Mothers and others: The invisibility of LGBTQ people in reproductive and infant psychology

Abstract

Queer people’s experiences of conception, pregnancy, birth and parenting are underrecorded, under-researched, and under-heard. Research on pregnancy continues to be ‘centered within a heteronormative framework’ (Charter, Ussher, Perz, & Robinson, 2018) and this needs to change, to address the invisibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. The numbers of LGBTQ people having babies is unknown in most countries due to universal data rarely being collected on the gender or sexual orientation of those who are pregnant, or their partners. Indeed, in many parts of the world, such a requirement could compromise safety or family life. In the UK, data from fertility clinics (HFEA, 2019) and birth registrations (via the Office of National Statistics) identify that lesbian couples are one of the fastest growing groups within maternity services, with fertility treatment and live births increasing by 15–20% in this group, year on year for the past decade. Fertility treatment in UK clinics involving surrogacy has shown a similar increase but it is not known what proportion of intended parents are heterosexual couples and what proportion are gay men because fertility clinic statistics assume a female patient and report statistics as ‘male partner’, ‘female (same-sex) partner’, ‘no partner’ or ‘surrogacy’. No figures are available for transgender people becoming pregnant or impregnating their partners. Referrals to UK Gender Clinics have however risen every year, have risen proportionally more for trans men than trans women, and given that the literature shows many trans men wish to be parents (Riggs, Power, & von Doussa, 2016), pregnant trans men may also be a growing population with maternity services. How characteristics/minority groups are recorded has implications for the ability to commission or adapt services to meet local needs and implications for how people are identified for research purposes. Over the years, the Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology has contributed significantly to the literature on LGBTQ parents – predominantly lesbian couples and in relation to assisted conception and donor conception, with some investigations into support for family diversity in different countries, and a smaller amount of research into gay men’s reproductive psychology, both in the context of being sperm donors and of having their own children through surrogacy. However, following the patterns in the wider literature, few of the published articles relating to LGBTQ reproduction examine birth experiences or focus on perinatal mental health. Much progress has been made in the area of paternal perinatal mental health but continuing to adopting a heteronormative approach in this area risks conflating gender and role. For example, which aspects of paternal perinatal mental health are linked to being a ‘man’ or ‘father’, and which to being a co-parent or (often) secondary caregiver? There is a growing body of evidence in relation to lesbian women’s experiences of reproductive and maternity care, but research addressing the birth experiences and JOURNAL OF REPRODUCTIVE AND INFANT PSYCHOLOGY 2019, VOL. 37, NO. 4, 341–343 https://doi.org/10.1080/02646838.2019.1649919