...For Her ...Advice For Lesbians

GETTING PREGNANT ADVICE FOR LESBIANS

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The desire to have a baby
Reasons women give for wanting a baby
Reasons for not wanting a baby
Making the decision
Conditions for success
Options

THE DESIRE TO HAVE A BABY
The desire to get pregnant is one of the most powerful urges a woman can have. It can hit you with the force of a tornado knocking all rational thought out of the way or it may arrive in a calm and orderly fashion. It may appear when your life is sorted out and you are good and ready for a baby. Or it may come at the most inconvenient time, when your life is a mess and the worst thing you can do for yourself and any baby is act on that urge.

Who knows where this desire comes from? It may be an innate biological imperative, an unconscious plot by our genes to replicate themselves. Or it may be a result of the conditioning even lesbians cannot escape, dictating that woman's role is to bear children. Wherever it comes from, a lot of lesbians (but not all) get smitten by it at some time in their lives.

At the workshops Pink Parents facilitate for lesbians who are considering getting pregnant, they explore this desire and the ambivalence that inevitably goes with it. They do an exercise where we write on separate slips of paper 5 statements completing the sentence, 'I want to have a baby because' and 5 statements completing the sentence, 'I don't want to have a baby because'. The idea is to do it quickly without analysing or censoring the ideas. They then pass the slips around the group and read them out. (from Cheri Pies' book Considering Parenthood). This is a useful exercise for getting in touch with our reasons for wanting a baby as well as the reasons we don't. We are not judging the reasons or using them to defend our desire to anyone else. By writing them down, we bring to consciousness both our hopes and fears about having a baby and we realise a deep connection with other lesbians who are struggling with these same issues. Back to Top

These are some of the reasons women give for wanting a baby:
"My heart and soul feels it is the right thing to do."
"It fulfils a need in me."
"I feel empty when I see other women pregnant or with their babies."
"I’m a very family centred person."
"We have so much love to give a child."
"I think I would be an excellent mum."
"I think I could provide a fun-filled loving environment for a child to grow up in."
"To make me feel complete as a family with my partner."
"I want to be needed and to look after a child that is mine and my partner’s."
"I want to have a baby to feel connected to the future of the planet."
"I want to join the circle of motherhood."
"The chance to do it better the second time around."
"I love being with children and want that close relationship with a child of my own."
"I'll always feel a failure if I don't have a child."
"I just do."Back to Top

At the same time as wanting to have a baby, we all have plenty of reasons for not wanting to:
"I feel too young. I’ve got too much to do with my own life before taking on another."
"It will alter my lifestyle and maybe not for the better."
"My partner is unsure – she must be certain too as I see it as a joint decision."
"I’m scared of the negative effect of prejudice on a child, afraid that the child will feel stigmatised."
"I’m afraid of not being a good parent."
"I’m frightened that if I tried and it didn’t succeed I’d be more unhappy than if I’d not tried or bothered."
"I am worried about the pressure it will put on my relationship with my partner."
"I’m single and maybe I won’t be able to manage."
"I’m too selfish. I’ll be alone and isolated."
"I couldn't cope if my partner left and took it away."
"I’m concerned about their future resentment at being fatherless."
"I haven’t had enough fun yet, just being me."
"Emotional roller coaster."
"Loss of identity/individual/spur of the moment."
"Scared of commitment."
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MAKING THE DECISION
Once you have acknowledged your desire and all your hopes and fears about having a child, it's time to make a decision. You do have a choice whether or not to act on your desire. You do not have to get pregnant just because you are overwhelmed with baby-craving. Having a baby is an enormous undertaking with no guarantee that everything will turn out as you hope. In fact, it undoubtedly won't turn out anything like what you expect.

It will change your life irrevocably and not always for the good. It is a massive financial responsibility - far too scary to add up all the costs. It exposes your own inner child's unmet needs for mothering. It brings you face to face with how truly you accept your own sexuality and it uncovers the homophobia simmering away in the rest of society. Your circumstances may be all wrong - no money, not enough support, the wrong relationship, no partner, chronic illness, a demanding career, absorbing activism, mental health problems, whatever. These are all good reasons to decide not to have a child, even if there is a part of you keen to go ahead. If that's the decision you come to, you can deal with the loss of not having a baby and get on with a child-free life. Or with a life that includes children you haven't given birth to.

For many of us, making a conscious decision is just too difficult. It is far easier to "make the decision" to get pregnant by accident. But unless you have sex with men, lesbians don't often find themselves unexpectedly pregnant. What many lesbians do is delude themselves into thinking that they are going to make the decision later, when their life is more sorted out. What they are actually doing is making a decision by default. If you can't bear thinking about it and keep putting it off, you are unconsciously deciding not to have a baby. Our child-bearing years are shorter than most of us like to believe. Although there are a few exceptions, if you haven't started trying to get pregnant by the time you're 38 or 39, you have made a de facto decision not to get pregnant. Yes, I do know of women who left it until they were in their 40s and still got pregnant. One of my best friends conceived by self insemination at the age of 43 and I am delighted for her. But the exceptions prove the rule. For every successful 40 plus pregnancy carried to term, there must be 100 failures (That's my impression from the thousands of enquiries I've had over the years.)

I don't believe that anyone makes considered, rational decisions about something as momentous and as unknowable as having a baby. Decisions emerge from within us and then we rationalise them. The truth is, that like heterosexual people, we don’t have that much choice or control over our lives. We don’t always know what we want. When our circumstances change, our wants and desires also change. For some people, the decision to have a child is easily made. It feels right. Some people find the decision making process agonising and spend months, if not years, at it, becoming paralysed by all the issues and eventualities.

Whether it's easy or hard, at some point you make your decision. The younger you are, the more leeway you have. You can afford to take the time to think through the implications of the various options. The older you are, the more urgent it is to make a conscious decision. There are no obvious right or wrong decisions but there are consequences of each decision. You will have to live with those consequences so think them through before you start. This is where lesbians are at an advantage over heterosexual couples who have babies by accident. We have the opportunity to plan and prepare. We all know that planned babies are wanted babies and wanted babies are happy babies and happy babies don't grow up into axe murderers. At least that's the theory.Back to Top

THE OPTIONS
One you've made up your mind that you do want to get pregnant, you have to sort out your source of sperm. You have 3 options:
1. Sex with a man.
2. Self insemination
3. Donor insemination at a clinic.

Sex with a man
The first option has been tried and tested. It is a proven method of getting pregnant. Some lesbians feel that the other options are too clinical and impersonal. They prefer to have sex with the donor in order to get pregnant even though they are not having an ongoing sexual relationship with him. The issues about screening, timing of intercourse, legal position of the man, etc are the same as for self insemination.

Self insemination
Self insemination is the simple act of placing a man’s sperm in a woman’s vagina without intimate contact. It is a non-medical, low-tech way of avoiding sex with a man. For lesbians, it uncouples sex from baby-making, liberating us from heterosexual sexual relations. It does not mean that men are redundant.

Without their sperm, the baby would never be conceived. Self insemination is a great way to make babies and has a good track record, though admittedly not as long as that of the first option mentioned. Sometime in the 1970s, lesbians figured out how to do it. They found men willing to donate their sperm. They found Harley Street doctors willing to provide them with fresh sperm. They inseminated themselves at home using kitchen implements. We've been doing it ever since.

Clinic inseminations
Donor insemination at a clinic is a variation of self insemination but tarted up to appear like a reproductive technology. The differences are superficial. At a clinic, sperm is frozen rather than fresh. It is placed in your vagina by a nurse using a long thin straw. You lie on a table with a speculum inside your vagina. You pay a lot of money. But fundamentally it is the same as self insemination. It is not a fertility treatment. If you have fertility problems, donor insemination will not increase your chances of getting pregnant. In fact, the freezing of the sperm means that you are less likely to conceive at a clinic than using fresh sperm. Back to Top

CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESS
None of these methods allow us to overcome the limitations of our biology. Whichever one you opt for, the following conditions apply. To maximise your chances of getting pregnant, take account of these five factors:

1. Fertility
Both you and the donor should be fertile or have a fertility problem that can be treated. Women with blocked Fallopian tubes cannot have them unblocked but may be able to conceive by IVF (in vitro fertilisation) instead of donor insemination. There may not be a treatment for men with low sperm counts.

2. Age
Getting pregnant is something to do in your 20s and early 30s. For women in their late 30s and early 40s, it is nearly always unsuccessful. It is harder to conceive as you get older and the chance of miscarriage is higher. Above the age of 40, half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. Women in heterosexual relationships having unprotected sex over many years occasionally do get pregnant in their 40s. But the circumstances surrounding insemination or planned sex are very different.

The drop in fertility is due to the ageing of the eggs, causing their gradual loss and inability to fertilise. Ageing of the eggs happens even if you continue to ovulate and have regular menstrual cycles. There is not the same drop in fertility for men although an upper age limit of 55 is recommended for men donating sperm to clinics. Pregnancy is somewhat less likely to occur with the sperm of older men.

3. Timing of inseminations
You should be able to recognise the days in your menstrual cycle when you are fertile. (You can use the Fertility Awareness Method described in OVUPLAN which is free or our Ovusoft Software)

4. Frequency of insemination
You inseminate at least twice during your fertile days, and preferably 3 or 4 times. The more inseminations you do, the more likely you are to conceive.

5. Realistic expectations
It may take a year even if you are under 30 and meeting all the conditions for success. As you get older, it may take several years before you conceive. Back to Top