“I Have Never Slept with a Man, and There Is No Star Rising in the East”: Lesbians, Bisexual Women, and Pregnancy Before Insemination

The National Lesbian Health Care Survey (NLHCS) was the first major survey of lesbian and bisexual women's health and mental health, and was conducted in 1984–1985 with 1,927 participants from all U.S. states and several territories. The NLHCS included an open-ended item, about what had prevented respondents from becoming pregnant, that was never transcribed or analyzed, yet that reflected historical trends of that time. The survey was conducted immediately prior to the era when donor insemination was becoming available to lesbians and bisexual women in some urban clinics. Many respondents at the time wrote that they could not have children without heterosexual intercourse, feared losing custody of children in a homophobic or biphobic society, or knew that their family of origin or society in general would not accept their children. This article examines themes about lesbians, bisexual women, and pregnancy from this time period.