This book provides a sociological anthropological analysis of how same-sex couples navigate family founding and disassembling and post-divorce parenting. Offering a collection of 20 personal accounts of lesbian and gay individuals describing how they partnered, became parents—through adoption, gamete donation, gestational surrogacy or co-parenthood—and eventually disassembled their families, the book explores how same-sex couples, in collaboration with relatives, friends, policymakers, and judges, form and transform their parenting while negotiating custody arrangements. Investigating how genetics, law and perpetuity are construed as the central pillars of post-separation same-sex parenting, chapters elucidate foundational issues that span a wide variety of families’ dynamics of adaptation. The book will be of interest to researchers in gender studies, politics and gender, family studies, family law, and social policy.

Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli is a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her main research interests are reproductive policy and health, focusing on the politics of genetics and assisted reproduction technologies and on their national significance and implications. More generally, Birenbaum-Carmeli is interested in the interface of gender, politics, ideology and health, also in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.