Lesbians and IVF

Another story from the Age trumpeting how right on and hip they are down in Victoria. Lesbians and single mums will be able to access IVF.

Whilst the usual suspects on my side of the fence are making a fuss about it, I don't expect there to be long queues of enormous lesbians outside IVF clinics on Monday. Nor do I expect hordes of gay couples to descend on adoption agencies if gay adoption is ever legalised in Victoria.

Why?

For the same reason that you won't see a plethora of conservatives queuing outside a Mosque this Friday to get in. I reckon that only a small minority of lesbian couples will want IVF, and stuff-all single women will want it either. I also don't see packs of gay men roaming up and down Oxford St bemoaning their lack of children.

Let me start with the poofs.

Out of all the poofs that I have ever known (and I reckon I have known at least two dozen in my life, through work or the Army Reserves or social contacts etc), only one of them has ever expressed any urge to take part in the whole family/fatherhood affair. The rest look at rugrats the same way I did five years ago, "I am sure your offspring is very cute; now, please take him/her away and let the drinking begin".

Before I became a dad, I had no interest in kids. None. Nada. Nilch. A lot of single guys feel the same way, and this is why there are so many stories about women having to drag men down the aisle etc etc. Single men love the idea that they can just ditch their job and go surfing in Bali for a year, because they have no commitments and so on.

All the poofs that I've met have been no different from straight men in that regard. Some settle down with their partner and buy a house and create a lovely home, but it is a home for them, not for a family. They have about as much interest in kids as I have in crochet.

So whilst there might be a lot of gay men in Sydney and Victoria, I reckon you'd be lucky if 5% of them wanted to adopt. If they're the nurturing kind and they're willing to put up with all the sacrifice and commitment that being a parent involves, then I say good luck to them. As Kinky Friedman said about gay marriage, "They have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us".

Will the kids grow up wierd?

Possibly. But I look at the steady parade of kids going past our front door each day on the way to school, and a lot of them are growing up wierd too. Kids from normal families grow up to be axe murderers and drunks and rapists and drug addicts and thieves, and plenty these days are turning into EMO's and goths and other wierd things, so how wierded-out can the child of a gay couple be?

Put it this way, they can't do any worse than the Abo's.

Onto lesbians. I will declare a vested interest here. Monkey does day care with a lesbian couple. They are far and away the best carers that he's had. By a country mile. If we sprog up again, I hope they are still in business because I'd happily give them all my kids, and yours as well. They are bloody great.

Are they representative of lesbians as a whole? I doubt it. They're just who they are - a couple trying to make a go of it in the suburbs. I don't see them as the poster children of good lesbians or bad lesbians or anything else. I just know that if they wanted to have kids, I think they'd do a fine job of bringing them up.

I have no idea if they want kids or not, and I'm not going to ask.

I'm not sure though that I'd want my taxes to be paying for their plumbing work though. When it comes to lesbians having kids, call me a traditionalist. ie, go and find a male who is willing to do the procreating and have him over for drinks each night until you are knocked up.

I don't really believe the whole turkey baster story. I reckon that's just something that radical lesbians tell each other so that they don't have to admit to having had a bit of cock in the process of getting sprogged up.

Do I see lesbians with kids as being wierd? Well, I don't see it as terribly natural, but I'm sure it is something that has been going on for thousands of years. It just hasn't been out of the closet, that's all.

The way I see it, if my kids were at school with theirs, I wouldn't want mine to be running around going "gay, gay, gay" all day at the other kids. I'd rather they treated people based on the content of their character, rather than their sexual orientation. If they are shitheads who happen to be gay, then call them shitheads by all means.

Anyway, I think lesbian IVF parents will be as rare as hens teeth in the scheme of things. There are 50,000 kids under the age of 12 in our area - if 50 lesbian couples in this area decide to baste up, that will be 1 kid in 1000. Nothing to panic over.

As for single women wanting to have kids, I think that idea can just go fuck off. If you want to have a kid without the commitment of a dad, just do what stacks of feral women out in the sticks do - get drunk, root lots of men and have six kids by six different fathers. There's plenty of that going on. If you can't get hammered and laid, then I see no reason why the state should cough up for IVF.