What has sex got to do with family law?

Law’s involvement in our intimate lives can have the effect of normalising and validating certain practices of intimacy and intimate relationships, whilst devaluing others. This workshop contribution discusses aspects of a small-scale qualitative study that explores same-sex parenting and the law following assisted reproduction involving both biological parents. In the study, a range of practices emerged around conception in female couples ranging from clinical involvement to highly sexualised home insemination and sexual intercourse. Following conception, a number of parenting arrangements also existed, some of which involved multiple parents, even though there was not necessarily an intimate sexual connection between them. The legal framework is not, however, sufficiently nuanced to accommodate this range of experience. Legal analysis of these issues may fail to capture the relevance and impact of this on how individuals experience intimacy and express their sexuality. This begs the question, therefore, how insights from research into sex and sexualities in other disciplines might be brought to bear to help us understand expressions of sexuality and intimacy in the context of the reproductive choices that LGBT individuals make and how the law regulates this.