Baby Steps

How Lesbian Alternative Insemination is Changing the World

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by Amy Agigian

Wesleyan University Press

Due/Published June 2004, 288 pages, cloth

ISBN 0819566292

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.