The main reason that I'm writing this blog is that if it hadn't been for a Twitter DM, we still may not have even been to the fertility clinic yet.
That message, sent to me just after our wedding in March this year by a wonderful woman I've never met, began a chain of events that made our initial plan almost unrecognisable.
Here's the thing: for cis couples in male-female relationships, even though there is every bit as much uncertainty around whether or not you will successfully conceive, the pathway to intentionally starting a family is fairly well-established. You decide to make a baby. You will try, using your genitals, to make a baby happen. If you are not successful in the timeframe you expected, you will visit your GP. Your GP will either tell you to keep trying, or make a referral to a fertility service to get you checked out. The results of that checking-out will inform you on which treatment would best help you to conceive. The risk of heartache is equal but you are held in a system that knows you, that expects you.
When it comes to making lady-lady babies, though, no such pathway unfolds in front of you. You decide to make a baby. You gaze lovingly at each other and imagine your expanding brood. A silence falls. Tumbleweed blows across the screen. Crickets chirp in the distance. "Uhhhh..." one of you says, eventually. "How do we do that?"
Other she-she couples do it a hundred different ways. Some sleep with men, some ask male friends to jack off in their bathroom, some ask strangers from internet forums to jack off in their bathroom, some go through clinics using private donors, some go through clinics using public donors, some do IUI, some do IVF. A mistake that too many of my hetero friends (bless them) have made is to pretend as though having all of these options is somehow a positive thing. They did the same when we were trying to figure out how to walk up the aisle. "Ooooh!" they'd say, "You can do it however you want! It's all up to you! That's so cool!"
No it is bloody not cool it's a goddamn nightmare.
Here's the thing: cis couples in male-female relationships could, too, walk up the aisle and/or conceive children in any and all of the ways available to queer couples. Some do choose to stray from the normative options, but for the vast majority who don't the only reason they might feel as though they can't is that the normative options are so sensible and easy that it would be completely dumb to not do them. "Darling, I know we could just try having sex, but instead let's trawl through the internet trying to find a strange man willing to masturbate in our bathroom, then we'll just squirt his donation into me using some kitchen equipment! Doesn't that sound much more fun than the boring normal way we could do it? Gay women have all the luck!" I mean, really.
It's not just making the choice that's the hard part - it's even finding out what those choices are, how much they cost, how to go about actioning them, and who to go to for support when you don't know a single other lesbian couple working through the same decisions. It's incredibly isolating to feel as though you're the same "age and stage" as everybody else but staring down a far different, less illuminated pathway. Every single option has a list of pros and cons, a wealth of uncertainties, and price tags that vary from 'free' to 'tens of thousands of dollars'. For every option that exists, there are fifty things you don't know about how the heck it actually works, or the timeframes involved. And no matter which you choose, none of the options involve making a tiny human that's half you and half your best person, so there's the grief of that loss to battle with while you decide on the least imperfect path for your family.
The purpose of this blog is to take you through each decision we encountered and the way we made it. I will take you with us, from that deliriously fanciful plan we first made to the reality of where we've ended up. I will very much try to include as much practical information as I do hyperbole and emotion, and I vehemently encourage you to send me questions via comments or via twitter if you have any. We were incredibly blessed that a queer couple neither of us knew reached out and kept us alongside them in their pathway through their system, so that ours would be a little less dark by the time we were ready. If you're reading this: thank you both. This is my attempt to pay that forward.
Here's the thing: for cis couples in male-female relationships, even though there is every bit as much uncertainty around whether or not you will successfully conceive, the pathway to intentionally starting a family is fairly well-established. You decide to make a baby. You will try, using your genitals, to make a baby happen. If you are not successful in the timeframe you expected, you will visit your GP. Your GP will either tell you to keep trying, or make a referral to a fertility service to get you checked out. The results of that checking-out will inform you on which treatment would best help you to conceive. The risk of heartache is equal but you are held in a system that knows you, that expects you.
When it comes to making lady-lady babies, though, no such pathway unfolds in front of you. You decide to make a baby. You gaze lovingly at each other and imagine your expanding brood. A silence falls. Tumbleweed blows across the screen. Crickets chirp in the distance. "Uhhhh..." one of you says, eventually. "How do we do that?"
Other she-she couples do it a hundred different ways. Some sleep with men, some ask male friends to jack off in their bathroom, some ask strangers from internet forums to jack off in their bathroom, some go through clinics using private donors, some go through clinics using public donors, some do IUI, some do IVF. A mistake that too many of my hetero friends (bless them) have made is to pretend as though having all of these options is somehow a positive thing. They did the same when we were trying to figure out how to walk up the aisle. "Ooooh!" they'd say, "You can do it however you want! It's all up to you! That's so cool!"
No it is bloody not cool it's a goddamn nightmare.
Here's the thing: cis couples in male-female relationships could, too, walk up the aisle and/or conceive children in any and all of the ways available to queer couples. Some do choose to stray from the normative options, but for the vast majority who don't the only reason they might feel as though they can't is that the normative options are so sensible and easy that it would be completely dumb to not do them. "Darling, I know we could just try having sex, but instead let's trawl through the internet trying to find a strange man willing to masturbate in our bathroom, then we'll just squirt his donation into me using some kitchen equipment! Doesn't that sound much more fun than the boring normal way we could do it? Gay women have all the luck!" I mean, really.
It's not just making the choice that's the hard part - it's even finding out what those choices are, how much they cost, how to go about actioning them, and who to go to for support when you don't know a single other lesbian couple working through the same decisions. It's incredibly isolating to feel as though you're the same "age and stage" as everybody else but staring down a far different, less illuminated pathway. Every single option has a list of pros and cons, a wealth of uncertainties, and price tags that vary from 'free' to 'tens of thousands of dollars'. For every option that exists, there are fifty things you don't know about how the heck it actually works, or the timeframes involved. And no matter which you choose, none of the options involve making a tiny human that's half you and half your best person, so there's the grief of that loss to battle with while you decide on the least imperfect path for your family.
The purpose of this blog is to take you through each decision we encountered and the way we made it. I will take you with us, from that deliriously fanciful plan we first made to the reality of where we've ended up. I will very much try to include as much practical information as I do hyperbole and emotion, and I vehemently encourage you to send me questions via comments or via twitter if you have any. We were incredibly blessed that a queer couple neither of us knew reached out and kept us alongside them in their pathway through their system, so that ours would be a little less dark by the time we were ready. If you're reading this: thank you both. This is my attempt to pay that forward.
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