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At the same time as some gays and lesbians were fighting for domestic partnership recognition, others were demanding the right to create families through foster care and adoption. In the 1980s, social workers who were struggling to find homes for foster children increasingly turned to same-sex couples. Those placements proved controversial, leading several states to institute bans on gay and lesbian foster parenting. But the debates they generated helped to make queer families increasingly visible. Adoption out of foster care was only one way in which same-sex couples had children. In the 1980s, lesbian couples increasingly began forming families through donor insemination. To create a legal relationship between the nonbiological mother and the child, the couples petitioned courts to grant second-parent adoptions, analogizing their situations to stepparent adoptions. Over the course of the 1990s, courts increasingly authorized these types of adoptions, which helped entrench queer families in American life.

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4 - Adopting Change

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4 - Adopting Change

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