Family formation among sexual minorities: a cross-country perspective on desires and outcomes

Lin Rouvroye, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute
Maaike van der Vleuten , Netherlands Interdisciplinary demographic institute
Yuxuan Jin, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute

Within the scientific research community, there is a rapidly expanding awareness of sexual orientation as an important demographic characteristic shaping people’s life course. For sexual minorities, the road to parenthood is often complex. They must navigate restrictive institutional frameworks, discriminatory legal systems, and social stigma about whether they should become parents at all, while also facing lengthy and costly procedures to do so. These structural and normative barriers shape not only people’s ability to have children but also their desires around family formation. Existing research on family formation among sexual minorities has largely focused on same-sex couples and is limited to single-country analyses. Consequently, we know little about family formation desires among single sexual-minority individuals or those in different-sex relationships. How ideal family size as well as the gap between ideal and actual family size among sexual minorities varies across national contexts is also understudied. We use representative data from the second round of the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS-II) to study ideal family size and actual family among people of different sexual orientations (i.e. heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual) across multiple European countries. Preliminary results for Norway and Estonia show that, similar to heterosexuals, sexual minorities expressed a two-child ideal, especially in Norway. Moreover, the gap between actual and ideal family size between heterosexual and non-heterosexual individuals was smaller in Norway than in Estonia. These findings support our expectation that societal and legal contexts shape ideal family sizes as well as the extent to which these ideals can be realized.

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 Presented in Session 72. LGBTQIA+ Life Course Transitions and Trajectories