number of ways, not just surrogacy, and the evidence still applies around attachment.

Just because I would grow and birth the baby, doesn’t mean the baby will be less attached to my wife than to me, that’s not how attachment works.

That’s exactly how attachment works.

It’s the reason why fathers can feel a bit sidelined when it is obvious that the baby is obsessively and madly in love with the woman who bore them and can see that no one else, including themselves, provokes that strength of feeling in the child.

A baby is not a doll or a possession.

It is a person and just like all other people who were babies before it, it is hardwired to adore and obsess over its mother (who bore it) and to hate being separated from her.

No, it’s not how attachment works. A baby is hardwired to attach to a primary caregiver. This is often, usually in fact, the mother who bore it. However it’s not always and doesn’t have to be.

society historically has been created on the idea that women will be the people to remain at home and often in male/female couples women earn less (because of the way society has developed) so it makes financial sense for the woman to sacrifice her salary to remain at home. But if the father earns less (say the mother is a doctor) then it may be that she chooses to return to work and the father becomes the primary caregiver, the baby will attach to the father. Attachment is an innate drive which is triggered to respond to feeling safe and secure, as a result of needs being met. If a father or second parent meets those needs then that child will develop a secure attachment to that parent. Usually because both parents meet the needs of the baby the baby attaches to both parents but the primary caregiver isn’t always the mother - and it doesn’t need to be for the baby to be ok.

Erm… No.

The woman who gave birth to the baby and the male from where the sperm came from. It's not about liking it or feeling offending - it's a record of where the baby has come from.

If you're a lesbian and you've had nothing to do with making the baby, then you're an adoptive parent. ie. not on the birth certificate.

oh no I've been sucked back in.

one fairly recent bit of research on attachment to multiple care givers:
http://www.ordagan.com/uploads/1/3/3/4/133400866/early_attachment_networks_to_multiple_caregivers_review_dagan_sagi_schwartz_2022.pdf

One (of many) resources that consider cultural variations of attachment and note the cultural peculiarity of the models that seem to have gained the most popularity in the West:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/feeding-bonding-and-the-formation-of-social-relationships/DE0E7EF30E134D4A830985259B0E0CE2

These are just the ones that happen to be on my desk at the moment for various reasons, I don't have time to compile a reading list for TangledRoots but suggest those reading don't take her word for what attachment theory is, but go do some googlescholar searches yourself.

There is a lot available on the anthropological record re milk sharing in other cultures, the importance of skin to skin with fathers in some other cultures, different ways of figuring which children belong to which families amongst cousins etc etc etc

attachment is obviously a much more complex topic

Tangled, if you’re interested.

This is from the NSPCC. From birth to around 6 weeks of age the baby is in the “pre-attachment phase” this means they don’t show a preference to a particular attachment figure. They have the potential to attach to anyone, biology doesn’t matter, responsive caregiving matters. Most of the time a child’s primary attachment is to their mother (who gave birth to them) but this is not a biological imperative, rather it is a consequence of the way most families are set up. Just because something is common does not mean it is superior, or that a different situation cannot be equally good.

https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-health-development/attachment-early-years#article-top

@mumarooni I dipped into the first of your two links and my first impression is that it is a highly politicised area of research, it makes sense really because the relationship of the mother to the family has a huge impact upon women’s ‘lib’, there is a lot of vested interest in finding certain outcomes.

That said, although it supported the idea that babies form multiple attachments (no shit Sherlock - babies are small people, and even adults form relationships with those they spend a lot of time with, particularly if those people are kind and caring- ‘attachments’ seems to be the jargon for ‘forming a relationship with’ but applied to children), it doesn’t suggest that there is no child’s preference for the mother, or that biological relationships are not more important to the child.

@loopsdefruit the NSPCC suggests that there is a phase where preference for a particular caregiver is not observed, but this does not mean that the child does not have preference for their mother, (it could mean that the child’s concept of time and expectation is very crude and undeveloped) in fact it also says that going into the SCBU during this phase of development and being separated from the ‘primary caregiver’ can causes attachment issues and lifelong symptoms of ADHD.

I am not denying that non-biological relationships can be important to a baby or that a baby can form a bond with a number of people, what I am strongly refuting is that any of these relationships is on a par with the importance of the mother who bore the child to the child, and strongly refuting the suggestions that it is not significantly harmful or psychologically disruptive for a child to be separated from its mother who bore it, for any extensive period.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental difference, babies are born with ADHD it doesn’t develop as a result of trauma.

Attachment also isn’t the same as bonding (forming relationship). An attachment to a caregiver is a very specific relationship which has an impact on an infant’s future psychological well-being. A child has the ability to bond with others at any stage, but the window for forming an attachment and developing an attachment style is much shorter (believed to be around the age of 2 but we don’t know for certain).

Given babies from birth are very keen to and able to communicate their feelings, I think it would be pretty obvious if they had a preference for one attachment figure. They certainly show that preference after 6 weeks.

Babies who for whatever reason are raised by someone other than their birth mother from the very start are just as likely to develop a secure attachment, and be well-adjusted as children and adults as those raised by their birth mother (assuming no additional trauma experiences as children which would obviously impact). NICU and SCBU is of course different because it’s often loud, staff are busy, parents may not be there 24/7, the baby may be unwell etc… you can’t really compare that to a healthy term baby being cared for primarily by their second parent.

Read through the nspcc link you attached. It disagrees with your refutation.

I did read it, I’ve also studied attachment as a result of my work. You’ll have to specifically quote what you mean as evidently we are coming to different conclusions reading the same thing.

Like I said, separation from parents (it doesn’t specify biology in the article) without a replacement of a primary attachment figure could lead to attachment difficulties. It wouldn’t cause ADHD or ASC but giving you the benefit of the doubt it could cause behaviour that could be mistaken for learning disabilities, ASC, or ADHD. It’s why assessments for those differences require a comprehensive understanding of a child’s early life experiences.

@loopsdefruit while I 100% agree with you that attachment does not depend on genetic connection, I would be a bit wary of separating it completely from the physical bond the child forms with its gestational mother.

I have also worked in a field with children where attachment is important, and have seen first hand the gestational bond broken by the mother not properly meeting baby’s needs and caring for baby, and the affects of RAD in older children. So I know that a nurturing, properly attached environment is better than a poor but genetically close one.

However, the bond a baby has and the natural incentive to attach to the woman who bore it is undeniable.

In addition to having worked directly with adopted children, I have the benefit of having bonded with my own genetic and non-genetic children. There is no doubt the baby considers its gestational mother it’s true mother.

That is not to say the other parent doesn’t eventually create equal attachment with the child, but there is no denying the head start the gestational mother has (@excellenfish is bonkers for saying it’s genetics, no feminist analysis whatsoever)

I think with my children, preference had evened out after about a year, and then it’s like all children— they go through phases of preferring one or the other. I would actually say, anecdotally, that attachment to the non-gestational mother follows the same pattern as I see with involved fathers (that is, it takes time and patience despite the genetic relationship)

Nor do I think it matters in the debate of lesbian couples on birth certificates, because in lesbian couples the baby always stays with its gestational mothers. I think as women and feminist we would be remiss to discount the value of gestation as women, the value of gestión for the baby, and separating a baby from its physical mother does open the door for child safeguarding issues (which ARE NOT applicable to this discussion on lesbian body certificates, but would apply to a discussion on surrogacy).

@Triplemove I don’t actually disagree with any of that, and obviously if the biological mother is present, doing the primary caring, and meeting the needs of the baby (so not a cold or unresponsive caregiver) then attachment is likely to be secure.

I think some of the difficulties you see for adopted children come not from either the child having been fostered and then moved to adopted parents, or from having to process the initial need for adoption which is often as a result of trauma.

I also don’t disagree that appropriate assessments should be carried out on couples adopting a child and that includes on “commissioning” parents in a surrogacy arrangement. That’s the bare minimum of safeguarding and it does worry me that it doesn’t happen.

Lesbian couples having a baby together (using a donor) already have a higher level of scrutiny on them than heterosexual couples choosing to have a baby via intercourse. Anyone using donated gametes has to have pre-treatment counselling, and anyone accessing fertility treatment must provide a declaration with support from their GP that there are no concerns about their fitness to parent. This is a very regulated process, and as the child is then planned for, and born into a loving relationship, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the initial building blocks of a healthy and secure attachment are there.

I do feel strongly that if a birth mother can’t be the primary caregiver, as long as someone is and they are responsive to the baby then the baby won’t have any detrimental effects to their wellbeing. That is an extrapolation from existing attachment research yes, but research is limited in that particular field because it’s an unusual/less common set up for the birth mother to not be the primary caregiver outside of serious trauma situations (thanks patriarchy) so we have to extrapolate.

@loopsdefruit I think it’s a bit ridiculous that we are having to defend the value on a non-gestational parent on this thread at all!

i remember the process well.

and a planned lesbian family (or any woman that uses egg donation, for rather that uses sperm donation) is nothing like adoption in terms of attachment issues, which is one reason the continual insistence on the comparison is so frustrating.

I just wanted to clarify that it’s still an important factor (and a non-issue for lesbian birth certificates) I’m glad we agree :)

If you list legal parents and genetic parents separately on the birth certificate then all these issues go away. I’d don’t understand the problem with this.

For many children these would be the same people, but where they aren’t for whatever reason, then there is clarity.

She would be the genetic mother. That doesn’t make her more the mother than the person who built every cell of the baby.

If you read the thread, you will find the many practical reasons that regulation of genetics on birth certificates is practically impossible.