Queering the ‘biological clock:’ Age and family formation among LGBTQ+ parents

• In Event: LGBTQ+ Families

Abstract

LGBTQ+ people who want to become pregnant often intentionally seek conception. In doing so, they confront both cultural and medical pressures around the role of aging on their fertility, from the ticking “biological clock” to the impending “fertility cliff.” While age has long been associated with population-level fertility declines, most individual-level examinations focus on perceptions of the relationship between age and reproductive capacity, rather than how these perceptions shape reproductive behavior itself. Most also rely on heteronormative assumptions about the process of conception-seeking and exposure to the risk of pregnancy. In this paper, we examine the role of age in the reproductive decisions and practices of LGBTQ+ people who have sought pregnancy. LGBTQ+ people offer an ideal case to study reproductive decision-making as their experiences attempting conception are often intentional, discrete, and highly memorable life experiences that aid in detailed recollection after the fact. We thus draw on in-depth interviews with 57 people in the US who identify as LGBTQ+ and pair these rich qualitative data with an innovative dataset of their lifetime conception attempts (n=290) to trace the decisions, practices, and processes by which our participants sought pregnancy. We find that institutional and cultural discourse about age meaningfully shape the decisions of pregnancy-seeking LGBTQ+ people. Specifically, age influences not just the timing, but also the processes by which LGBTQ+ people attempt to conceive. We show that while cisheteropatriarchal norms around childbearing meaningfully structure perceptions about age, queer parents also creatively subvert dominant reproductive temporalities, queering the biological clock. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these findings for research on both age-patterns of fertility and lived experiences of LGBTQ+ family formation.

Authors

• Katherine Sobering, University of North Texas

• Amanda Jean Stevenson, University of Colorado-Boulder