Lesbians' right-to-choose, children's 'right-to-know'

During the second wave of feminism many lesbians seeking pregnancy preferred to use anonymous donor insemination as a means of avoiding patriarchal interference in their families. In the years since, there has been greater interest in what is seen as the more child-friendly alternative: finding an identifiable sperm donor with whom the child can seek contact. In this chapter, I consider the relative influence of the Women’s Liberation ‘right-to-choose’ and the more recent ‘right-to-know drawing on the stories of three lesbian mothers: Trish Williams, Karen Bell and Gale Attard. Trish Williams, who conceived and gave birth to daughter Sarah in 1988, was a member of a Melbourne-based lesbian feminist self- insemination group. Trish was influenced by a lesbian separatist-inspired commitment to donor anonymity that became tempered by exposure to arguments in support of children’s right to know. By the time Karen Bell and Gabe Attard had their children in 2000, the ideologically inspired use of unidentifiable donors had all but disappeared among lesbian prospective parents. But the struggle to balance right-to-choose with right- to-know remains just as important. These women’s stories serve to illustrate the political and social shifts over the past twenty years between lesbians’ own sense of reproductive and familial autonomy, and their awareness of the significance of biological fathers to children’s understanding of family and identity.