Each year hundreds of children around the world are born to lesbian mothers who conceived through alternative insemination. This unique form of family-making creates families with no legal or psychological father, and challenges some of our most basic assumptions about what it means to be a family. How, and why, do lesbians use insemination to build their families? How could it best be protected by law? Is it a feminist issue? Is insemination the ultimate in lesbian liberation, or a sell-out to nuclear family norms? How are race, class and human engineering involved? Drawing on legal findings and personal interviews, as well as medical and psychoanalytic research, sociologist Amy Agigian looks at the impact and potential of this form of reproduction. Baby Steps is the first in-depth discussion of the issues and questions raised by lesbian insemination, and the book has been designed to serve the interests of general readers and health care providers as well as teachers and students in women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, sociology, legal studies, and bioethics.
- ISBN10 0819566292
- ISBN13 9780819566294
- Publish Date 14 June 2004
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 20 July 2021
- Publish Country US
- Publisher University Press of New England
- Imprint Wesleyan University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 288
- Language English