Immaculate Misconception: A Story of Biology and Belonging

By Dr. Gwen Bass

In the early 1980's, 95% of all artificial inseminations were performed for married, heterosexual couples. Among the other 5% were people like Gwen's parents- lesbians navigating a homophobic medical system ready to deny them children.

They found a doctor willing to perform the procedure in secret, using sperm from an anonymou

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889269939

Dr. Gwen Bass

Dr. Gwen Bass is a teacher, advocate, parent mentor, researcher, and collaborative consultant. With a decade of experience each in K-12 classroom teaching and teacher education, plus years of research and program development, she supports kids whose needs and voices aren't honored by conventional systems - and the adults who care for them.Gwen provides consultation and training to help nonprofits, educators, government agencies, and caregivers foster positive outcomes for young people - especially those with disabilities and learning differences, LGBTQ+ youth and families, and youth in foster care and unique family situations. She is also a foster and adoptive parent in a queer blended family. They travel often, work like a team, and live by three rules: Have fun, be safe, be kind.

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Introduction

Being conceived through artificial insemination is a funny thing. My existence is, quite simply, the result of a medical intervention that could be characterized as a substitute for the real deal. Even the term artificial suggests some level of faking it. Regardless how expansive your definition of family, it’s physically impossible for two women to make a baby without a man. But what happens when that man isn’t your dad?

My parents, Lois and Judith, were among the first lesbian couples to have a baby through artificial insemination with an unknown donor, and I was born into a bit of an experiment. When they consented to the only viable option for getting pregnant at the time, they simultaneously agreed to forego access to any information about my paternal lineage. I grew up with two loving caregivers, two sets of relatives, and half a family tree.

I regarded my donor as a means to an end for my actual parents, a biomedical proxy rather than a human. He was the artificial one, not me, and as a child, these missing pieces felt inconsequential. Navigating the very real complexities that come with being the first of my kind took priority. I was in my mid-thirties when Judith began to hear from old friends—also lesbians—that their kids had found biological siblings through mail-in DNA tests. They sent me a kit, accompanied by a gentle nudge to see what might happen.

I dragged my feet for months before finally spitting into the vial and tucking it into the mail. Meanwhile, Judith texted me photos of her friends’ daughters and the siblings they had discovered on Ancestry.com and 23andMe, remarking at the shocking resemblance I shared with the women in the images.

By the time I eventually sent in the test, I’d apparently waited so long that it had expired, rendering my sample unanalyzable. The company sent me a second one, and I did the process all over. Again, I received the result my specimen couldn’t be analyzed. Maybe I hadn’t inherited the good spit.

I took it as a sign that this wasn’t a tree I needed to bark up with any urgency.

What difference would it make if I shared DNA with strangers or even with some of these old friends?

Swimming Upstream

Judith and Lois lived in a suburb outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Judith was an early childhood development consultant who traveled internationally for meetings and site visits, while Lois worked in a local school as a counselor. Together they had been raising Judith’s son, Dan, from her previous marriage to a man. Lois was desperate to have a baby of her own, and Judith was eager to give her eleven-year-old son a sibling.

In 1980, the landscape for lesbians who wanted to get pregnant was bleak. The few sperm banks that provided the service to unmarried women required prospective mothers to undergo comprehensive psychological evaluations. Homosexuality was slowly phasing out of the DSM, women who had divorced their husbands and come out were losing custody of their children, and the handful of clinics that offered artificial inseminations primarily served heterosexual couples. The notion of a family with two female parental figures was completely new, historically speaking.

The popularization of sperm banks and donor registries didn’t begin for nearly another decade, and the possibility that a child could have two moms was laughable. It wasn’t safe for many gays and lesbians to be out in the workplace or in schools, and people didn’t know how that would translate to a Lamaze class or a delivery room. While Roe v. Wade had recently secured a woman’s right to choose not to be pregnant, the political tone did not favor single mothers or the idea that an unmarried woman could choose to become pregnant.

After months of searching, they found a doctor who agreed to perform the insemination under one condition: that they never request any record of the procedure or seek information about the donor’s identity. Dr. Taylor believed it was not his right to deny them a baby, but he dealt solely in cash, relied on sperm donations from men in his network, and noted only a routine physical examination in Lois’s file.

My parents agreed to the terms, to the ambiguity, and to the secrecy. Once I was conceived, my parents referred several lesbian couples to the doctor, who gave each woman a slightly different story about their respective donor.

He’s blond.

He’s Jewish.

He’s tall with an olive complexion.

He’s a doctor.

Aside from the dominant, heterosexual paradigm, there was no model or language for them to rely on in formulating our family. Amid preparing a nursery, choosing between cloth and disposable diapers, and debating the pros and cons of purchasing a microwave to warm bottles, Lois and Judith decided I would not be raised by two moms.

Instead, Lois would be the mom and Judith would be the other parent. Lois would be linked to me on school forms and would carry me on her medical insurance. I would be, in legal and technical terms, her child. Since Judith was already her son’s mom, this made sense to them. Of course, she too would raise me—not as a mom or a dad but as Lois’s partner and my other parent. Establishing this division also offered them a sort of cover that could be used as needed.

For the first years of my life, I didn’t know any families like mine, as the road to building a queer family had yet to be paved. I grew up surrounded by chosen and biological relatives and my upbringing was imbued with the conviction that family extends beyond our DNA. By the time I entered preschool, I was an unwitting spokesperson for the gay movement.

As a kid, I straddled two worlds: at home I lived with my nontraditional family, but in the wider world, I lived in everyone else’s heteronormative reality. By bridging the gap, I was living proof that kids with lesbian parents could turn out okay. I defended my relationships to my nonbiological relatives and rejected the notion that I needed to know my artificial dad to feel like a whole person.

My family was different to the world, but it was all I knew. I spent my childhood playing with Cabbage Patch Kids, shooting hoops, cherishing my slap bracelet collection, and sitting on panels at conferences and in graduate classes, touting my experience for prospective parents and community skeptics that it is okay for gays and lesbians to raise children. I was taught that love makes a family, not DNA, and felt as deeply connected to my nonbiological parent and brother as I was to my biological mom.

Questions about the donor’s identity took a backseat, and navigating life as the first family of our kind took precedence. I never lacked the nourishment I needed to develop a strong sense of self. The disconnect between my personal life and the outside world reaffirmed what I believed: I was alone in my experience, code-switching in ways my peers couldn’t quite understand. Over time, my parents lost touch with many of the women they’d referred to Dr. Taylor, so the discovery that some of us were related came as a bit of a shock.

The Gayby Boom

Along with the passing of marriage equality, the increase in LGBTQ+ representation in the media, and legal protections for LGBTQ+ people, families like mine are now commonplace. While recent legislation and political waves continue to threaten the safety of LGBTQ+ people, parents today have choices about how to build and secure their queer families.

Yet many of the questions that my parents grappled with four decades ago are still relevant for queer parents. Who will carry the child? How will we protect the nonchildbearing parent’s rights to the child? What will the child call us? What is our comfort level with a known versus an unknown donor? What do we think our unborn child would want? How will we talk to our children about how they were conceived? Is donor sibling contact a good thing? Should we call the donor the donor or the father?

Regardless of how far we have come, raising children as LGBTQ+ people is inherently in conflict with the societal ideal that children have a mother and father. There will always be a question for kids about their missing biological parent(s), even if just for the purpose of understanding their own conception. I always imagined that the traits that differentiated me from my mom and my other parent must have come from him. Perhaps you are living with a similar sense of not knowing, or maybe your child is. There is so much more to us than meets the eye, and this book is for anyone who navigates the world with untold stories that lay beneath the surface.

Immaculate Misconception

While I didn’t set out to write a memoir, signs that it was time to share my life story were everywhere. I began to see how my conception, upbringing, and family-finding directly influenced who I am today, from how I have built my own family to the professional life I have dedicated myself to: working with kids whose families and identities exist outside of tidy, normative storylines.

By thirty-seven years old, I had raised a family, was married and divorced, and didn’t register my lack of connection to my paternal lineage. Unexpectedly finding biological siblings and learning about my donor has provided a context for parts of me that were previously homeless, and it has completely shifted my understanding of family. A flurry of new questions about identity and belonging emerged:

• What happens when we’re born into an identity we didn’t choose?

• What does biology have to do with belonging?

• How do we all, in our own ways, suppress unique aspects of our identities to fit in and secure our safety?

• How do we unintentionally harm others by assuming they fit into our view of normal?

I ask these questions by looking back at my life story and the sliver of queer history I was born into. Each chapter begins with a common query I fielded as a kid. The anecdotes I share are based on my own accounts of events and conversations that took place, as well as stories I have been told over the years.

I don’t claim to speak for everyone conceived through artificial insemination. This book is about my experience.

More families in pop culture and in day-to-day life look like mine, yet their honest family stories remain mostly untold. While so much has changed since I was a kid, the impact of being different still makes a mark on anyone in a nontraditional family. Kids of queer parents still code-switch between home and school to survive in mainstream society.

A growing community of queer people are building families and making decisions about donor registries, sibling contact, and the role of biological family. In sharing my story, I hope to offer insight into some of the issues these non-heterosexual families may be grappling with. Connecting with half-siblings has not threatened my deep and enduring relationships with my family of origin. It has allowed me to know myself more fully.

Many of us, queer or not, are in a lifelong process of negotiating how nature and nurture, the known and the unknown, contribute to our sense of self. This story is for you too. It turns out I am who I am because of my nature and how I was nurtured, and I am equally grateful for both.

1.

Are You Close with Your Mom?

My phone rang just a few minutes after 6:00 a.m. It was still dark, and I knew who was on the other end of the line before I rolled over to answer.

Hello.

Hi. I’m guessing you’re calling about my mother, Lois, I responded, cutting to the chase.

Hi. Yes, I’m calling to let you know she’s pretty much been sleeping since yesterday. She’s still with us, but she’s...fading... The nurse continued awkwardly, We’ve been sitting with her and making sure she’s comfortable, but she’s going to pass today. I thought you might want to come say goodbye. She paused again.

I waited in the silence for her judgment to follow her words through the phone line. I pictured her sitting behind a desk in the dim light of the hospital with her eyebrows raised, thinking, Aren’t you going to come sit by your dying mother’s side? What kind of daughter are you? I imagined her face cringing with disdain. It took me a moment to find the right words.

I actually can’t come because I’m going in for a minor surgery later this morning, I mumbled, knowing the timing seemed so impossible she might have thought I was making