The film, critically acclaimed and commercially successful, increased public awareness of same-sex couples’ using assisted reproductive technologies to create new family arrangements. While somewhat eye-opening to heterosexual moviegoers unfamiliar with these families, these trends are not news. In the 1970s, at the modern gay liberation movement’s start, women leaving heterosexual marriages took their children and raised them with lesbian partners. By the 1990s, a veritable gay baby ("gayby") boom ensued, as male and female same-sex couples, never heterosexually married, had children.
Children of the gayby boom are the subjects of the recently published study under discussion, "Adolescents of the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Sexual Orientation, Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Risk Exposure." The NLLFS study was launched to provide prospective data on a cohort of lesbian families" from conception until adulthood, includes "84 planned lesbian families [with] a 93% retention rate to date," and includes 39 adolescent girls and 39 adolescent boys conceived through donor insemination.
Among other things, the study found "no reports of physical or sexual victimization by a parent or other caregiver." That’s good to know, but why look for evidence of "victimization" in the first place? The authors say their goal was to "contradict the notion, offered in opposition to parenting by gay and lesbian people, that same-sex parents are likely to abuse their offspring sexually."
Studies like these are the interface between scientific research and the culture wars. Sadly, opponents of same-sex couples as parents frequently appeal to cultural stereotypes of homosexuals as predatory and potentially harmful to children. These kinds of assumptions (like asking "When did you last stop beating your wife?") put potential parents in the position of defending themselves against unwarranted character defamation. Increasingly, courts have struck down state bans on gay and lesbian adoption that make broad, stereotypical assumptions about these parents as members of a group rather than looking at a potential individual parent or couple’s actual qualities.
The study does not address parenting by gay male couples and more research is needed in this area as well. The authors note the study’s limitations: a nonrandom sample; neither matched nor controlled for socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, or region of residence; and a small sample size.
I would add a further limitation in the social context that led to doing this study. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 581,000 same-sex couples lived in the United States in 2009. Although no reliable surveys exist about how many U.S. children are living in homes with gay and lesbian parents, estimates range from 1 million to 14 million. The numbers are growing, and the important research issues should not be whether millions of gay parents are harming millions of kids or making them gay. Instead, further research must focus on the kind of effective care, social policies, and legal protections these children and families need.
Dr. Drescher is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and serves as president-elect of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. He is also coeditor of "Uncoupling Convention: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Same-Sex Couples and Families" (New York: The Analytic Press, 2004).