Just beginning

I am so glad I found this site. My fiance and I are just beginning the insemination process to start our family. I am in the middle of a cycle now, so we'll probably start inseminating in August/September depending on when I ovulate.

If any of you are from South Jersey or know of a resource to find LGBTQ family-friendly OB/GYNS and hospitals, I would really appreciate some referrals. I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, which can cause a lot of fertility problems because of the hormonal irregularities that throw off the cycle, so I made a preconception appointment with my regular gynecologist, who has never expressed any negativity about my sexual orientation before. Apparently the idea of lesbians not only loving one another and having sex but also making babies and raising them like "normal" families is too much for her to bear because she was very rude to me when I told her we were trying to conceive. She refused to allow our sperm to be shipped to her office and wouldn't fill out the forms to have it delivered to our home either, which means I either need to find a sperm bank that will ship to my home without a doctor's note (which really pisses me off anyway - straight women don't need a doctor's permission to get access to their partner's sperm to get pregnant - what do they think I'm going to do with it that requires supervision?) or find a new doctor, which I would be doing even if I wasn't trying to get pregnant. Just two more things to add to the endless list of things I need to do to get ready for inseminations and pregnancy!

My fiance and I have been together for nearly five years and have been engaged for almost as long. We plan on getting a civil union here in New Jersey sometime before the baby is born despite my political opposition to and personal discomfort with this lesser title. I would rather wait until we can be legally married and actually call it a marriage but am willing to do it sooner because I want to ensure that our new family has as much legal protection as possible from the very beginning. Here, civil unions offer all of the same tangible state benefits and obligations that marriage does (except the federal benefits of course) and therefore would allow my fiance to also be on our baby's birth certificate when he or she is born (I'll be the birth mom for any children we have because my fiance has serious health problems), although we will still need to complete a second-parent adoption for federal recognition of our family. We'll probably wait to have a ceremony and reception when they come around to calling it marriage, which should only be a year or so away.

Any advice about anything involving civil unions/marriage, insemination, conception, pregnancy, birth, or parenting would be more than welcome. I spend all of my free time (and some time that I should be spending on other things, like sleeping) reading up on these subjects because I'm one of those people who is obsessive compulsive about being as prepared for every possibility as it is possible to be. However, I've been discouraged to find limited resources on these subjects in regard to lesbians, most notably in the area of insemination and conception. There are several LGBTQ parenting books out there, but I've only found two books about lesbian conception and pregnancy. The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Childbirth and The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth. Practically the same titles, but these are each written by different authors from completely different perspectives, and although I highly recommend both, I am hungry for more! Let me know if you've come across any others! Thanks!