02/28/2002 "Gay families are good families"

Gay families are good families
- Jenni Millbank (Sydney Morning Herald)

Gay families belie the old biases. Meet the children - there is no evidence that they suffer for having same-sex parents.

Over the past two years there has been a furore over access to fertility services for unmarried women, particularly lesbians.

Throughout, groups such as the Australian Family Association (AFA) have argued that lesbian mothers and gay men are not fit parents. They have claimed that gay people are child molesters, are excessively promiscuous with other adults (as well as various animals!) and that their children grow up gay, impoverished and deeply deprived. These myths are very damaging to lesbian and gay families, are misleading the public, and run contrary to evidence.

Meet the Parents, a report on lesbian and gay families published by the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, summarises the results of more than 30 studies undertaken in the past 24 years, covering more than 1000 children.

The research uniformly finds that the children of heterosexual and homosexual parents show no differences in levels of self esteem, happiness, psychiatric state, quality of friendships, popularity or social acceptance, sexual orientation, gender role or gender identity, or level of happiness with their family identity.

Available surveys suggest that between 10 and 20 per cent of lesbians and gay men in Australia already have or live with children, and another 15 per cent of lesbians want to have children in the next five years.

In previous decades, children from lesbian and gay families were usually born into previous heterosexual relationships. Now children are increasingly being born into Australian lesbian families through the use of donor insemination, mostly with gay men as known donors who go on to have a friendly and supportive role in raising the children.

Research shows that, more than family structure, it is the happiness and quality of the relationship between the adults, and the openness of warmth and communication between the adults and the children which affects the wellbeing of the children. Nearly three decades of research has consistently yielded the same results: the children of lesbians and gay men are in no way disadvantaged or badly affected by their parents' sexuality. The debate about whether lesbians and gay men should be "allowed" to be parents is redundant. They are, and in increasing numbers.

Instead of debating whether lesbians and gay men are good parents, what we must now focus upon is the unmet needs of these new family forms.

A lesbian mother, cannot, for example, use the Child Support Agency if she and her female partner break up and that partner does not provide child support. Gay men who form families with lesbian mums are caught between the legal status of donor (legally, nothing) and father (legally, a full parent, to the exclusion of the co-mother) - whereas it is clear that many of them are somewhere in between.

Following the recognition of same- sex relationships in a number of areas of NSW law in 1999, the Government asked the NSW Law Reform Commission to indicate where it should go next - particularly with issues involving children of same-sex couples.

Two and a half years later there are still no suggestions forthcoming. It's time.

Jenni Millbank is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Sydney and author of Meet the Parents: A Review of the Research on Lesbian and Gay Families.