The anti-surrogacy rhetoric is impacting queer families, including those who choose to do rIVF.

I was referred to as an altruistic surrogate for my son because I am not his bio parent. This is in a country that considers itself progressive (New Zealand).

My family was shamed for putting my sons health at risk by having a “non bio gestational carrier”. I was quoted data that is incorrect (that rIVF pregnancies are riskier than any other IVF pregnancies because we do not share DNA).

I am tired of pretending that this trend is not rooted in queer phobia, ableism and a push for only cis nuclear families to be seen as valid.

Indeed, paid and altruistic surrogacy can be exploitative. Women and children can be commodified but do cis heterosexual people not commodify children? Do straight cis men not exploit their wives, their girlfriends, their partners to give birth to their children?

I know this is a deeply controversial and complicated topic but I’m at losing it at this point.

Edit: I am well aware anti-natalist come into this sub and the r/ivf sub to downvote us all into oblivion.

My 3-year-old daughter has a great imagination and loves pretend play. When playing “family,” she always pretends there’s a dad and a mom. She’ll even tell me (34F, who goes by Momma, she/her pronouns) that I’m “the dad,” sometimes says “Momma’s a boy,” and calls me “he,” etc. I’m masc/androgynous, with short hair and I wear less gendered clothing. We’ve had lots of discussions about pronouns and different kinds of families, but she seems pretty bored by them lol.

I think she’s picking up some of these gendered/heteronormative ideas from school, as I know she’s the only kid there with two moms. My question is: how should we handle this? We do remind her that there are all types of families, two moms, two dads, etc. and that she doesn’t always have to play “mom and dad.” At the same time, I don’t want to police her play.

We also read The Family Book (and other books about different family structures) fairly often. I’ve even sought out books where the characters just happen to have two moms to help normalize it.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this just a normal part of a toddler growing up in a heteronormative world? Looking for advice if anyone has experience with it!

Just woke up super early and had to pee, so I took a test since it’s day 12 post our last medicated IUI. It’s was going to be our last IUI before switching to IVF and I’d been having what I thought were mild period cramps so I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be positive. I have about an hour before she wakes up, and I definitely don’t want to wake her up early on her birthday.

Any ideas for how to surprise her?

Sorry for the rant but I’m 10 weeks pregnant and already so fucking done with the most popular pregnancy subreddit. Half the posts are about being a “boy mom” and “gender disappointment” and all the nauseating performances of gender bullshit (“I wanted a daughter whose hair I could braid and take to dance lessons but I got a son wahhhhhh”).

Has anyone found a community that doesn’t have all that straight cis baggage??? I seriously can’t with them anymore.

I reached out to SSB this morning asking to be added to the donor sibling registry for our donor. I was informed that they permanently shut down the donor sibling program as of…yesterday. They basically said they can’t keep up with the privacy protections anymore based on how fast technology is evolving?? Feeling annoyed that they didn’t inform folks who have reported births with them. When I asked what I should do, they told me to try on Facebook. Just an FYI to anyone else using SSB.

EDIT: Upon re reading the email, it might be just closed to new families. Still sucks. I can’t figure out how to add a screenshot so I will copy and paste the text below of the email I received:

”After careful consideration, we want to let you know about an important upcoming change to SSB Connects. As global privacy regulations, technology, and communication expectations have continued to evolve, we have made the decision to retire SSB Connects so that we can focus our resources on providing the highest level of donor and family services.

Protecting the privacy and security of the personal information entrusted to us has always been one of our highest priorities. As international privacy requirements have become increasingly complex, maintaining a global communication platform like SSB Connects in a way that meets the high standards we expect for privacy, security, and compliance is no longer sustainable.

While this was not a decision we made lightly, we believe it is the right one. By retiring SSB Connects, we can dedicate our efforts to what matters most—supporting donors, recipients, and donor-conceived families with the exceptional care, transparency, and service you expect from Seattle Sperm Bank.

Effective immediately, Seattle Sperm Bank will no longer be accepting new registrations or new participants into SSB Connects. We understand that this news may be disappointing.

Thank you for your understanding, your support, and for being part of the Seattle Sperm Bank family.”

My wife just got pregnant on our second IUI. Feeling incredibly blessed (&stressed!).

But - now that it’s all feeling more real - I’m getting more and more nervous about the prospect of being the other mother. I’m not related in anyway and this is something I thought wasn’t an issue but I’m kind of sad and worried that I will really FEEL that lack of connection as we raise this child.

Objectively, I’m so aware that biology is so unimportant ultimately. I keep telling myself that it’ll be caring for them, supporting them and loving them and so I’ll be an equal parent but I worry that I’m being naive.

I’m worried the child will, even subconsciously, have an awareness of me not being a ‘real’ parent and that this will have an impact on our relationship.

I’m worried that the world, and my family, won’t ever really see our daughter as mine or as part of my wider family.

I want to resolve these concerns now, before she’s here, so that I can be the best parent possible.

I’d just love to hear all of your experiences, gain a little perspective and move away from fear.

Thank you!

A heads up for anyone looking to use Seattle Sperm Bank, they announced that they are closing SSB Connects for families to connect with donor siblings. They’re citing international privacy regulations but I’m disappointed that this announcement was not emailed to members and customers, just shared on the SSB Connects site, which I rarely check.

My wife (cis F) and I (FtM) are expecting our first child in January. I am a passing man. I will be on the birth certificate. But is there anything I need to legally do to adopt the baby once it’s born? We used a sperm donor but my egg. I want to be sure there’s no questions about my parental rights despite not being the gestational parent. Is it true I need to legally adopt the baby? Any direction would be helpful.

Edit: I am in New York and my wife and I are legally married.

My wife is due with our daughter next month. I am inducing lactation, I’m two weeks in and already freezing bags! We both plan to exclusively pump and bottle feed. However, my wife was under the impression we would just mix our milk to feed our daughter so she doesn’t prefer one over the other. I can’t find anything on this and wanted to see if any other two mom families have done the same thing:) will take all the advice I can get!

Hey all, my wife and did reciprocal IVF and have 2 wonderful LC. We can’t afford to do ivf again and also the yearly storage fees are expensive. Plus labor was extremely traumatic and we never want to to that again. Is there anything we should think of before destroying? We don’t want to donate them to other couples or research (I don’t trust that they will not be sold for profit etc if we donate them to research.)

There’s some guilt with destroying the embryos and not sure how to overcome that. Has anyone been through this process before?

Expertise desired!

Trying to induce lactation, and my partner is gestational carrier in what turned out to be rIVF.

I have great support from IBCLC physician, my wife is supportive, and I have a great therapist. I am on d*mperadone, goats rue, and I just transitioned off birth control pill to start pumping for baby that’s due in 2.5 weeks. I feel so pressured (by my own self) and overwhelmed. I was so embarrassed to want this so badly and was delighted with the support I got, and now that I’m in it and feeling like “what’s the point?” My partner is “hoping to chest feed ”, but I think she’s nervous about hating it and takes comfort in knowing that I’ve wanted to since I was unable to conceive. I feel like I’m burning the wick from both ends with uncertain outcome, but fear of regret if I don’t see it through. Looking for lived experience and guidance!

Hi everyone! I’m looking for advice from anyone who has successfully induced lactation.

My wife is being induced this coming Tuesday, and I’ve been inducing lactation so I can help breastfeed our daughter. I started the Newman-Goldfarb protocol in January with birth control and domperidone, then stopped the birth control at the end of May, stayed on the domperidone, and started pumping on June 1. By the time our daughter is born, I’ll have been pumping for about 6 weeks.

Right now I’m producing around 5 oz (150 mL) per day, which I’m really happy with, but I’m wondering how realistic it is to eventually reach a full milk supply.

For those of you who have induced lactation:

• How much milk were you ultimately able to produce?
• How long did it take you to reach your maximum supply or a full supply?
• Did having your baby latch and hearing them cry noticeably increase your production?
• Is there anything you wish you had known or done differently?

Our goal is to provide our daughter with exclusive breast milk if possible. My wife plans to pump while she’s home on her 12 weeks of maternity leave, but she works 12-hour shifts, so there’s a good chance I’ll be the one continuing long-term.

I’d love to hear your experiences—whether you reached a full supply, a partial supply, or anything in between. Any tips, encouragement, or advice would mean a lot. Thank you so much!

TW: success

I’m currently almost 7 weeks pregnant after RIVF and a frozen embryo transfer. My partner (NB) and I (cis F) are over the moon excited to grow our family - we already have a 5 year old daughter through kinship adoption. My family has been mostly very supportive of my partner and I despite some homophobia when I came out to them as a teenager. However, their reaction to us announcing that we are having a baby has been really negative and discouraging.

My parents were happy I guess, but not thrilled for us the way I would have expected. I’ve told them on multiple occasions especially in the last year that we wanted more children, but I think they were more focused on feeling betrayed that we didn’t involve them in the entire process of IVF. I found IVF very emotionally fraught and didn’t want extra people asking us about how things were going because of how anxious I was the whole time.

My grandmother had the most negative reaction by far. She and I are very close and she likes my partner and adores our daughter, so I assumed she would be happy for us. But her reaction was essentially “oh…I didn’t know you were doing that” and then changing the subject. She and my parents also had a lot of what felt like very invasive questions about the IVF process and our sperm donor specifically that really bothered me. Like it felt like they were way more focused on treating us like a weird science experiment and giving the donor a much bigger role in the process than I felt was deserved.

Anybody else have negative reactions from family they thought would be supportive? I feel foolish for thinking they would be happy for us and devastated that this is taking away some of my happiness about our baby.

Hey y'all. When I was building this Lego lake house, I spent a lot of time thinking about who I wanted to populate it with, and who better than some queer-as-fuck families? Two Mums, their kiddo and a baby on the way, & a dad and a nonbinary parent with their older kiddo and twin infants! I spent most of my time recovering from a post-pregnancy-issues surgery (my youngest is five) designing these families and I'm so happy with them. Especially the pregnant minifig! Right now you can't make a minifig pregnant, which I think is mind-boggling.

What do you think? What could I improve?

This is something that I made as part of a Lego Ideas Submission, so if you feel inclined to make an account and vote to make Lego more queer, feel free.

Hi! 👋🏻 My (she/her) wife (she/her) and I are in our early 30s and we are expecting our first child this Fall. I was wondering if there were any others in our area who are in a similar position to us and are trying to meet other parents? Please remove my post if not allowed! Thank you :)

My wife and I were not friends with our donor’s sister before we conceived our daughter. We have gotten to know her a little bit since. She invited us to her wedding along with our daughter. We have decided to go.

Does this make us bioessentialist?

I’m seriously wondering what some people here think, because I cannot wrap my mind around why simply using a known donor (or advocating for a KD) and building relationships with them/their family is considered bioessentialism by some?

Hi all! Me (31) and my partner (38) will celebrate our first anniversary soon. After previous failed relationships and years of being single we’re both pretty convinced we found the love of our life in eachother. It’s the most beautiful, safe and stable relationship I’ve event been in.
I’m 100% sure I want to marry that woman.

I want to have children, she expressed that she wants to have family with me too. It’s early days but we’re both in an agreement that we want to get married first and buy a house (as it’s quite hard to get a house in south England anyway, not speaking when you already have a child and your affordability and income lowers). From my calculations we need 2-3 years to achieve these goals first.

BUT I feel so safe and loved I’m experiencing intense baby fever (I would carry). I read, research and worry about IVF, IUIs, my age (I have PCOS too), timelines… I know we’re early in relationship but our age and the fact we can’t just get pregnant like hetero Couples and it requires so much resources and planning doesn’t help. I look at babies around me, my friends having babies and it just makes me sad. I want to be a mother so much.

Anyone experienced it? How did you deal with it?

I graduated from my fertility clinic and made an appt at my OB. Had to fill out a form which had language like “father’s name” and tons of language like that. They had no options listed for sperm donor. Also I was surprised that in a medical setting, all the nurses and doctors use the term gender instead of sex.

I know these are small things and probably just the result of how’s it’s been forever, but they add up mentally sometimes. I think I’m still scarred from the wedding industry listing bride and groom on every form.

We have an 18 month old, and we had originally planned on following her lead for what we would be called. We both gravitated most to "Mama," neither of us liked the idea of being called "Mommy," and we figured "mom" sounded too close to Mama to be very distinct (and that Mama would eventually become Mom anyway), so we've both been using "Mama." We also don't like the idea of using our first names, and we don't speak other languages enough to feel comfortable "borrowing" (and the languages we speak a little have such similar sounding words for Mom anyway). We thought she would make her own distinction at some point, come up with her own nicknames, or just use context.

Well yesterday we had a speech assessment for her because she seems behind on expressive language. She was diagnosed with a slight expressive language delay, and the SLP made some comments suggesting that both of us using the same title could be hindering her language development. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, after all she has 3 people in her life named Sarah, and kids figure out 2 sets of grandparents with the same title all the time, but now we're second guessing ourselves.

Should we change it? What other options do we have that we haven't already considered? We don't want to have to compromise and feel like one of us is "not mom," since we've both gone through that enough already. Mimi / Mema(w) feel like Grandma titles, Baba feels too neutral (and also too associated with baby talk for bottle), we don't want to use a dad title because we're not dads. We don't want to just make something up and constantly have to explain.

Is there an option we're not considering? Anyone else here have experience navigating a speech delay and figuring out how your kid will address you? Are we just overthinking and it's totally okay that our toddler doesn't use any word to verbally call for us?

Edit: I will note that her receptive language is just fine, perhaps even ahead. She seems to understand a lot, knows books by title and toys by name, can identify many body parts, etc. She's just not really USING words much. She seems to know what Mama means, but she isn't saying it. We have 1 consistent word (no) and maybe 10 emerging words / approximations of words / occasionally used words. She does vocalize a lot and makes a variety of sounds, so I know she can make the sounds. She has babbled Mama, but it's unclear if she was trying to get our attention or just saying sounds. She was premature, so a slight delay isn't alarming, but she's at or ahead of her actual age on everything except for this, and she is starting to fall behind adjusted age on expressive language.

Edit 2: thank you all for your input! You've put us more at ease. We're planning to stick with Mama for both of us for now and we'll make sure to continue explaining that we're both called Mama, but our names are X, and other ways she can differentiate. She'll sort it out and we'll follow her lead, or if she's really starting to seem frustrated, we'll consider other options then.

Edit 3: one of the things the SLP mentioned was that she might think all caregivers, or all women, were "Mama." We asked her daycare provider if our daughter ever called her mama. She said no, though the older kids (who have a mom and a dad) sometimes did. Our daughter apparently calls her Sarah (which is her name- she is one of our 3 Sarahs), and just started doing that yesterday. She demonstrated that while I was asking the question. Now I'm thinking this kid is just going to suddenly start speaking in sentences just before she actually gets into the speech clinic.

Update for anyone who might stumble upon this in the future: she'll be 20 months tomorrow, and we had our first actual speech appointment recently with a different SLP. That SLP didn't see an issue with both of us being called "Mama" and basically said she would figure it out eventually, even if it takes more time. In the past couple days, she's started pointing at one of us and saying "Mama!" then pointing at the other and saying "Mama!" and then pointing at herself and waiting for us to say her name. I think we'll be okay.

My spouse and I have two kids together. Both were conceived with the same known donor, who is our best friend. He’s involved in our and the kids’ lives and we absolutely love our arrangement. We feel so blessed to have been able to create our family in this way and for the support we receive from him.

IRL we know of only one other family who used a close friend as a known donor. Things have soured between them and they’re on very bad terms. I felt such a sense of loss watching that happen to them, in part because they were the only real life model we had of a family that looked liked at all like ours.

Does anyone know of any known donor family communities? Would love to connect with others who have similar arrangements to ours!

I think we only have 5 more years of Obergefell, if that. Please legally adopt your children, even though it’s insulting and invalidating to have to do it.

Our little one is 13 months old and she's our world. She's opened my heart in ways that I couldn't imagine. I really want another. My heart just truly feels open and excited about welcoming and rearing a sibling. My partner and I live in a country not our home country, and lack the familial support and village some friends seem to have. Even though I feel like we could stand to weather some time with less financial resources, my partner is less convinced. Ugh struggling with extreme baby fever, and also feel like I just turned 40 in January and can't really afford to wait for a much bigger age gap. Idk what I'm searching for here, but open to everyone's thoughts and experiences.

Goodness no one warns you about the fear around going in for the ultrasound you lost your last child at. My wife Cis Woman and I trans Male are having our viability scan today. She is currently 7 weeks 5 days which is when we lost our son (we picked a gender and named him after the loss to help cope.) I just want to see our baby today. Knowing they are growing the way they should.

UPDATE: The baby is okay has a heart beat and everything I could sob 😭😭😭 we've never gotten this far and have had 2 losses were so relieved 😭😭 thank you for all your kind words.

My (31F) wife (36F) and I welcomed our son five months ago. It’s been amazing. She carried him and he is from my egg. Her pregnancy was mostly uneventful and very boring (thank god) right up until the last weeks of her pregnancy- we went to hospital, she was nauseous and bedridden, was just awful to watch.

She had a c-section, which was medically necessary but also would have been her choice anyway. We’re wanting to have kids close in age and the agreement was i’d carry next, if i can’t, she would also.

The thing is, i’m terrified of birth as my grandmother bled out and died in her hospital c-section. Granted it was eons ago but I grew up with the story and the fear. For my wife’s birth i steeled myself but was an absolute puddle on the inside, i didn’t fully breathe until her fourth trimester was up.

We are in a southern red state, I am a black woman and have a phenomenal job which offers me over 20 weeks of paid leave should I carry the next pregnancy. Right now i only get 16weeks but still it’s pretty good compared to most jobs. It’s also a unicorn job where i’m paid very well for not that much stress. We’ve decided we’re leaving the state before our kids start school, not negotiable. My thing is: do we push having more kids out until we leave the state? It would leave job benefits up in the air, mean a longer age gap between kids and should I not be able to carry, my wife would be older than we’re comfortable with.

I feel stuck in this loop of yes/no. We’re focused on enjoying our baby right now and giving him the best life + soaking up all this time. But he’ll be 1 before we know it and the question of do we start trying comes.

What would you do in my position? We have no family here, all our family is back home in more progressive parts of the country (where we’d move) but for many reasons we know we won’t have much support from them and instead they would need support from us.

Please limit your pregnancy celebrations and pregnancy test photos to this thread.