The new frontier of queer liberation: babies
When she first came out as a lesbian, Meg York never imagined having children—until she did.
By Angie Pulmano
Jocelyn York was in labor, breathing and pushing with her first child. She and her wife, Meg York had prepared for a homebirth. Their midwives raced to their home that morning.
As Jocelyn’s contractions became more intense, Meg found it wrenching to watch her wife in agony.
Still, Meg explains, “With each contraction and each wave of pain, we were getting closer to meeting the child we had longed and hoped for, for so long.”
The moment the baby’s head poked out, the midwives rushed Meg over to Jocelyn, who was sitting over a birthing stool, to help deliver.
Meg’s voice falters slightly, “I put my hands out, and felt her little head, and felt her little hair.”
A family video shows the child born directly into the palms of her hands. Meg immediately placed the baby on Jocelyn’s chest, and, for a moment, the world felt like it stopped turning on its axis. For a moment, their world was reduced to Meg, Jocelyn, and their small baby girl.
“I just held this little human,” Meg recalls, “and I was just like: Oh, now I understand. I want to give you everything.”
Listen to Meg and Jocelyn's story here.
Meg holds baby Ida after homebirth. Photo courtesy of Meg York.
Despite the intimacy of little Ida York being born into their Vermont home in 2017, modern science was crucial to the process. Ida was conceived through an assistive reproductive technology called Intracervical Insemination — the medical cousin of the IVF.
When she first came out as a lesbian in 2008, Meg could not imagine becoming a parent. A big step toward making that possible was the legalization of gay marriage in the state of Vermont in 2009—six years before its federal legalization in 2015. Marriage signaled to Meg that creating a family was possible. In 2015, they pursued reproductive health care possibilities for a lesbian couple in the particularly progressive state of Vermont, but it proved to be surprisingly difficult.
LGBTQ+ couples have a variety of options to consider that are similar to those of opposite-sex couples experiencing infertility. They must deal with confusing acronyms and complicated, clinical explanations, but they must also consider which partner should take special hormone treatments and who will carry the embryo. One specific type of assistive reproductive technology that Meg and Jocelyn considered is in vitro fertilization, a medical process that has drawn attention from prominent conservative politicians such as vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
IVF is not simple. The fees for things like consultation, hormone therapy, egg retrieval, assisted fertilization, embryo transfer, and a final pregnancy test can cost more than $20,000, according to data from the Pacific Fertility Center of Los Angeles. That’s a fraction of what it used to cost a few decades ago, but it still too expensive for many aspiring parents to afford.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, to retrieve the egg, a thin needle connected to a tube is inserted through the vagina at a slight angle and punctures through the ovaries to grab mature eggs. Because of the invasive nature of this procedure, the operation requires sedatives to ease the pain. The eggs are placed in a petri dish for three days to develop more fully.
The next step is fertilization. Sperm collected from donors is injected into the mature eggs through a syringe. Only about 70% of mature eggs will be successfully fertilized.
Once fertilized, the eggs are left to begin dividing. About half of the fertilized eggs will become embryos that can be successfully transferred to the uterus with a syringe that pokes through the cervix.
Even after implantation, pregnancy is not guaranteed, and it may take several tries for a pregnancy to hold.
For ICI, the sperm collected from donors is directly inserted into the host parent’s cervix during ideal times of ovulation with a syringe. The success rate of each implantation effort is about 35%. There are fewer steps than with IVF, but the thought process in choosing the procedure remained similar for Meg.
If all goes well for either of these procedures—about nine months later, a baby is born.
In the beginning, Meg and Jocelyn felt overwhelmed. Questions ran through their heads: Should the sperm donor end up being someone from Meg and Jocelyn’s lives? If the sperm donor was someone they knew, how involved with their children would that individual become?
They decided to go with a known sperm donor, but Meg remembers when their doctors handed her sperm bank catalogs of potential donors complete with descriptions of height, eye color, hair color, and family medical history.
“The idea of like, shopping in a catalog to create a person, felt very unsettling for me,” Meg said.
Screenshots of price quotes for the medical procedure ran through Meg’s phone camera roll.
She reached out to a friend who had given birth to twins via IVF and lived outside of Vermont in search of answers.
Her friend’s advice? “Move to Massachusetts, because we have better health insurance here.”
Meg with Polly Croizer, attorney with GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, at Boston Pride marching for the Massachusetts Parentage Act. Photo courtesy of Meg York.
According to Fertility Centers of New England, Massacusetts state law requires health insurance companies to cover infertility treatment. To this day in Vermont, the state has not passed a law mandating health insurance coverage infertility.
In the end, Meg and Jocelyn decided to use a different type of assistive reproductive technology before they had Ida. It is called Intracervical Insemination — where the sperm is inserted directly into the cervix to increase the likelihood of conception.
The decision of which procedure to choose took time, and the timeline for embryo conception took time. Almost nine months passed before Jocelyn became pregnant.
During Jocelyn’s pregnancy, Meg felt insecure about being the non-gestational parent — the one who does not carry the fetus to term. Like some fathers, she found herself on the periphery of the child-bearing experience, and she wrestled with feeling jealous.
“I didn’t know really what my place was,” says Meg. “I struggled with that experience a little bit.”
To cope, she read the memoir, “She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Non Biological Lesbian Motherhood),” written from the perspective of a lesbian mother in similar circumstances. The book helped Meg work through some of those feelings.
After Jocelyn gave birth to Ida, Meg had to adopt her own daughter and navigate a "patchwork of parentage laws.” At the time, Vermont had not yet updated its parentage laws to be inclusive of a diverse experience of family building. If a parent does not share a biological connection with a child, but wishes to claim legal guardianship over them, they need to go through second-parent adoption to be legally recognized as a mother or father. Different states have different frameworks for what the non-gestational partner needs to do to become a parent. In some states, this involves proof of marriage license, a home study, checking the child abuse registry or fingerprinting for criminal background checks.
“It felt, in some ways, humiliating,” Meg said.
Meg went into this better informed than most. She works at a non-profit organization called Family Equality, that advocates and provides resources for couples with diverse experiences to build their family. She is a family law attorney who, among other things, works to guarantee the legal rights of queer families in accessing assistive reproductive technology and adoption.
She acknowledged the confusing process that might prevent one partner from not pursuing legal guardianship. Family law judges ask invasive questions about a couple’s intimate life: How did the couple conceive the baby? Did the couple have sex to create said baby?
“You are treated like a legal stranger to your child — to the child that was literally born into my arms,” said Meg. “Here I am asking a court, you know, ‘Please fingerprint me, and check out my home, and deem me worthy of being a parent.’”
As a lawyer, Meg understood that she needed to prove that she could be a good parent so that she could be legally recognized as one. But as a mother, she had to endure a process built to confirm that they were parents of a child that they loved into existence.
According to Meg, in all 50 states, for opposite-sex couples, the pathway for legal parentage can be as easy as scribbling a signature on a form. A free document called the Voluntary Acknowledgement of Parentage allows for a prospective parent to fill out and sign the form, and under federal law have that parentage be recognized across state lines. Currently, only 11 states actually have this form available for same sex couples who have used assisted reproduction, and in 2025, Michigan is projected to be the newest state to adopt an updated VAP for same sex couples. A key component of her work at Family Equality involves improving parentage protections for LGBTQ+ families by expanding access to the Voluntary Acknowledgement of Parentage agreements.
Meg and her team at Family Equality were also staunch advocates of the Massachusetts Parentage Act, Gov. Maura Healey signed the act in August of 2024 to ensure legal parentage equality in the state.
Meg and Ida York beside Governor Healey at the Massachusetts Parentage Act signing ceremony. Photo courtesy of Meg York.
Similarly, in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in September of 2024, drafted by California Senator Caroline Menjivar, that requires that large health insurance companies provide coverage for fertility services. The bill also introduces more inclusive language surrounding infertility. In this bill, “infertility” is defined as “a person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention”.
The fight for family equality has been fraught with obstacles—namely, voices on the other side of the ticket advocating for more “traditional” family values.
Family Equality vs. Traditional Family Values. Voice #1: Meg York talks about her experiences of becoming a mother. Voice #2: Greg Burt explains his perspective on traditional family values.
Greg Burt grew up in a traditional household surrounded by family. Like Meg and Jocelyn, Burt and his wife have three children. His mother and father before him were married for 60 years. He grew up surrounded by his aunts and uncles, who also had children of their own.
"We think the man, woman, child, family is the foundation of any society to the extent you have solid families with good parents who are raising their kids who value their relationship,” Burt explains. “Any community where that kind of thing isn’t happening, you’re going to see societal breakdown.”
Societal breakdown he describes in the form of kids coping with drug addiction or living on the streets and increasing suicide rates. Burt wishes people talked about these issues more often.
He talked as he drove up the 101 highway after sitting through road closure traffic caused by a Clear Lake wildfire. The perfect time to explain, via phone call, the process of IVF. The grassroots activist and vice president of the foundational Christian organization California Family Council continued, “it turns children into things that you can buy, almost like a product…a commodity.”
Burt’s voice crackles through spotty phone connections, but he speaks with conviction. “What you’re doing, is you create a bunch of human beings, and then you pick the ones you want, and freeze the rest.”
In a public statement that Burt helped draft for California Family Council, Burt describes IVF as a “eugenic practice” that has “no place in a civilized society”.
In regards to the recent infertility healthcare coverage bill in California, Burt also voices his concerns, calling out Senator Menjivar.
“[Senator Menjivar] is more or less saying, it’s not fair [opposite-sex couples] get a treatment that I don’t get because my sex partner isn’t a man, that’s the unjust part.” Burt summarizes Senator Menjivar’s argument in the bill, “in her mind that’s unjust. In my mind, that’s just the way we’re built.”
From Burt’s perspective, same-sex family building is “radical”. He sees these families as “alternative ways of thinking about the world”, that make an “unjust moral statement” about social family structures.
In California, with Prop 3 establishing a Consitutional right to marriage regardless of sex or race, up for votes, Burt also claims that advocacy for same-sex family building would be allow for child marriage and three-person unions.
Meg York disagrees with this sentiment.
“People who don’t want things to change, or even just to acknowledge the current reality for folks are going to cling to fear, as a way to scare people out of celebrating and honoring our families,” she said, pointing out the flaws in this kind of thinking.
“It compares people, human, adult, consenting people who love each other, to some really horrific situations. And that is insulting and degrading, and it’s really a shame that people go that route.”
She explains that the idea of IVF as a perpetuator of eugenics misses the point about the potential joy the technology can offer to people—regardless of LGBTQ+ identity.
“I mean if you talk to anybody and ask them about what are some of the most meaningful things in their life, many people will say, ‘my family’, ‘my children,’” Meg said. “To say ‘I don’t want to support people being able to build families is, I mean, I think that’s a very shocking position to take."
These “shocking positions” are the very reason Meg York works for the Family Equality organization. Meg echoes the mission of the organization, that “everybody should have equal access to that love, belonging and joy of being a family.”
She acknowledges where the fear mongering thought process comes from. Meg was raised in a conservative household that was not very supportive of people being out and proud as LGBTQ+. When she first came out, it was a hard concept for her family to grasp.
“I came from parents who believed that the best family structure is one man and one woman who are married and who have babies,” said Meg. “So I understand that mindset.”
As she and Jocelyn got married and had children, her parents saw how well-adjusted and happy they were.
“They were able to see that we love our children, and our children love us, and that our children are very loved and very wanted, very supported.”
As her parents grew to understand, they came around to a point where they’re actively supportive of Meg and her family.
Now that society has reached a point where technology can aid in family building, Meg finds herself at the forefront of the fight for family equality, and the crux of their mission is to advocate for the parentage laws to become more validating and streamlined and accessible.
“It’s such a shame that we live in a time that this is very [difficult].” said Meg. “But we’re so glad that we live in a time that this is possible.”
Even without having the personal experience of fighting for legal parentage herself, York was on the path to become an advocate for updating parentage laws to reflect the diversity of modern family structures. Her personal experience ended up fueling the motivation to pursue her advocacy mission.
York has been named in a list of the LGBTQ+ Bar Association’s Top 40 Lawyers Under 40. She currently sits as the director of the LGBTQ+ Family Law and Policy, at Family Equality.
She also subsequently carried their next two children, another little girl, Georgia in 2020 and their son Auden in 2021—both conceived through alternative methods of assisted reproductive technology. Because Vermont had updated its parentage laws in 2018 to reflect the diversity of ways families are formed today, Jocelyn and Meg were able to obtain parentage protections for Georgia and Auden with greater autonomy.
Pregnancy quelled any harbored feelings held during her wife’s pregnancy. She half-laughs and explains, “I remember being pregnant and thinking, Oh, this kind of sucks. Pregnancy is a lot, and maybe this was kind of better when [the baby] was just handed to me at the end of it.”
