How To Protect An Unconventional Family In The Age Of Trump

How to protect an unconventional family in the age of Trump

- Nicole Pasulka

For several years, friends Megan Hessenthaler and Sully Ross lived on a boat in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, played in a punk rock marching band, and joked about having a baby together. They’re queer, so they would crack up thinking about Ross providing the sperm for artificial insemination and taking on the name “Uncle Daddy.”

Then the joke got real. They lost their boat. Hessenthaler got married, and she and her wife, Heather Sommerville, did, in fact, want Ross to help them have a baby. “We had to talk about it like a real thing,” Hessenthaler says.

In recent decades, America has come to look more like Modern Family than Leave It to Beaver. The number of unmarried couples living together increased by 61 percent between 2005 and 2016, and more than half the nation’s kids are no longer raised in households headed by a heterosexual couple in their first marriage. Most of our family law, though, is still written for the Cleavers. The Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision gave millions of gay couples the right to marry, but it didn’t do much for a single lesbian having kids with her best friend or for sperm donors who want contact with their progeny. The Trump administration’s efforts to undermine Obama-era LGBT protections have put nontraditional families further on alert.

Which is why Hessenthaler, Sommerville, and Ross decided to sit down and puzzle out the details—visitation, financial responsibilities, what would happen if Hessenthaler miscarried—and codify them in a contract called a “known-donor agreement.”