A Southern Living feature celebrating the pregnancy of lesbian influencers Lunden and Olivia Stallings has set off a wider public argument over whether intentionally conceiving a child without a father deserves the same scrutiny as fatherlessness caused by abandonment.
The magazine profile, which the couple’s followers have embraced, showed the two women in pastel dresses posing with a sonogram and a wicker bassinet ahead of the arrival of a baby girl. A commentary published by The Federalist called the shoot an attempt to normalize what the piece termed “designer fatherlessness” — a child conceived by design without any path to knowing her biological father.
The essay’s author posted a screenshot of the photo shoot online and asked whether society is willing to hold women accountable for deliberately creating a fatherless child, or whether such scrutiny is reserved for gay male couples who have faced criticism for surrogacy arrangements. The post reportedly drew several thousand comments across platforms.
An Old Bipartisan Consensus
The debate revives a theme that once had broad political backing. On Father’s Day 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama told a Chicago congregation that “we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation” of family life, a message he later built into White House fatherhood initiatives during his presidency.
The Federalist commentary argues that same standard should apply regardless of the sex of the parents involved, and that the discussion has divided along different lines depending on whether it’s two men or two women pursuing parenthood without a father in the home.
What Donor-Conceived Adults Report
The piece cites data from what it describes as the largest study of donor-conceived adults, which found that 65 percent agreed with the statement “my sperm donor is half of who I am.” Nearly half of respondents said they think about their conception at least a few times a week, 70 percent said they wonder what their donor’s family is like, and 69 percent said they wonder whether the donor’s parents would want to know them. Forty-five percent said the circumstances of their conception bother them, and a similar share said they were bothered that money was exchanged to conceive them.
The study also found that 48 percent of donor-conceived adults feel sad when they see friends with both biological parents, compared with 19 percent of adopted adults who reported the same feeling. Fifty-three percent said it hurts when others discuss their genealogical background, compared with 29 percent of adopted adults.
One donor-conceived woman quoted in the piece, identified only as Ellie, described the experience this way:
“There isn’t a handbook on how to rebuild your sense of self when you discover that your non-identifiable father sold you.”
The Argument’s Core Claim
The Federalist commentary contends that a child’s loss is the same whether a father abandons his family or was never permitted into it in the first place — the difference, it argues, is only who caused the absence. It rejects the idea that love from two mothers can substitute for a father, and argues that objections calling the position discriminatory miss the point, since the argument applies equally to any arrangement, gay or straight, that deprives a child of a father by design.
The piece concludes that consistency, not exceptions based on the sex of the adults involved, should guide how the public judges intentional fatherlessness.
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