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Pride Angel Journey | What do lesbians and babies have in common?

December 2, 2013 By prideangel.com

They all come out in the end…
I was eight days overdue and the pressure was mounting – but unfortunately only metaphorical pressure rather than the literal pressure that might signal labour was imminent. Despite our hopes for the birth centre, induction and the labour ward was once again looming.

Then, at bedtime, I sensed change. A slight abdominal ache, back pain, a heaviness between my legs. The next morning brought some splotches of a creamy, bloody stuff and I knew the time was nigh. I had a labour-inducing acupuncture session booked for that morning and, lying on the couch wired up, watching a muscle in my hand quite disconcertingly twitch of its own accord, I mused on how the £38 could perhaps have been more usefully spent.

Back home, there was an ominous atmosphere. Looking outside, I expected to see a sky expectant of a storm, heavy and murderous, but the clouds were white and calm as if unaware of what was surely beginning inside me. Preparing lunch, I doubled over briefly – a sudden shooting pain in my abdomen. Just like I sometimes got with my period. Sudden and then gone. And then again, half an hour later. I made myself comfortable in the conservatory with a wheat pack on my abdomen and got my knitting out, ignoring the inkling that such behaviour merited my immediate removal to a retirement home.

8pm. After a shuffle round the streets for a bit of fresh air, we got the tens machine attached and settled down with a film – To Kill a Mockingbird – and popcorn. The pains were sharper now; when I felt them coming, I knelt on the floor and leant over my birthing ball. By 10pm the noise of the film was distracting and the popcorn was starting to make me feel sick.

11pm. The pains (I suspected they were contractions, but was reluctant to use the ‘c’ word in case they weren’t) were stabbing and sudden and I was beginning to rethink my minimum pain-relief birth plan. Sally packed the car and ran me a bath. She phoned the midwife and explained that her partner was in labour (once again ‘coming out’ which it seemed happened every few days for one or both of us towards the end of our ‘lesbian pregnancy’). The midwife told us it could be three or four days yet, so at midnight, we settled down in bed to try and get some rest.

Article: by Lindsey, West Yorkshire 1st December 2013

Filed Under: Family & Friends Tagged With: lesbian baby, lesbian family, lesbian fertility, Lesbian parenting

Pride Angel Journey – Hunter-Gatherer Aspirations

August 31, 2013 By prideangel.com

It was Christmas and I was twenty-two weeks gone when I decided that we’d timed this pregnancy perfectly (I say ‘we’ – of course aside from putting the raw ingredients together and hoping for the best, ‘we’ can hardly take the credit for my body deciding it was about time to have a go at the baby thing). Anyway, the timing was certainly perfect: thick support tights aimed at preventing varicose veins were ideal for the frosty wintery weather; I‘d been over the sickness long enough to regain a hearty appetite for my Christmas dinner and I was still comfortable enough at night to sleep on a blow-up mattress at the family get-together, after watching the Christmas Special of Call the Midwife.
It had made a change that morning to put on my black JoJo Maman Bébé maternity dress – one of the few maternity items I’d actually bought. Aware that university tuition fees were looming (well, in eighteen years or so) we’d been keen to save money, and a friend had kindly leant me a stack of clothes. Still, I spent the best part of six months alternating mostly between four pairs of maternity trousers: jeans, tracksuit bottoms, work trousers and pyjamas. So it was nice to put on a dress for a change, and to show off the nifty breastfeeding feeding holes which were revealed when you loosened the waist ties.

And with Christmas came of course the reminder of how much more fun it would be next year. In my family, Christmas had been for far too long an adult affair. It was hard to imagine it any other way and, so inexperienced where babies were concerned, we wondered how exactly it would change: what would our little person – this little creature which squirmed and shuddered under my skin – be doing next December? Could eight-month-olds eat mince pies or open presents or have any real idea of what was going on? We didn’t know. We were still reading the pregnancy books and hadn’t quite made it on to the parenting ones.

Somehow, in addition to the more mainstream titles we’d ploughed through, my partner, Sally (who was always two or three books ahead of me, and thus by far the better informed regarding this whole pregnancy lark) came across a publication entitled Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic & Birth. We knew from watching One Born Every Minute that some of the book’s claims were now rather dated – enemas and pubic shaving are no longer the order of the day, and you aren’t automatically drugged as high as a pile of nappies and hitched up into stirrups with four gown-wearing doctors brandishing forceps and peering at your nether regions.

Nevertheless, it certainly showed us the benefits of aiming for a more natural approach: limited use of drugs, a midwife-led, active birth. A calm and gentle welcome to the world for our baby. I could see the point of those birthing pools and stools: squatting and groaning, rather than lying flat on a bed and screaming was perhaps how our bodies had been designed to deal with this. I was reminded of how a cat or dog will go off to find a quiet, safe place to snuggle down and give birth – surely this, and not furnishing the spare room with a Mamas and Papas furniture set in Light Oak, is ‘nesting’. The book encouraged me to think about what our ancestors must have done – not our mothers and grandmothers, but our Hunter-Gatherer ancestors. They managed without the medics – not all of them of course – childbirth must have been a very risky business. But enough of them managed – well, we’re here now, aren’t we?

I interrogated friends who already had children and listened to one birthing horror story after another: tales of non-progressing labours, anaesthetists busy elsewhere, epidurals not working, morphine and forceps and third degree tears. And while of course I knew how grateful we are to those medics when an emergency caesarean saves two lives, I wondered how feasible it was to hope for a natural birth. I would probably only get one opportunity to do this thing – this fundamental process of birthing, for which my body had been designed. And somehow, I wanted to acknowledge all those Hunter-Gatherer mothers of yore who slipped off into a quiet corner of the forest without drugs, hospitals or anything but a knowledge passed on time and again, one woman to the next.

Part of me felt I could do this, I could be that Hunter-Gatherer woman, squatting in the forest – nowadays we aren’t as physically fit as they would have been, or as accustomed to manual labour, but I was healthy enough. How can pain relief be so essential in a normal childbirth when we’ve only really had it in the last one hundred years? But would my pain threshold be too low to cope? And if there were complications, was there a way of preventing one intervention from leading to another? Did the best laid birth plans of mice and birthing women gang aft to pethidine?

Meanwhile it was January and the pelvic pain that was starting to set in was tempered with the knowledge that maternity leave was now only a school term away. But, at the end of a silent corridor of a school after home-time, rooting around in a dusty old storeroom, unearthing cobwebbed textbooks from ancient shelves, it occurred to me that perhaps this was the quiet spot my Hunter-Gatherer woman would have chosen.

Article: by Lindsey, West Yorkshire 30th August 2013

Filed Under: Insemination Tagged With: lesbian conception, lesbian fertility, lesbian having baby, Lesbian parenting, lesbian pregnancy

Lesbian Fertility Journey – Annoying little BEEPS and Olympic Gold Swimmers

May 11, 2012 By prideangel.com

Like most people, I always look forward to the longer daylight hours of spring. This year though, I await it with a particular eagerness, because the lighter mornings will bring an end to frantic half-conscious scrabbling around in the dark for the thermometer, torch, pen and notepad. I’m not sure quite how she does it, but whilst I am still fumbling around on my bedside table sending the random paraphernalia of my nocturnal life in all directions, I invariably hear the smug BEEP of my partner’s thermometer: waking temperature taken, job done.
Never mind the life transformation new parents undergo; we’re already experiencing a whole new world – and language – of BBT, ICI and FSH among others. Our collection of monthly charts is growing and a daily analysis of the ups and downs usually leads to me wondering whether typing “=OVULATION” into an Excel spread sheet might be worth a try. I’ve prodded and pondered on the texture of parts of my body I barely knew existed. And the Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue novels have been shelved in favour of titles which usually include the words “lesbian” and then “insemination”, “conception” and/or “pregnancy”. The Americanisms – it seems most are from over the Atlantic – get a bit tedious, but we’re lucky such publications exist at all – I don’t suppose anyone looking for such material ten years ago would have had much success.

One result of finding myself in a happy long-term lesbian relationship that I could not perhaps have predicted, was a serious interest in sperm. And I no longer find myself performing a dramatic squirm of disgust when the word is mentioned – spermatozoa (yes I’ve learnt the full name, and you need to trust me on this – that I just typed it with a serious and thoughtful expression on my face, no eeugh face or sperm squirm now). Try as I might though, I think I’ll always struggle a bit with looking at things from a scientific viewpoint; I need some frame of reference and sperm have become for me the athletes I’ll be following this year. It’s all about having a well-formed shape and getting up some speed as far as I can see. And if they do it in time for a gold medal in London this year, well, all the better – we’re ready for you.

Because it’s amazing how your mind-set changes, and how in six months you can go from “we’d better start discussing the baby question before it’s too late to decide” to “right, where’s the sperm and when do we start?” It seems to happen so gradually, with each smug thermometer BEEP, you find yourself not only in the new world of BBT, ICI and FSH but wondering whether it’s too early to talk about which bedroom he or she would have, which high-chair seems like a good buy and will we get chance to go back to the gay book shop in London for that children’s book about the kids who have two mummies and/or two daddies or should we get it now? (We decided pre-definite sperm donor was a bit soon.) So the life transformation is already well underway – perhaps when we actually have a baby, this process will have made us so ready that we’ll barely notice it slip into our lives. Yes, parents reading this, I’m joking – I know – or rather, perhaps more to the point, I really have NO IDEA!

So there you are: mittens and bootees might have a job to do sometime next winter, and as for my partner and I, we’ve got our eyes on the gold this summer, and next time the lighter mornings are on the way, perhaps we’ll be welcoming them with a new member of the family. And the nocturnal noise level might just have risen above that smug thermometer BEEP.

Filed Under: Family & Friends Tagged With: lesbian family, lesbian fertility, lesbian fertility journey, lesbian getting pregnant, Lesbian parenting, lesbian trying to conceive

Mothercare Competition Winner | Mittens, Bootees and Decisions

December 12, 2011 By prideangel.com

Imagine a pair of mittens, and bootees to match, tiny and all furry soft and with paw prints on the palms and soles. And in the half-price sale. Of course we bought them, but this time they were not just a gift for one of our many breeding friends (someone‘s popping one out at least once a month or so now). No, we bought them as a symbol – a symbol of our decision-making process about whether to have a child. If one day, someone else’s child wears them, it will be because we decided not to do it. For now though, the jury is out…

It’s the suddenness of prospective parenthood that is most disconcerting. After fifteen years of sorting out your sexuality and looking for love and, once you find it, a bit of time settling down, rings and vows and all, by the time the question of kids even crosses your mind as a vague and rather complicated option for a lesbian couple, you’re suddenly aged thirty-four and starting to think actually, if we’re going to do this, it needs to be soon. Do straight couples actually really think it through? Or is it just what you do, once you’ve been working a few years and you’re married with the three-bedroomed semi and the Ford Focus? I don’t honestly know, but my guess is, when you’re gay you think it through a lot harder.

You question your motives: is it selfish to want a child? Do we just want one because our friends have them? Because we think we could do a good job of it? Because now we’re civil partnered, what’s next? You question the morality of the method: is it wrong to have a child by artificial insemination when so many children need adopting? (I’d follow this principle when acquiring a cat – but does the morality change with a child?) To what extent is it genetic engineering when you select a donor who looks good on paper? (Don’t even ask what makes a donor ‘look good’ on paper.) And is that selection process actually any more engineered than a straight person selecting a spouse which whom to breed?

And then once you’ve convinced yourself you’re okay with the whole sperm donor idea, what then? A series of weird discussions (We know – we’ve had them) about which of your friends or friends’ husbands you would most like to impregnate yourself/girlfriend. Do you ask the one who’d be least freaked out by the whole prospect, or the one who looks healthiest and still has a good head of hair? And when you ask him, how exactly would that conversation go? Seriously, I’d like to know.

Frankly, it’s going to involve some uncomfortable discussions, but on the other hand, that whole donor bank thing of a complete stranger with blue eyes, brown hair and an A’ level in computing appeals even less. Our recent discovery of the Pride Angel website has introduced a more attractive option of finding a sperm donor who we can meet and develop some sort of (albeit unconventional) relationship with, but who is otherwise unconnected with us personally, and this is the option we’re currently working on.

But for now the mittens and bootees, with the fur and the paw prints, are on a shelf in the wardrobe, waiting patiently for the possibility of any paws close to home that might one day fit inside.

Winning article: by Lindsey, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom 12th December 2011

Filed Under: Family & Friends Tagged With: choosing a sperm donor, competition winner, gay family, gay parenting, lesbian fertility, Lesbian parenting, lesbian pregnancy, mothercare voucher competition, pride angel article, pride angel stories, pride angel testimonial, pride angel winner, same-sex parenting

Pride Angel would like to hear about your fertility and parenting experiences

September 12, 2011 By prideangel.com

Pride Angel wants your feedback – Receive £150 mothercare vouchers for FREE
Having babies and toddlers can be expensive as they just keep on growing. Imagine what you could buy with £150 Mothercare vouchers, a endless supply of nappies, new baby clothes, a new pushchair, whatever you would buy, the choice is entirely yours!

How to get your free vouchers? Pride Angel would love to hear about your experiences, whether you have:

• Found a donor through Pride Angel?
• Got pregnant using a Pride Angel insemination kit?
• Starting the journey to parenthood and considering different options?
• Co-parenting with a single person or gay couple?
• Used a friend as a sperm donor?
• Using IVF treatment or going through surrogacy?

Are you willing to write a small blog/article about your personal experiences in the region of 200-500 words? Personal names do not need to be included if you prefer not to.

The best article will be published on Pride Angel and will be rewarded with £150 mothercare vouchers. Any other articles which we may choose to add to Pride Angel will be rewarded £50 in mothercare vouchers.

Speak to us for more information, just contact us. Enter your article by email: info@prideangel.com

This promotion is available until 30th November 2011. All entries will be replied to by the Pride Angel team.

Filed Under: Family & Friends Tagged With: gay family, gay family stories, gay fertility, gay having baby, gay parenting, lesbian fertility, lesbian having baby, Lesbian parenting, mothercare vouchers, single fertility, single having baby

Pink Parenting Magazine to launch for the gay and lesbian community

May 27, 2011 By prideangel.com

Welcome to Europe’s first Premier Same Sex Parenting Magazine for the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender) community.
In these modern times more gay people are becoming parents than ever before as many in the LGBT community seek to fulfil their dreams of having a family especially with so many countries around the globe now making same sex marriage available. Pink Parenting is here to do just that. Bringing you everything you need to start a family from surrogacy options, adoption and the legal aspects of being a modern family to what’s the best stroller out there on the market.

A SNEAK PEAK INTO THE AUDIENCE: While we are feverishly working on getting the statistics for the UK & Europe, our research has shown that:
According to the 2000 Census – SAME-SEX COUPLES IN THE UNITED STATES
• Census 2000 identified same-sex couples in every state and virtually every county in the United States.
• Individuals living in same-sex couples not only live throughout the country, but share all of the other attributes of the U.S.’s population.
• Individuals in same-sex couples contribute to the economy: 71% of them are employed compared with 65% of individuals in married couples.
• 65% of SS couples one partner is a homeowner. By comparison, one or both partners are homeowners in 43% of different-sex unmarried couples.
• More than 39% of same-sex couples in the United States aged 22-55 are raising children.

Unlike many other gay magazines, our demographic is LGBT couples between the age of 30 to 45 that are more interested in modern day life and having a family and growing out of the gay club scene. We are also working with many LGBT organizations to promote and distribute the magazine. The magazine is also available through the www.Pink-Parenting.com website and will soon be available via www.prideangel.com

To read more go to http://bit.ly/iec11U

Filed Under: Insemination Tagged With: gay family, gay parenting, gay parenting magazine, lesbian family, lesbian fertility, lesbian getting pregnant, Lesbian parenting, lesbian parenting magazine, pink parenting, same-sex parenting

Sisters are doing it for themselves: Fertility Road Feature

August 18, 2010 By prideangel.com

Having a child is the most natural thing in the world. In an ideal scenario, it’s a situation born of love, commitment and the desire to procreate. But what if the usual trappings of that romantic impulse to give life aren’t available to you?
To put it into context, The UK Adoption and Children Act 2002 gave same-sex couples the right to jointly adopt children, and in the same year the English Court of Appeal judged that a same-sex couple could be seen to be “living together as husband and wife”.

The Civil Partnership Act was passed in 2004 and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Act 1990 was revised in2008. The new HFE Act gives lesbian couples who conceive using licensed donor sperm increased legal recognition in law, replacing the 1990 wording of “father” with “supportive parenting”. Under the new act, if a woman is in a civil partnership at the time of the treatment, then “the other party to the civil partnership is to be treated as a parent of the child”. If a woman is not in a civil partnership at the time she obtains donor sperm but has a partner who gives consent to the treatment, the non-birth mother is automatically treated as a parent of the child.

To read more go to http://bit.ly/a1oB2h

Filed Under: Insemination Tagged With: fertility law, gay parenting, lesbian fertility, Lesbian parenting, same-sex parenting, surrogacy


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