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The American Fertility Association’s Monthly Newsletter

May 30, 2008

Terry Boggis

LGBT Adoption: No Brainer, but Plenty Still Disagree
By Terry Boggis

I’ve been involved in helping LGBT people bring children into their lives for almost 20 years, since my son was born through donor insemination in 1988. For all of that time, I’ve had regular calls from students, researchers, and media looking for the “pro” side of the “Should gay people be allowed to adopt” debate. I was dismayed, but hardly surprised, to receive those calls 10 or 20 years ago – but I am outraged to still be receiving them today.

I’m particularly disappointed when those callers are college students, who, at this point, really oughta know better! Beginning with the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexual affectional orientation from the list of psychiatric disorders in 1973, the avalanche of data and research findings, on both sides of the Atlantic, has consistently substantiated equivalence in mental health and capacity of LGBT people. More recently, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics (among others) have all released statements affirming and endorsing the parenting capabilities of LGBT people on a par with straight-identified folks, and recommending the elimination of barriers to placement of children in our homes.

So, why the ongoing controversy? There are many reasons: the overwhelming political and religious conservatism of the past seven-and-a-half years, the ongoing confluence of religious belief and government, the state of our law – local and federal – that refuses to allow a broader, more expansive understanding of what a family can look like, and, most pointedly and most offensively (considering the argument most often mustered is that LGBT people make incompetent parents), a stubborn refusal to listen to the offspring themselves, the real experts on the issue.

As long ago as 1990, Center Kids held a forum featuring a panel of young adults who had been raised by gay parents, where they were asked – largely by new LGBT parents anxious to do a good job – about those persistent myths surrounding LGBT parenting: it’s not fair to the kids because they’ll be teased, we’re dangerous to kids (incompetent at best), and kids need role-modeling from both male and female parents in order to grow up well-adjusted. To an individual, these young speakers put those concerns to rest. Yes, sometimes they’d felt “different” and yes, sometimes they were teased – all of it pretty survivable, and they had found male and female role models in abundance throughout their lives, and hadn’t felt they needed to live in the same household with them, etc. Today, years later, many more young adults have emerged from gay-parented households to attest to their own, overwhelmingly-positive experience. We no longer have to speculate on the impact LGBT parenting will have on children – the children themselves are now adults, living testimony to the survivability of their unusual life circumstances. They speak of the challenges, the rewards, the complexities, and the ordinary and extraordinary moments that characterized their upbringings and their families.

The degree to which lesbian and gay people have been green-lighted in their efforts to be parents has been determined largely by social expediency and opportunism. Our first access to parenting by adoption really came through the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s. In New York City, babies were being born HIV-positive and abandoned in maternity wards. The child welfare system was desperate for caregivers for these acutely ill children, often also born with drugs in their systems, in a time when AIDS was a death sentence and its communicability was still, to a large extent, a mystery. Gay men were suddenly seen as potential providers of homes, willing to accept children too physically at risk for straight parents to be willing to consider. That crack in the door allowed caseworkers and agencies to begin to shift their perceptions of LGBT people from child-free hedonists to conscientious, committed parents. These days, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, bolstered by municipal LGBT civil rights laws, has an aggressively pro-active position on LGBT parent recruitment, training caseworkers in cultural competence, doing outreach at Pride events, even employing a liaison to the LGBT community, and working more assiduously on behalf of LGBT youth in foster care.

But that’s New York City. The news elsewhere isn’t always so affirming. Though the number of states and cities across the country that have laws supporting LGBT adoption has increased steadily, statewide initiatives are pending in a half-dozen states that would curtail our ability to adopt, requiring our ongoing vigilance and activism.

On the international level, the fact that, as of April 2008, the United States became a participant nation in the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, has had a chilling effect on the ability of LGBT people to adopt out-of-country. This well-intentioned accord, created to put a halt to baby-selling and trafficking and other unscrupulous adoption practices, has had unintended consequences harmful to gay and lesbian hopefuls: heightened scrutiny of parent candidates, fewer participating agencies willing to work with LGBT individuals, and country-to-country comparisons that are resulting in sharing and standardizing practices that more deeply entrench discrimination against LGBT prospective parents. The already very short list of “sending” countries, has grown even shorter - so short, in fact, that options for international adoption have essentially evaporated for us.

There are, of course, private adoption agencies sprinkled across the country that are willing to work with LGBT intended parents. I have a short list posted next to my desk, where I refer callers every week. I’m distressed, in 2008, at how short that list remains. Although I know there are, no doubt, a good many more agencies that welcome LGBT candidates that I’m not aware of, I know how very, very many agencies still don’t want to work with us. Some of that has to do with idiosyncratic state adoption laws, some has to do with faith-based objections to our sexual orientation or gender identity, some has to do with our “single” status, some to do with birthmother bias, some just don’t want to take on what they imagine will be complications and additional headaches.

Last night, the New York City LGBT Foster Care Coalition of which my program, Center Kids, is a part, hosted a foster and adoptive parent recruitment event here at the LGBT Community Center. A panel of LGBT foster and adoptive parents spoke, a half-dozen agencies tabled, and experts abounded to answer questions. The room was packed with wannabe gay adopters. The event was to have ended at 8 p.m. – the last eager guests left at 9:30.

There are unending numbers of LGBT people dreaming of parenthood, via donor insemination, surrogacy, or adoption. We are caring. We are competent. We’re ready and waiting for the law and society to catch on, and catch up.

Terry Boggis is the Director of Center Kids, the family program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, New York City.

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