Congratulations to Jeff Crockett and Giorgiou Severi on the upcoming publication of their new glossy magazine, Pink Parenting, next month and on Tuesday's feature in i, the mini-newspaper put out by the Independent. If you don't know of them already, Jeff and Giorgiou are also the publishers of European glossy, Fertility Road, as well as the team behind the Fertility World Show which debuted in London this year.
Same-sex couples who are parenting have been in the public eye this year more than ever, as celebrities lead the way in talking about their new families, including Elton John and David Furnish, pop star Ricky Martin, and actresses Cynthia Nixon and Jane Lynch. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, gay couples have been quietly creating families through sperm donation, surrogacy and adoption. Under the Adoption and Children Act of 2002, same-sex couples have exactly the same right as heterosexual couples to adopt in England and Wales. In practice, however, it hasn't always been so straightforward for gay couples to find the help they needed to create their families of choice. Thankfully, this is now turning around, with research and polls suggesting that:
- same-sex parents can make better parents than a woman and man;
- children of gay parents are no more or less likely to be gay; and
- approximately 64% of people think that same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt.
I wish Jeff and Giorgiou every success in their new venture. As Giorgiou said about gay surrogacy and adoption in i, "the world is ready for it now.
Fertility World Show, NEC Birmingham, 22 - 23 October, 2011.
The fertility rate is a hypothetical, almost conjectural number. It is not the same as the birth rate, which is the number of children born in a year as a share of the total population. Rather, it represents the number of children an average woman is likely to have during her childbearing years, conventionally taken to be 15-49.
Posted by: Natural Fertility | August 22, 2011 at 08:06 AM