One in five lesbian couples have kids

It’s official: There is a lesbian baby boom.

A report released on Tuesday by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found 20 percent of lesbian households and five percent of gay households included children.

Gay and lesbian households made up just 0.5 percent of Australian families, the study found.

The study’s author, David de Vaus, said most of the children were from previous heterosexual relationships, but new reproductive technologies were making it easier for women in same-sex relationships to have babies.

Increasingly, lesbian couples are making use of assisted reproductive technologies to have children as a couple, he told The Age.

Society’s attitudes about what constituted a family were also changing, de Vaus said, with more people likely to recognise a same-sex couple with children as a family unit.

The study’s data did not include single lesbians or gay men with children.

The Diversity And Change In Australian Families study also found the number of couple families was rising and so was the number of people living alone. And less than half of Australian families fit into the two married parents with children structure.

Meantime, a US judge has ruled both the biological mother and her former partner are legal parents of a two-year-old child, The Advocate reports.

The couple were involved in a custody dispute following the dissolution of their civil union. The case has been heard in two states.

In a previous hearing, a Virginia judge ruled the biological mother’s former partner was no more than a friend of the child. A Vermont judge disagreed, saying the former partner should be treated the same as an infertile father whose partner had conceived by artificial insemination.