Last week, the Family Equality Council released data from the LGBTQ Family Building Survey, providing new insight into how many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people are interested in becoming parents, and how they are planning to do so. Most significantly, the data reveals dramatic differences in expectations around family building between LGBTQ Millennials and older generations of LGBTQ people.
Key findings include:
- 63% of LGBTQ Millennials (aged 18-35) are considering expanding their families, either becoming parents for the first time, or by having more children
- 48% of LGBTQ Millennials are actively planning to grow their families, compared to 55% of non-LGBTQ Millennials, a gap that has narrowed significantly in comparison to older generations
- 63% of LGBTQ people planning families expect to use assisted reproductive technology, foster care, or adoption to become parents, a significant shift away from older generations of LGBTQ parents for whom the majority of children were conceived through intercourse.
“Since marriage equality became the law of the land, we’ve known anecdotally that more and more young LGBTQ people are fully expecting to form families, just like their straight and cisgender peers, but no research has been conducted to test this,” said The Rev. Stan J. Sloan, CEO of Family Equality Council.
“This research is of truly groundbreaking importance to LGBTQ people interested in forming families, and to the work of Family Equality Council in supporting our community. We believe that every LGBTQ person should be able to form a family and know the joys of parenthood, no matter who they are or where they live. Family Equality Council exists to make that dream a reality, and the data released today show just how many loving families are waiting to be formed with the right supports,” said Sloan.
The Family Equality Council is dedicated to helping members of the LGBTQ community realize their dreams of becoming parents. In 2018, Family Equality Council merged with Path2Parenthood, a leading provider of educational family-building and reproductive health resources with over a decade of experience serving the LGBTQ community. In January, the Family Equality Council launched the Open Door Professional Training Program, providing LGBTQ cultural competency training to family-building providers, from fertility specialists and midwives to family law practitioners and social workers.
In parallel, Family Equality Council’s policy team is working to eliminate discrimination in adoption and foster care, through our leadership of the Every Child Deserves a Family campaign, and to remove barriers to LGBTQ family building in state law, such as our 2019 campaign to eliminate New York state’s outdated ban on gestational surrogacy.
