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Latest Surrogacy News
By Eils Lotozo
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Sat Jun 28, 2003
PHILADELPHIA -(KRT)
- While the changes wrought by Thursday's Supreme Court
decision decriminalizing gay sex and Canada's approval of
same-sex marriage will be significant, one of the biggest
shifts in gay and lesbian life in United States is already
in full swing:
Parenthood.
Through adoption, foster
parenting, donor insemination and surrogate births, gay and
lesbian couples and singles are starting families by the
thousands.
And they're not waiting for
the law to change: They're doing it despite
discrimination and without the kinds of legal protections
heterosexual married couples enjoy.
The phenomenon has already
been dubbed the "gayby boom."
More than 2,500 families
take part in programs run by a New York gay and lesbian
community center, while the family services program at Los
Angeles' center grew over the last two years from40 families
to 1,000.
"We've had some
parenting groups for about 10 years." said Arielle
Rosen, the center's family-services manager. "But
in the last three to five years, we've seen that boom,
with mass numbers of people choosing to have children."
This month Philadelphia's Gay
Pride Festival at Penn's Landing featured its first "Family
Zone," one of many child-oriented efforts to crop up at
Pride events from Atlanta to Columbus.
Social and advocacy groups are
growing too. San Francisco's Our Family Coalition has
400 member families, and Minneapolis' Rainbow Families
claims 680. Rainbow
Families director Deborah Talen said nearly every elementary
school in the Twin Cities has children with gay parents.
"I can name four schools where a lesbian mom or gay dad is
president of the PTA," she said.
A glossy bimonthly magazine
for gay and lesbian parents, And Baby, has 10,000 paid
subscribers, and 75,000 copies go to newsstands and get
distributed for free at special events.
Gay and lesbian families are
winning the attention of tour operators too. Olivia,
famous for its women-only cruises, h as scheduled its
first-ever family vacation for October. Kelli O'Donnell,
the partner of gay-parenting advocate Rosie O'Donnell, has
launched a family vacation outfit with trips to start next
year. This weekend
marks 34 years after Stonewall, the New York City riot that
ignited the gay-liberation movements, and the nation is now
one that few people then could have imagined.
One in which not only can
Heather have two mommies, but a gay couple, through a
surrogate, can become the proud fathers of quadruplets - as
two men in Lexington, Ky., did last year.
Said Abby ruder, a family
counselor in Wyndmoor, Pa., who specializes in gay adoption:
"Because it's more visible, people believe more and more
that it's possible."
That's how it was for Chris Schwam, 37, and Steven
Piacquadio, 40, a Collingswood, N.J., couple expecting
their first child in October, to be born to a lesbian friend
who volunteered to be a surrogate.
"In the society we live in,
you're taught (as a gay man) that you're not allowed to want
those things," Schwam said. "But both of us are so
close to our families, we wanted our own. We had this
sense we'd regret it if we didn't try."
No one knows exactly how many
children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents.
A report issued last month by the Urban Institute, base4d on
2000 census data, found more than 67,000 male same-sex
couples with children and 167,000 female couples.
Urban Institute researcher
Gary Gates said that was certainly an undercount. Gay
single parents weren't counted in the census, Gates said.
And because of the stigmas still attached to being gay,
Gates said, many respondents might have declined to reveal
that they were living with someone of the same sex in a
"close personal relationship."
A report cowritten last year
by Witeck-Combs Communications in Washington, which helps
corporations market to gay and lesbian consumers, culled
data from a number of existing surveys to estimate that
there are more than two million gay households with more
than three million.
Whatever the numbers, gay families are becoming more visible
and they're pushing for changes that pave the way for more
gay families. About half the states now allow
homosexuals the right to adopt children born to, adopted by,
or fathered by their partners, called second-parent
adoption. The
American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have publicly said that
research shows that children raised by gay and lesbian
parents develop as normally as those with straight parents.
While lesbians are credited
with starting the "gayby" boom, the number of gay men
choosing fatherhood appears to be rising.
The Los Angeles gay father's
group the Pop Luck Club, the biggest of its kind in the
country, began five years ago with 20 fathers and now has
265, including 67 single fathers.
One of the newest options for
gay men looking to become parents is surrogacy.
The gay-oriented California
surrogacy agency Growing Generations, which charges $50,000
to $90,000 for its services, has seen 182 babies born to 132
clients. a celebrity client, actor B.D. Wong, wrote of
his son's premature birth and difficult first months in a
just-published memoir.
But many gay men and lesbians
also look to the foster-care system as a way to start a
family. Philadelphia
Family Pride, an organization with 180 member families,
recently teamed with the city's Department of Human Services
for an even to recruit gay and lesbian foster parents.
Maria Veneziano, a Family Pride board member, said the
program drew more than 130 people.
"It's a means for gays and
lesbians to become parents," Veneziano, 40, said. "I
think because we are a disenfranchised community, sometimes
coming from families that may or may not have accepted us,
we feel like we can deal with the special needs foster kids
might have."
Veneziano is the mother of 5-year-old Hannah, born to
Veneziano's partner, Marcy Boroff, through donor
insemination. "I
can't imagine not being a mother," Veneziano said. "I
think my life would be less for not having this experience."
She knows that gay families
are still anathema to many people, but she said her family
has found acceptance wherever they've gone.
"Having children is such an
equalizer in the community," she said. "Gay- and
lesbian-headed families can relate to other familes so
easily. No one in our neighborhood thinks, 'Those are
the lesbians, I wonder what they're doing.' They know
what we're doing: We're making dinner, doing laundry, and
getting ready for school tomorrow."
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