Welcome to the QueerBabyMaking Revolution!

Welcome readers, to the wonderful world of QueerBabyMaking!

This blog was inspired by my experiences as a single dyke on the road to parenthood. About a year and a half ago, in the summer of 2006, I decided that I wanted to have a baby. Since then, I have learned more about sperm banks, ovulation, inseminations, and the logistics and politics of family-making than I ever could have anticipated. I have also met lots of other women who had questions about these things. This blog is, in part, an attempt to put together all of the information and resources I have gathered, and make it available to anyone with questions. It is also a space for me to write about the very complicated process of become a queer single parent by choice.

To make my politics and position clear from the start: I believe that everyone should have access to the institutions and technologies of family-making. By this, I mean adoption, co-parenting, and various forms of donor insemination. I believe that access to family-making and babymaking should not be a privilege of heterosexuality; queer people have the right to make families, in all sorts of shapes and sizes! Equally importantly, I do not believe that access to family-making should be a class privilege. When I began to investigate the process of how to make a baby, I found a system that is geared toward an upwardly mobile queer middle class who can afford to pay big bucks for sperm bank fees and fertility treatments. As a single, graduate student parent-to-be, I was automatically priced out. This blog takes as its fundamental assumption that not everyone can afford expensive, managed fertility care, and attempts to offer some ways around it.

Finally, though I firmly believe that there are many ways to make a family, the route that I have pursued is that of anonymous donor sperm through the sperm bank. Thus, most of the information on this site will be geared toward conceiving via the sperm bank.

This is, of course, a work in progress. Please feel free to add comments and make suggestions.

Happy babymaking!