LGBT People Accessing Reproductive Justice

What is reproductive health for LGBT people? The answer is as diverse as our community and as varied as it is for heterosexual people. For all people it is the right to choose how we want to live our lives that is constantly in peril and must be relentlessly protected.

Reproductive justice is not new for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) movement. Some of the earliest stories of our movement and our lives are those of questioning, of feeling different, of alienation, of being disavowed from our families for loving or expressing our gender differently. Many of the oldest LGBT reproductive justice stories are about those of us who lost children due to being LGBT. And, unfortunately, these stories are not historical relics. They occur everyday. Recently this was driven home when a friend of a friend came to me. She is married to a man with whom she has two children. She knows that she is a lesbian and feels constantly torn between her family and her truth. "Should I come out to my husband? Should I divorce him?" she asks me, her eyes full of fear. I tell her, "If you are going to divorce him, don't come out until after custody is decided," and I give her the name of a lawyer to the LGBT community. My friend lives in Virginia and the risk of her losing her children is too great. This is not the leftover paranoia of a pre-Stonewall day; this battle is raging in our country today.

My first awareness of the existence of LGBT people was intertwined with my first questionings of reproductive justice. When Martina Navritolova came out on television, she told the reporter about her desire to have children; a family member of mine cracked about how that was no longer possible for her. I thought, but did not ask, "why?" This moment of awakening was followed in church where I sat and listened to the priest rail against abortion and same-sex adoption. Again, "why?" I looked at my sister, adopted at the age of two, and thought, "We love her, would a same-sex couple do any less? Is she not better today as a member of our family then being in an orphanage? Why is this man so against abortion and birth control, yet also wants to deny children a family?"

Where I work at the National Coalition for LGBT Health, we focus on advancing the health of the LGBT community and increasing its access to all forms of healthcare, including reproductive healthcare. Access is one of the LGBT community's greatest reproductive justice issues. For many LGBT people, we simply cannot procreate without the government becoming involved in our lives. Gay men cannot donate sperm in accredited facilities. Often unmarried women, and all lesbians outside of Massachusetts (who are legally unmarried), cannot get in vitro fertilization (IVF) covered by their health insurance. In some states, we can adopt; in others, we cannot. These barriers do not exist due to health reasons, but because of homophobia and ignorance.

But reproductive justice is about much more than laws and goes well beyond the decision about whether or not to have children. It is what happens in clinics, hospitals, and doctors' offices. Access is blocked when a bisexual person is told by a healthcare practitioner that they will grow out of this "phase," when a transgender person must check either an F or M box on a form, when a gay man is assumed to be HIV positive, and when a doctor's first question to a lesbian is "what form of birth control do you use?" All of these examples are about lines of communication being closed off, a person becoming uncomfortable and omitting important information to a healthcare practitioner, and stereotypes hurting our health.

What is reproductive health for LGBT people? The answer is as diverse as our community and as varied as it is for heterosexual people. LGBT folks adopt, birth, foster, contribute to the creation of children, and choose not to have children the same way that heterosexual people do. For all people, LGBT and heterosexual, it is the right to choose how we want to live our lives that is constantly in peril and must be relentlessly protected.

And what is reproductive justice for us? Again, it is the same: the ability to create and protect and sustain a family (whether or not that includes children) that nurtures and supports us. But it also is substantially different. Our bodies, like the bodies of many communities, are politicized. When transgender people cannot get insurance, when all gay men are assumed to be HIV positive, when lesbians are assumed to "just need a good man," and when bisexuality is ignored as a sexual orientation, access is blocked and reproductive justice is denied.