“It Takes a Lot of Planning”: Sexual Minority Young Adult Perceptions of Gay and Lesbian Parenthood

Lesbian and gay parents are becoming more prevalent, visible, and accepted in the United States. Despite these shifts, legal and social obstacles continue to shape pathways to parenthood. For many lesbians and gay men, access to parenthood is difficult, uncertain, and varies geographically. Using focus group interviews, this study explores how 36 Midwestern gay, lesbian, and bisexual young adults without children perceive gay and lesbian parenting and their own parenthood prospects. Themes included perceptions of legal and social barriers to parenthood, assumptions of the mounting economic obstacles and constraints surrounding parenthood, and concerns with navigating legal relatedness when establishing their families. This research provides insight into how emerging adulthood is experienced by sexual minority young adults in a shifting legal and social climate full of uncertainty regarding LGBTQ rights and parenthood. Policy implications and future research are discussed surrounding sexually diverse people’s accessibility in pursuing parenthood.

“I’ll Tell You What You Need to Know.” How Respondents Negotiate the Sense of Meaning- Making—Methodological Reflections from the Field Based on Ethnographic Study of Lesbian Parenting in Poland

The aim of this paper is to shed light on how various interactional and interpretational contexts arising from specific researcher—research participants relationship established in the course of doing ethnographic study on sensitive, and thus often enough resistant to immediate cognition, phenomenon, namely, lesbian parenting in Poland, as well as different ways of embracing these, may factor into the research process. Drawing on specific dilemmas I encountered while doing the study at hand—from engaging a hard-to-reach population that, in a sense, wished to be reached, and the consequences thereof; through being pushed out of the comfort zone as the women under study, in the wake of becoming acquainted with the analysis I offered, “switched” from narrating their “in-orderto motives” to reflecting on the “because motives” behind their actions; to contextualizing emotions arising as my response to experiencing the issues they face (on a daily basis), to name a few—my goal here is to discuss how different ways of collecting and analyzing data—in the context of developing rapport with the women under study—have had an impact on conceptualizing and (re)framing the data at hand.

The Italian public debate on same-sex civil unions and gay and lesbian parenting

After many years of heated debate, in 2016 the Italian parliament approved a law to regulate same-sex civil unions. Although this can be considered a significant step towards the equality of lesbian and gay couples, the law preserves legal differences between heterosexual marriage and homosexual union and does not guarantee the rights of lesbian and gay parents and their children. In this article, we analyze the public debate on same-sex couples and gay and lesbian parenting that occurred in Italy while the parliament was discussing the law. Findings highlight that the ‘natural order’ argument and the irreducible differences between heterosexual marriage and same-sex union are the bedrock of the current expression of heteronormativity in Italy.

La construcción social de la homoparentalidad: ámbito académico, medios de comunicación y ámbito profesional-legislativo

<p>This work aims to analyze the discursive strategies from which we are constructing the phenomenon of gay and lesbian parenting in different public scopes , such as: academic, media and law field. We use a qualitative research method, specifically, the discourse analysis as Potter and Wetherell propose concerning interpretive repertoires. Thus, we can see that defensive standardization strategies are favoured against the risk of homophobia and the attacks on the family diversity.</p><p>There is a risk of confusing resources and experiences that could contribute to a richer collective construction of the phenomenon, reflecting its progress on the legislative, social and political field.</p>

Strasbourg’s Response to Gay and Lesbian Parenting: Progress, then Plateau?

This article examines the advancement of parenting rights for gay and lesbian persons as established through the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It notes that, after many years of progress, this advancement has seemingly now reached a plateau. In particular, although the Court has previously been effective in ending discrimination against single gay and lesbian parents, it has been reluctant to find that discrimination against same-sex couples seeking access to joint parenting rights is contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights (echr). This article examines this plateau and it questions whether consideration of the rights and interests of children could be used to overcome it. It is argued that this consideration may ultimately demand that joint parenting opportunities are made available.