In my neighborhood is a partnership of a lesbian couple and a gay male couple, who combined their genes in the typical way and all four are raising a child together. Double gay and procreating! Frankly, having four parents has to be a lot less stressful on the family. Spread that responsibility around.

I know a couple-couple like that too. They live next door to each other and have now had two children together, although I can't remember how the biological labour was divided.

Four parents would certainly help when it's time to pay for college!

I'll accept their reasoning when fertility tests become part of the legal requirement for marriage. Otherwise, what's the point? (Do I need to add a sarcasm tag? I think it can be assumed.)

And Hec reminds me now that of my friends who have recently procreated, several are gay couples. (One is the minister of our church, btw, who was married in the church. Even when religious reasons are cited for why this is so wrong, wrong, wrong, it's important to remember that there is far from consensus on this issue, even within a particular faith.)

In addition to the predictable reaction of Huh!!??!! to the whole 'because it doesn't help the survival of the species' argument against Gay Marriage, I must need register my amusement that the intereview in question took place in a Darwin radio station.

Statistics have shown that the more education a woman has, the later she marries and the fewer children she has. So all these worried countries should stop allowing their females to waste their fertile years in college and building a career, and get them breeding as soon as possible, though only if they're already married, and if they're single, they better somehow manage to bring in enough money for themselves.

And yeah, legalizing gay marriage could help raise childbirth rates, since one of the things that keeps some gay couples from having children is the difficulty of arranging health care, insurance, legal custody, etc. since legally they're two single adults. If they didn't have to worry about second parent adoption, and they could get their man-in-a-can paid for the way heterosexual couples get some of their fertility drugs for free, there could be a lot more babies born.

I thought man-in-a-can was always out of pocket?

It's not like homosexuality is a medical problem like infertility.

A homosexual couple cannot produce a child through sex, usually. That pretty much means they're infertile, it's just that they know it starting out. It's like if a male-to-female transsexual married a man, there'd be fertility issues. Or if a couple married after the woman had had a hysterectomy or he'd been castrated.

And man-in-a-can for het couples that have a problem on the male side can get it covered by insurance since it's considered a plain old fertility problem if he's shooting blanks. So if someone wanted to shack up with a male vampire, they'd just have to make sure they had a good insurance policy if they wanted kids.

Can couples be infertile if both people in it are fertile (do we use "fertile" for men? what should I be saying?)?

It seems a muddling of the term.

For the record, I don't think couples get pregnant either. The woman gets pregnant. The man gets her pregnant. The couple may be expecting (an addition to the family), but it's something shy of dyad pregnancy.

There are heterosexual couples who both test out as medically fertile, yet are unable to concieve a child together. (And yeah, it is the woman who does all the gestating, but I'm so used to all the "we're pregnant" "shared experience" couples that I know, that it seems a natural method of wording.) And while in a medical sense, both members of a gay couple are fertile, they're still unable to have a child without outside help - something that a fertile couple doesn't have to deal with.