Male Couples Face Pressure To Fill Cradles

WASHINGTON — When the jubilant couple were wed in June, they exchanged personalized vows and titanium rings, cheered the heartfelt toasts and danced themselves breathless. Then, as the evening was winding down, unexpected questions started popping up.

One after another, their guests began asking: Are you going to have kids? When are you going to have kids?

Tom Lotito and Matt Hay, both 26, could not help but feel moved. They never imagined as teenagers that they would ever get married, much less that friends and family members would pester them about having children.

“It’s another way that I feel like what we have is valid in the eyes of other people,” said Mr. Hay, who married Mr. Lotito in June before 133 guests.

As lawmakers and courts expand the legal definition of the American family, same-sex couples are beginning to feel the same what-about-children pressure that heterosexual twosomes have long felt.

For some couples, it is another welcome sign of their increasing inclusion in the American mainstream. But for others, who hear the persistent questions at the office, dinner parties and family get-togethers, the matter can be far more complicated.

Many gay men had resigned themselves to the idea that they would never be accepted by society as loving parents and assumed they would never have children. They grieved that loss and moved on, even as other gay men and lesbians fully embraced childless lives. So the questions can unearth bittersweet feelings and cause deep divisions within a couple over whether to have children at all, now that parenting among same-sex couples is becoming more common.

The process can be also daunting logistically and financially, as would-be parents wrestle with whether to adopt or use a surrogate.

Looking at this article from 2008, I find it interesting that most gays now want surrogates vs. adoption.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/OnCall/story?id=4439567&page=1#.UCURfZ1lReA

All the twisting of reality in this article is sickening... in a bad way.

Before they used, ‘We could adopt and raise all those poor kids no one adopts’, (as if taking some of the kids with troubled past would be better in still another un-natural and unstable relationship), now it’s ‘it will tell your parents they can be grands and bring the family together... it will not seem as bad’. Sheesh.

I found it interesting that the preferred option is to go surrogate to produce a child of your bloodline (sounds paternal). I can’t tell you how many of these relationships broke up when the child appears, via jealousy or just the fantasy being a little too real afterwards.

I guess most go to lesbians to be surrogates. I wonder what that does when the maternal instincts kick in during their pregnancy, delivery and having to give your child up?
I thought about that while reading the link above re: Ken Miller case, who helped an ‘ex-lesbian’ kidnap the child of former union.

It’s a legal nightmare, whether through IVF, adoption or otherwise.

I would love to see stats from when all of this started for outcomes.

I think it’s better that a child be raised by a male-female couple, preferably married (to each other lol).

But, if a homosexual male couple adopts, as gross as that is, it’s a baby not aborted, if you link adoption to one alternative, abortion (and I’m SURE planned parenthood arranges lots of adoptions).

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