Producing Citizens: Lesbians, Assisted Conception, and Enacting Citizenship

For much of the 1970s, lesbians found assisted conception difficult to access, risky to improvise, and unlikely to achieve.  Doctors and sperm banks typically denied lesbians access to assisted conception services because of their sexuality and marital status. However, the battle for lesbian access to assisted conception services made significant strides in the 1970s and 1980s, with many lesbians gaining viable access to insemination services and banked sperm by the early years of the 1980s. Many of these gains resulted, in part, from the successes of the women’s and gay liberation movements as well as the sexual revolution in shifting social norms around sex and family in the 1970s. However, while the larger women’s movement struggled to disentangle women’s identity and social value from motherhood, lesbians seeking access to assisted conception navigated a complex political terrain in which they linked access to pregnancy to full enactments of citizenship without making motherhood compulsory for all women. This paper examines the ways in which the medical and political struggle to make assisted conception more accessible to lesbians and single women employed and intersected with claims to citizenship. This mode of inquiry illuminates the ways in which race, class, and gender shaped lesbians’ expectations of health care and motherhood. Furthermore, the contested political meaning of pregnancy, birth, and sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s take on new dimensions from this vantage point.