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.

I haven’t created my donor-sperm assisted family yet, and perhaps I never will, but I can safely say that your ‘arguments’ will not make one iota of difference to that decision.

It’s become normalised because fortunately our society has largely come around to recognising that same sex, donor-sperm assisted families are perfectly normal, valid and healthy. If you think the minority of regressive voices like yours are going to turn back the clock, I believe and hope you will be sorely disappointed.

The child can have 2 Mums but also needs to know who their biological father is. Even if it says 'donor'.
I'll always argue that the birth certificate belongs to the child and should be factual. It's not up to a lesbian couple or a male and a trans-identifying female to falsify those.

You’re also pushing for much more radical technological engineering of human beings than is currently available. I want to stop that as well as wanting to roll back all the societal missteps resulting from law-makers being persuaded by activists to treat biology itself as a class oppression/equality issue.

The pros and cons of requiring sperm and egg donors to be named on birth certificates have already been exhaustively argued on this thread.

it seems a bit of a pointless argument to me, as the likelihood of the law being changed in that way is vanishingly small - I imagine the outcry from straight couples who use donor gametes due to infertility would be huge, even setting aside same sex couples.

"biology itself as a class oppression/equality issue"

Pretty sure I've heard thus argument used to dismiss basic feminist demands, too. 'What do you want employment rights for, when women are hardwired for caring/domestic roles? It's not sex discrimination to keep women out of the fire service, the armed services, elite sports, it's just biology! Women are too weak for that..'

Re: the ideal ways of starting a lesbian family, I think one issue is that the law is currently heavily weighted towards clinic-based donor conception (using ID-release donors if conceiving in the UK). Better processes for recognising the legal parenthood of the non-birth mother instead of and/or alongside a known donor might make this a more attractive option than it currently is. Theoretically the process here is gaining PR, followed by adoption, but it is very slow (years-long) and the legal position is that there can be only two legal parents, so a sperm donor and the other mother (who in some cases may also have contributed the egg) cannot both be recognised. If the two mothers are married, the other mother will automatically be the second parent, but this leaves the known donor without equivalent legal recognition. These are child-centred concerns to grapple with.

Fwiw, I've read a great many accounts from adult children of donor conception, including those who are profoundly unhappy about it, and the notion of feeling rejected by the donor isn't really one I've come across.

Pretty sure I've heard thus argument used to dismiss basic feminist demands, too. 'What do you want employment rights for, when women are hardwired for caring/domestic roles? It's not sex discrimination to keep women out of the fire service, the armed services, elite sports, it's just biology! Women are too weak for that…

Mmm. Not quite. Trans arguments do treat biology itself as a class oppression thing - “everyone has an equal right to call themselves a woman, to have a womb, get pregnant and breastfeed, therefore we need to advance technology to stop the ‘gatekeepers of womanhood’ oppressing malewomen and allow them to join anti-natal classes along with the old fashioned women’.

Feminists challenging ‘hardwiring’ claims and sexist stereotypes about women’s capabilities, are not quite the same as feminists challenging biology. If women really were arguing that biology needs to be made equal, it would be more like saying that women had the right to run the 100 metres with men, but riding motorbikes, and to start referring to men’s legs as their wheels. Or that women had just as much right to have a penis as men, for women to get penis transplants and to change language and biology books to normalise the grafted penis on women, saying ‘it is really no different in practice’ and accusing people of sexism if they are in any way sceptical or critical about the practise.