Intentional Families

Both LesbianDad and Dana Rudolph over at Mombian commented on the New York Times piece titled "Your Gamete, Myself" which explored "issues surrounding conception via an egg donor" and overlooked LGBT families.

Dana highlights (as quoted by LD) that "'intentional' parenthood characterizes some, but by no means all families in the current 'gayby' boom. Many kids are born into heterosexual families, before one or the other parent comes out and continues to raise them. Significantly, at least as of the moment, families planned and realized from within LGBT community skew towards the white and the middle class on up..."

I am very interested in the outcomes for kids of GLBT families and have noted the difference between kids who are born of heterosexual parents who later come out (actually the General Social Survey shows that there is no significant difference in number of kids of GLBT families and heterosexual families due to this phenomenon) and kids whose parents were "intentional" in conceiving them within the GLBT relationship.

In the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner make the argument that Roe v. Wade explains much of the precipitous decline in crime in the 1990s. They argue that the kids who would have been born pre-Roe, to women who, given the choice, would have aborted them, were more likely to participate in criminal activities. They make the argument that these kids were somehow less wanted and the parents were less likely to "invest" in them (in all ways that parents invest in kids).

The corollary argument is that parents who intentionally have kids are more likely to invest in their kids and are likely to have better outcomes (however defined). This intentional GLBT group falls into this category.

Great argument for gay marriage, huh?

This is my next research project, given that I can locate some decent data.