Skip Navigation


International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family Advance Access originally published online on February 22, 2006
International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 2006 20(1):1-22; doi:10.1093/lawfam/ebi030
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
20/1/1    most recent
ebi030v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Almack, K.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, Vol. 20, No. 1, © The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Seeking Sperm: Accounts of Lesbian Couples’ Reproductive Decision-Making and Understandings of the Needs of the Child

Kathryn Almack*

* Dr Kathryn Almack, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham.

Same-sex couples and their children have been the subject of significant international attention over recent years, including debates about planned parenthood in the context of same-sex relationships (Donovan, 2000; Dempsey, 2004; Luttichau, 2004; Vonk, 2004; Ryan-Flood, 2005). Drawing on a qualitative study of lesbian parent families in the UK, this article contributes further to these debates through a discussion of respondents’ accounts of their reproductive decision-making. I discuss the socio-legal discourses around the legitimacy of the lesbian parent family created by donor insemination and examine how respondents react to these discourses. I identify an overarching preoccupation within these accounts which is concerned with addressing the needs of children. The dominant notions of how best to meet children’s needs established in contemporary UK family policy pose considerable tensions for the lesbian parent family. In seeking to resolve these tensions, parents in my study reinterpret and develop different understandings of how best to meet these needs. Their accounts reveal the complexity of the considerable efforts of families raising children in family forms that fall outside the normative order to address the needs of the child, and the disjunctions between everyday understandings of children’s needs and those constructed through policy and family law.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Int J Law Policy FamilyHome page
S. Besson
Enforcing the Child's Right to Know Her Origins: Contrasting Approaches Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Convention on Human Rights
Int J Law Policy Family, August 1, 2007; 21(2): 137 - 159.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.