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Let me begin by explaining the origins of the title of my talk today. Back in 1997, when my partner and I were proposing to our own Ob-gyn, an infertility specialist, our plan for me to become pregnant using her egg and anonymous donor sperm, this was an untested and novel idea. After thinking about it for a moment, she smiled, gave a bemused shrug, and said: “It takes three things to make a baby. An egg, sperm, and a womb. Any combination, you tell me.” As we were going through IVF, we were just about the only cheerful and upbeat patients in the office for our near daily visits and became friendly with the staff, who found us a breath of fresh air in a practice filled with heterosexuals whose conventional reproductive attempts had failed and who were demoralized about their ability to conceive. In contrast, we were just at the beginning of an exciting venture. The staff was open-minded but unused to lesbian couples in their infertility practice at that point, and they sometimes had trouble keeping our names straight. One day one of them dubbed us “the scrambled egg ladies,” and the name stuck. Perhaps, I thought, the idea of my partner and I cooking together was not such a bad image for making a baby.
We have only to look around us on the streets of New York to confirm that we are indeed in the midst of an unprecedented “gayby boom.” While
accurate statistics are hard to come by, the 2000 census estimated that 25 percent of same gender unmarried partners were raising children, including 34 percent of female couples and 22 percent of male couples. Extrapolating from these numbers, Tasker (2005) estimated that 2–14 million children in the United States today are living with same-sex parents. Despite the recent trend of gay men and lesbians having their own biological children or adopting children in the context of a committed relationship, the majority of children being raised by a gay or lesbian parent or parents are still in step families or blended