The current qualitative study of 35 pre-adoptive gay male couples (70 men) examined gay men’s motivations to parent and their reasons for pursuing parenthood at the current time. Similar to heterosexual couples, gay men described a range of psychologically-oriented reasons as shaping their decision to become parents. Some of these (e.g., desire to teach a child tolerance) may have been uniquely shaped by their sexual minority status, and others (e.g., desire to give a child a good home) in part reflect their adoptive status. Men named age, finances, and relationship factors, as well as unique contextual factors such as the need to find and move to gay-friendly neighborhoods, as influencing their readiness to pursue parenthood at the current time. Gay men’s motivations to parent echo normative life course decision-making processes, but also reflect concerns that are uniquely informed by their sexual minority status.

This study explores how lesbian and heterosexual pre-adoptive couples experience and construct the transition from infertility to adoption as a means to becoming parents. Thirty lesbian couples and 30 heterosexual couples were interviewed about the challenges and benefits they perceived in attempting conception and then later choosing adoption. Although similarities in perspectives emerged between heterosexual and lesbian participants (e.g., regarding the factors that led couples to pursue adoption), lesbians often felt less committed to having a biological child and perceived an easier transition from trying to conceive to adopting. Findings support the notion that, due to their unique relational context, lesbian women may embody more expansive notions about how to create a family that are not predicated on biological relations.

This study explores how lesbian mothers perceive their 3½‐year‐old children’s parental preferences in families in which one mother is genetically linked to the child. Thirty lesbian couples (60 women) were interviewed about their children’s parental preferences, their explanations of why preferences for one parent existed (or not), and their affective and behavioral reactions to such preferences. Many women acknowledged that their children, as infants, preferred their birth mothers due to biological factors (i.e., breastfeeding) or differential time spent with the child. Despite this initial preference, most women perceived little stability in children’s preferences over time, such that children preferred both mothers equally. Findings support the power of “social motherhood” in fostering maternal connections that transcend biological relatedness over time.

Do lesbian couples resist the (re)gendering of divisions of paid and unpaid labor within the context of biological and nonbiological parenting? In this study we explore how primarily Caucasian, North American lesbian mothers of three-and-a-half-year-old children construct divisions of paid and unpaid labor. We analyze 30 lesbian couples’ narrative constructions of their labor arrangements, examining the ways in which they both transgress and accept traditionally masculine and feminine gendering. At the same time that biological mothers and nonbiological mothers often described differences in their contributions to paid and unpaid labor, they rarely invoked biology as a salient factor in explaining their work/family roles. Our analysis suggests that the ‘egalitarian ethic’ of lesbian women is an over-simplification of the multiple ways that women develop their divisions of labor.

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