Science Says: Gay Parents are Better than Straight Parents

Written By Bryan McColgan, MD

It’s time for the BabyMoon Family journal club. In the medical world, journal clubs are a way for physicians to read, analyze, and discuss a new piece of scientific literature. I’m thrilled to bring this practice to the BabyMoon Family community, and there is a perfect publication with which to inaugurate the club.

On November 2, 2023, the journal Family Process published the article, European gay fathers via surrogacy: Parenting, social support, anti-gay microaggressions, and child behavior problems (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/famp.12950). The article was written by researchers from the University of Pavia in Italy, which I initially thought as problematic given how the Italian government is trying to make surrogacy done anywhere in the world illegal, as well as enact a number of other anti-LGBTQ+ family policies that I covered in a previous BabyMoon Family article (https://www.babymoonfamily.com/original-articles/italy-attacks-surrogacy-rainbow-families and https://medium.com/@babymoonfamily/why-every-lgbtq-person-especially-intended-parents-ips-should-be-furious-at-italy-right-now-cfb8a4382532).

However, the authors are not fueling the flames of the Italian government’s prejudice, but rather aiming to bring rationale, scientific evidence to the forefront of the discussion, as they write in this article’s introduction:

“We hoped to produce evidence that might dispel prejudice and discrimination against gay fathers via surrogacy among social policymakers, as well as to provide useful, empirically-based insights for clinicians interacting with gay father families.”

So with this scientific and enlightened perspective, what did the authors aim to study? How did they go about it? Was the study well-designed? What were the results and limitations of the study? What are the conclusions?

Not to bury the lead, but the results were pretty fantastic for gay parents, who essentially out performed straight parents in every aspect of parenting, child well-being, relationship, and family dynamics.

However, let’s do this journal club style and go through the paper, reviewing each section of the manuscript.

Introduction

The introduction does a good job of setting the landscape for surrogacy for gay men in Europe. It’s a complex patchwork of regulations that vary among the countries and often force men to journey to the United States or Canada, creating emotional and economic challenges.

In terms of previous research, the article does a good job summarizing and comparing previous studies in the U.S., Australia, Israel, and Italy that showed children in families of gay men develop similarly to children raised in mother-father families.

The current study aimed to study a number of different behavioral areas in order to get a complete picture of the family health and dynamics.

  • Health of the children through evaluation of their internalizing (i.e. anxiety, depression, social withdrawal) and externalizing (i.e. aggression, rule-breaking) problems.

  • Parenting styles, including analysis of the degree to which parents were either authoritative (i.e. firm but fair), authoritarian (i.e. strict), or permissive (i.e. lackadaisical).

  • Coparenting approach of division of parenting labor (i.e. “Who does what?”), and satisfaction with that division.

  • Couple relationship happiness.

  • Stigmatization and microaggressions experienced by the gay couples for their sexual orientation and family composition.

  • Social support through family, friends, and chosen family.

  • The relationships and impact of these different areas on each other.

The authors hypothesized that there would be no significant differences between the groups in terms of the health of the children, but they did anticipate that family interactions would affect child behavior more than family composition. They also hypothesized that gay parents would be negatively affected by stigma and microaggressions.

Methods

The study population included 67 gay fathers (one from each family) and 67 heterosexual parents (one from each family, 62 of whom were mothers). The parent who identified as the primary caregiver completed the questionnaires, and where parents shared parenting responsibilities equally and spent equal time with the child, they were asked to flip a coin to determine who would complete the questionnaires.

At the start of the study, there were some significant differences between the parents:

  • Gay fathers were older.

  • Gay fathers were more highly educated.

  • Gay fathers had higher yearly incomes.

  • Gay fathers lived primarily in France and Spain, while straight parents lived more in Switzerland and Luxembourg. (In total, 11 European countries were represented across both groups).

Importantly, the study used well-validated, widely used questionnaires and other instruments to objectively measure the children’s health, parenting styles, coparenting responsibilities, relationship satisfaction, stigma, and social support. This allows the results to have a higher external validity and application to gay parents more widely given the reproducibility and objective nature of the design.

Results

Not to be too biased, but the results were fantastic for gay fathers.

There are a number of great tables in the paper that provide all the detailed results and analyses.

In summary, gay fathers performed better in all areas:

  • Gay fathers reported fewer externalizing problems and fewer internalizing problems in their children relative to straight parents.

  • Gay fathers reported greater positive coparenting, more equal sharing of childcare tasks, and greater satisfaction with task sharing, compared to straight parents.

  • Gay fathers showed greater authoritative parenting, lower permissive parenting, and greater couple relationship satisfaction than straight parents.

So, gay fathers win (at least in this particular study), but why they won and the limitations of the study are a critical component of the discussion section of the article.

Discussion

The authors elaborate on some possible explanations for why gay fathers outperformed their straight counterparts.

“Whereas some children born to heterosexual parents are conceived by accident, children of gay male parents via surrogacy are always planned, wanted, and the result of a long, complex, expensive journey marked by sustained effort and sometimes many challenges (linked to fathers’ families of origin, friends, and colleagues). The surrogacy journey also requires gay fathers to spend significant time with the surrogacy agency, surrogate, surrogate’s husband/partner, psychologists, physicians, case workers, and attorneys. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that gay parents who pursue this pathway to parenthood are extremely motivated to have children, financially successful, and capable of bringing complex plans to fruition.”

  • Gay fathers may have stronger and more stable relationships given the arduous task they have as a couple in having a child through surrogacy.

  • Given the significant difference in education and yearly income between the groups, gay fathers may benefit from a more favorable financial environment, which has been shown to be associated with fewer child behavior problems.

  • Gay fathers (and lesbian mothers) may be less likely to conform to traditional gender roles and more likely to be voluntarily involved in child caregiving and to coparent more equitably.

The study’s limitations are important to discuss, as there are some aspects that could have affected the results and can be considered for future research:

  • The geographical representations across Europe were not controlled between the groups, so other cultural or social elements could have impacted the results.

  • The socioeconomic elevation of the gay fathers, but the authors admit that this is a likely an unavoidable limitation for this type of research. Because of the high cost of surrogacy, it is not possible to find a large sample of gay fathers via surrogacy whose education levels and incomes match those of straight parents.

  • The straight primary caregivers in the present study were typically mothers, so the ‘parenting’ results for straight couples is more ‘mothering’ results. However, this is representative of the current social climate and so still feels broadly applicable.

  • The study did not include straight couples who used surrogacy, but the authors acknowledge that this is not an ‘apples for apples’ comparison. Straight couples view surrogacy as ‘last resort’ full of feelings of fertility shame and failure, while gay couples have only positive associations with the process given the nature of their reproductive limitations.

As with all scientific research, the sample sizes could always be larger in order to have even more confidence with the results, but the authors confirm that the size of the study population did allow for large and medium effects or differences to be measured by the statistical modeling.

Conclusions

Interestingly, the author’s disproved part of their own hypothesis in that they anticipated that the gay parents would perform the same as the straight ones. Given that they performed significantly better in all metrics, the results completely refute concerns about the psychological adjustment of children raised by gay fathers, and that prohibitions against surrogacy for gay males seem entirely based on prejudice, with no basis in social science research.

It should not be missed that while gay fathers and their children performed exceptionally well, they were impacted negatively by stigma and microaggressions, so there are social changes that need to continue to evolve to make the world truly healthy for all rainbow families.

However, this research is an incredible step in the direction of truth, and I hope it will contribute to regulations and policies that allow for gay men to continue to have children, in Europe and all over the world.

Bryan McColgan, MD
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