CLASS ISSUES IN REPRODUCTION

by Terry Boggis
Director, Center Kids
the Family Program of the LGBT Center

Presented at Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition International Conference - July 25, 1997

I direct Center Kids, the family program of the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center and the largest regional LGBT program in the country - actually, I guess, probably in the world. Before I directed it, when the program was still run by volunteers, my lover, our son and I were one of the first families in the program, and members of its steering committee since its founding in 1988. I tell you this because, as someone involved with the lesbian and gay parenting groundswell on an organizational level as well as a personal one for the past almost nine years, Ive had the opportunity to observe a lot.

I get many phone calls - between 50-100 a week - from LGBT people needing information on becoming parents, and on coping with the challenges of parenthood (which are plentiful under the simplest circumstances) with the additional twist of being queer in the mix. These calls, from all kinds of queer people, have been tremendously instructive for me over the years. Id like to share with you some of the things Ive learned.

I should say something at the outset -- my reflections today have to do with the concept of class, of fitting in and exclusion. I know that in this culture, class has many variables: our parents, our parents parents, our continents and counties of origin, our first languages, our neighborhoods, our tastes, our hairstyles, the things we own, our educations, the possessions and positions to which we aspire, our accents, our pasts, our bloodlines, our accessories. So just to clarify and simplify, when I speak of class here, Im talking about money.

Over the past almost ten years, Ive watched and participated as we, as a group, have presented the face of lesbian and gay parenthood in this country to be white and middle class. I know differently, though. Queer parents are not only middle-class, educated, comfortable, employed dual income guppy couples. We are also people who live in cars with our kids, people who live in rural areas in economically stressed regions with little to look forward to in work or education, lesbian couples who want to have a baby and cant afford to buy sperm, gay men as enthusiastic at the notion of parenting as any could be who cant possibly afford surrogacy arrangements, people who cant imagine affording a camping trip away or a group junket to the circus with other queer families. We are people with AIDS, sometimes with children who also have the virus. Some of us not only cant afford a copy of Daddys Roommate or the other books depicting gay families, but the lives reflected in the pages of these books bear no resemblance whatsoever to the lives we lead. We are families on welfare, living in public housing. We are people whose desire to parent is every bit as strong as the middle class homo, but we lack health insurance sufficient to cover the most basic gynecological care, let alone sperm washing, intrauterine insemination, in-vitro, GIFT, and other sophisticated fertility technologies, or midwifery, or the funds to cover essential legal counsel (a basic requirement in a society where our children can still be taken away from us).

In my job I hear from lesbian mothers whose pregnancies have resulted from sex work, drugging or drinking, who have HIV and need to make arrangements for their children while they are working at taking care of themselves. I hear from young single lesbians who became pregnant and dont want to be, who seek lesbian or gay parents for adoption placement of their children. In fact, contrary to the popular truism in this community, not all of our families are planned, not all of our children are wanted, not every pregnancy is a carefully planned life transition.

The average cost of a surrogacy arrangement at this time is $35,000. Foreign adoptions cost about $20,000. Private, or independent, adoptions cost anywhere from $15,000 to $40,000 (and much of that price discrepancy comes from the different values assigned to white children and children of color -- a blatant horror). Lesbians, who tend to come to parenting decisions later in life and attempt pregnancy with frozen sperm, encounter infertility problems more often than straight women. Advanced reproductive assistance, such as in vitro fertilization, is very often not covered by health insurance, even when a woman is insured.

I recently spoke at a Center Kids support group for gay men and lesbians who were considering parenting biologically. A lesbian couple of limited means came to the meeting hoping to meet sperm donors. They had made inquiries at sperm banks, and were horrified at the $150 per shot price quotes, plus assorted adjunct expenses. One of them said, "We just want some sperm!". Her exasperation at her inability to access a substance generally treated as utterly disposable and valueless was enormous. And the men in the room were even more despairing -- the costs for them to reproduce (without even getting into the class politics of surrogacy) are even more daunting.

Only men and women of means are able to gain access to the reproductive technologies that allow lesbians and gay men to have children without compromising their sexual identity or their health. So what is the upshot of this financial challenge for working class lesbian and gay people? No surprise: the pathways that remain open include heterosexual contact, anathema to a gay-identified person, or insemination at home with fresh sperm from an unchecked donor, involving health risks that dont come with sperm banks.

Its interesting to note that through the twenty-odd year old modern debate on reproductive rights in this country, the argument on which we have unswervingly been focused is a womans right to choose abortion. The discourse is invariably cast in the negative -- the right not to have a baby. But reproductive rights also means our rights as queer people to reproduce, and to have adequate law in support of alternative family structures to make us feel safe enough to take the risk to parent, to love and tend our kids.

Ive been increasingly distressed at the self-congratulatory nature of the LGBT parenting movement over the years. We position ourselves as saintly progressives with the best children, the light of the world. But who are we talking about when we say "we"? Are we envisioning the virtually all white public face of the nontraditional parenting movement, or do we bear in mind the lesbian and gay parents who are not here because they cant afford to go to conferences, whove never heard of GLPCI or programs like mine? Im not saying we shouldnt get to feel proud and joyful - we all deserve that - but then what?

Perhaps more than any other subgroup of this community, ours has been the most vigorous in its assertion that "were just like everyone else," an announcement that sets my teeth on edge every time I hear it. Who is "everyone else"? What do we envision when we proudly make this pronouncement? We mean white people with money, education, property and possessions -- the American model, the American myth, not true of all of us, and mostly untrue in the larger culture. The desperation for acceptance that lies behind the "were like everyone else" profession makes me cringe. I understand the impulse behind it -- as parents, we have a fierce desire for our children to face an unimpeded life, a life without hurt feelings and ostracism for being different. But fuck it, were queer, and we are different. Not in many ways, and not in certain ways that really count, i.e., we love our kids, we want whats best for them, we do our best for them as parents, we do homework with them, see to their nutrition and hygiene and health, seek enrichment opportunities, are concerned with their emotional growth, etc. But we are still -- even after Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet not just as a lesbian but as a really cute Southern California blue-eyed blond educated middle-class lesbian - we are still considered by many to be weird, bizarre, scary, foreign, filthy, untouchable, and uncomfortable to be around.

So my point is that we are actually not like everyone else in some profoundly significant ways, and never will be, and I for one dont want to be. The point is that being different, being queer, does not make me a bad parent, or a good one. I see lesbian and gay parents striving for the "were better than good, were weller than well" image, serving as PTA leaders, the parent volunteers, the cake bakers, the block association leadership, the car poolers. All this is fine -- indisputably, the more visible we are, the more out, the more prominent, the better. Its what motivates these behaviors that disheartens me. Its that eagerness to please, to prove to people we dont have to prove anything to, that were just alike, and just as good, that kills me. It mimics class striving, that poor cousin sort of aping of the prevailing culture, buying the "norm" wholecloth as the only desirable model. I know -- Ive done it lots of times, and I can feel the tiny deaths inside of me each time I try to prove myself worthy of acceptance by straight society when I am so much more nourished and affirmed by making connection with the various members of our wildly diverse queer family.

So I conclude by asking , do we want to continue to present LGBT parenting as "a sport for the rich, like ballooning or yachting," as a letter-writer to The New York Times asked recently? I dont think so.

I actually dont know the answers to the questions Ive asked here. I only know that the questions, and the lives that pose them, trouble me. All I know is once again, in a profoundly personal, primal, basic area, its just not a level playing field. And I know how ironic our situation is: for all time, the one asset, the one abundance, that poor people have always had, is children. In the queer community, it is our most agonizing area of impoverishment that having children is not always a right we can access.

Where to begin? Given that the current leadership in the LGBT family rights movement identifies as middle-class, how do we move over and share leadership with our working class families? I think we begin, on both the personal and organizational levels, by forming alliances with other progressive people and movements - welfare rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, labor rights. I think we begin by claiming all members of the LGBT parenting community as our closest kin, rather that striving to claim alliance with and allegiance to Ward and June Cleaver. Then we can display our unique competencies as parents not just like everyone else, but our own kind of ideal.

 .