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Baby Steps
How Lesbian Alternative Insemination Is Changing the World
Sales Date: 2006-03-15
284 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in
Explores the controversial implications of lesbian insemination.
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 best could it 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.
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Setting the Historical Stage
Disfertile Discourses: The Inability of Infertility Medicine to Conceive of Lesbian Mothering
Legal Legitimacy and the Lesbian AI "Bastard"
The Economics of Lesbian Insemination
Transforming the Means of Reproduction: Lesbian AI Kinship and Politics
Conclusions: Toward a Lesbian-Normative Universe and AI Family Futures
Appendix A: Methodology, Sources and Citations
Appendix B: Definitions
Notes
Works Cited
Index
AMY AGIGIAN is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University in Boston where she is also a founder and director of the Center for Women's Health and Human Rights.
"Patriarchy is a longstanding, durable institution and this book exhilarates any reader—heterosexual or lesbian—who is weary of living under its mantle."
~Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, author of Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth
"Baby Steps is a fascinating study into the world of lesbian alternative insemination. Agigian brings into focus the institutional discrimination that has been perpetrated against lesbian families, and justly argues that such reactions require radical revision. —"
~Dr. Ruth McNair, Senior Lecturer, Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne
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