Gay Father Families

The study will explore the early social experiences and development of infants raised from birth by gay fathers in
the UK, France, and The Netherlands. Infants and parents will be observed interacting when the infants are four
months old, and the parents will be interviewed at the same time. When the infants are 12 months old, the
quality of their attachments to their parents will be assessed using Ainsworth's Strange Situation procedure. The
parental behaviour of these fathers and the quality of the relationships formed between the infants and their
parents will be compared with those of infants being raised by lesbian and heterosexual couples. All infants will
be conceived using reproductive technologies, including donor insemination and surrogacy, to ensure
comparability. In addition, the study will explore the extent to which the quality of infant-parent attachment at
one-year is predicted by individual differences in the parents' behaviour and indices of their social circumstances
when the infants are four months old. The study will be the first to examine families where children are raised in
gay father families from birth. It will allow us to determine whether infants 'need' women to be involved in their
early care and emotional lives, as many still believe; and whether infants raised not only by two men, but two
men with same-sex orientation, are as likely to develop normally as those raised from birth by heterosexual
parents or by two women with same-sex orientation. Sufficiently large samples will be recruited in each country
to allow exploration of the extent to which legal and cultural differences affect parental behaviour and infant
adjustment.

The findings will have far-reaching implications for the development of policy and legislation in relation to these new family forms, as well as the regulation of assisted reproduction. Same-sex marriage is recognised in the Netherlands and same-sex civil partnerships are recognized in the United Kingdom whereas same-sex partners are raising children without legal recognition of their relationships in France. Thus the legal status of the relationships we are studying is different in each of the countries involved in this research. Regarding assisted reproduction, important differences also exist between the three countries. In the UK, both partners in a same-sex relationship may be the legal parents of children conceived using donated gametes, and same-sex couples may become the legal parents of children born through surrogacy. In contrast, surrogacy is illegal in France and The Netherlands, so couples who wish to pursue this route to parenthood must travel abroad for treatment, which can carry additional risks. There are also key differences between countries with respect to donor anonymity. In the UK and the Netherlands, donor offspring are legally entitled to learn the identity of their donor at age 18 whereas in France donors remain anonymous, producing a climate of openness about the child's biological parentage in the UK and the Netherlands in contrast to a climate of secrecy in France. Such legislative and policy differences are likely to affect parenting and child development, underscoring the value of the cross-cultural comparisons that will be possible in the present study. These national differences notwithstanding, there will certainly be significant increases in the number of children growing up in gay father families in the future and it is thus imperative to establish the psychological consequences for all concerned.