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A given female cast member is gay and has entered into a long-term relationship with another woman. At some point, their biological clock will go off, and a pregnancy storyline will begin since they only want biological kids.

A great deal of attention will be paid to what is a relatively easy and minor part of the process: the lesbian couple's quest to find sperm. Sperm banks and adoption will almost never be seriously discussed. The TV lesbians will instead try to get sperm from the men in their life, be he a close friend, in-law, or random passerby and a truly improbable number will even opt for an "old-fashioned" impregnation with the sperm donor. If one can't be found, expect the lesbian couple go to increasingly unlikely, embarrassing, and even illegal ends to acquire one. Expect some variation on a joke involving turkey basters.

May lead to Homosexual Reproduction.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Vandread has a curious variation on this: set in the far future, the male and female crew of a colonization mission got into a dispute and split up, resulting in one planet in the system populated entirely by males, the other entirely by females. Generations later, both planets rely on genetic engineering to reproduce. For the all-female planet Majere, two women pair off, and they have their egg cells spliced together in a lab, and the resulting embryo is implanted in one of them who carries the fetus to term. So while the lesbian characters do want to "get pregnant" on the show, many times they just do this with each other, skipping the "we need a sperm donor" step. Zigzagged with Jura, who spends most of the series trying to seduce Hibiki. Jura is in a committed lesbian relationship with Barnette, but Jura is only trying to seduce Hibiki for the specific purpose of using him as a sperm donor: her logic being that if she's the first woman from her planet in generations to conceive a child with a male, it will make her a global celebrity.

    Comic Books 
  • In the Marvel Comics 2 universe, Felicia Hardy (formerly the Black Cat) lives with a woman called Diana and her daughter Felicity (fathered by Felicia's ex-husband Flash Thompson); however Felicity was apparently already a teenager when Felicia fell in love with Diana.
  • Played with in a back-up strip in the Rivers of London comic, where a horrific monster that wipes out the main cast turns out to be three kids, who turn out to be All Just a Dream of lesbian police officer Stephanopoulos. Upon waking, she dumps the adoption book she fell asleep reading in the bin.
  • In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (1989) series, there is the lesbian couple of Hazel and Foxglove. Hazel becomes pregnant in A Game of You after a bicurious one-night-stand with a gay friend, is shown pregnant in the mini-series Death: The High Cost of Living and strikes a deal with Death in Death: The Time of Your Life to save the life of her son Alvie.
  • Averted with Scandal Savage in Secret Six, her dad Vandal Savage wants a grandchild which she point-blank refuses to give him because she suspects with good reason he just wants an organ donor. A few series later, when Vandal is not pushing it hard she's in a committed relationship with two woman, she's more interested in the concept.
  • In the Gail Simone run on Wonder Woman Volume 3, specifically The Circle: all the women of the Amazon society of Themyscira are reincarnations of women who were murdered in their previous lives, many of whom were mothers. However, due to now existing under the Immortal Procreation Clause, they are unable to have children but still maintain the strong maternal instincts from their prior lives. As a coping mechanism, several women carried wooden dolls called whittle babies; unfortunately, one woman just cracks from it all, she starts believing that the doll is her literal baby, forcing Hippolyta's personal guards to kill her. Further, the Circle look upon Hippolyta having Diana after literal divine intervention as a curse that would lead to Amazon society being ripped apart by envy. This was forwarded most of all by Alkyone, head of the Circle and a very fervent protector of what she perceives as Amazon culture. She eventually decides to try and kill baby Diana and later her as an adult (where, in a fit of grand irony, it's revealed that Alkyone herself suffered from the same sort of envy she warned about.)
  • In the X-Men books, Mystique and Destiny were lovers for more than half a century, but during periods when they were for various reasons separated, both had children fathered by transient male partners. Mystique abandons her sons Kurt Wagner (aka Nightcrawler) and Graydon Creed with a degree of callousness, the former to save her own life from a lynch mob, the latter because at puberty he disappointingly turns out to be not a mutant. Mystique and Destiny eventually become a happy nuclear family with their adopted daughter Rogue (who however subverts the trope because she is no longer a baby when Raven and Irene adopt her).

    Comic Strips 
  • In another similarly Cast Full of Gay comic strip Chelsea Boys a lesbian couple asks Nathan to donate sperm but despite him being gay they for some reason want to conceive "naturally" with actual sex, which is achieved with Viagra, a gay porn playing, a Brad Pitt mask and the other partner pegging him.
  • Dykes to Watch Out For:
    • Dealt with, but as it is a Cast Full of Gay, there are many characters who don't want kids, and indeed the fact that Toni and Clarice want a conventional life with kids does irk the uber-principled Mo.
    • There is also her ex-girlfriend Harriet who becomes pregnant through sperm donation while single, and later Ginger (and later Lois, who had earlier said that she has the maternal instincts of a doorknob) dates Jasmine who has a transgender son. Lois' quote is straight from the author herself in The Indelible Alison Bechdel, and she's gone on record as saying this is exactly why Toni is the hardest to write for.
    • When Toni was pregnant with Raffi, other characters commented:
      "It used to be being a lesbian got you out of having to have kids. Now ever since my mama saw lesbian mothers on Oprah, I've been up to my eyeballs in clippings about sperm banks."
    • Actually lampshaded in a museum scene that has an endangered exhibit of Mo herself with the title "Childless North American Lesbian (dykus undomesticus)".

    Fan Works 
  • Beautiful Monster: Averted in Betty and Harriet's case, especially since Betty has enough issues as is stemming from her terrible childhood and she decides to get an abortion after she's raped during her evening jog.
  • In The Queen's Mercy, a nobleman proposes marriage to Elsa, pointing out that she cannot produce an heir with another woman. Elsa briefly feels a twinge of Angst over this and talks about the idea of raising a family with Anna, deciding to adopt one day.
  • In Teach Me, after Elsa's ex-girlfriend Emma dumped her as she was proposing to her, Elsa came to the realization that she didn't need to be married to start a family. She got pregnant on her first in vitro session and had Olaf.
  • Zigzagged in The Why We Fall Apart Blake and Yang are a bisexual example: Blake wanted to start a family with Yang, but Yang wanted to focus on her huntress career and this ended up being the primary reason they broke up. Years later however, Yang has had a long and distinguished career and feels ready to start a family, but Blake has already moved on and married Sun, so Yang is forced to look elsewhere for a partner. (The title of the fic isn't about them; the break up was perfectly amicable).
  • The whole plot of With You is centered on a happily married Elsa and Anna having a baby.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The mockumentary The Baby Formula about two lesbians who actually get pregnant through stem cell research. Fun fact: The movie was filmed during both actresses' actual pregnancies.
  • Badhaai Do: Lesbians Sumi and Rimjhim really want a child. Rimjhim asks why Sumi doesn't conceive with her (gay) husband Shardul, but Sumi stresses that she wants to adopt. Shardul even agrees since it will satisfy his family's desire for a kid. They get their wish in the end, with Shardul and Sumi's marriage on the adoption papers, but the film makes it clear Rimjhim will also be a mother to the baby.
  • Really, within seconds of the lesbian couple in The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy entering onscreen you can guess what their "drama" will be. Since the lesbians are Dennis' sister Anne and her partner Leslie, the couple's idea is for him to donate sperm to impregnate Leslie, so that their child is biologically related to both of them. The irony of this is that Dennis and Leslie completely loathe each other.
  • Clock: The very pregnant Shauna is tired of hearing her friend Ella go on about how a desire for babies is not natural for her. She points out that all Ella Ella has to do is spread her legs to get pregnant from her husband, while Shauna and her wife Fi had to struggle to make her pregnancy happen.
  • Entre Nous (2021): Elodie is resistant to the idea of having a baby at first when her stepfather Roity encourages her to, though she comes around on the idea. She and her fiancĆ©e Laetitia agree they'd like one, but Elodie has a heart condition which makes it very dangerous. Laetitia says she can have the baby, rejecting the idea of adoption as she really wants to experience being pregnant. She later gets pregnant due to a tryst with Simon (she's bisexual), and while they're getting over Laetitia's cheating they decide on keeping it. Tragically, she later loses the baby due to being beaten by Simon after he's coerced Laetitia into being with him.
  • The film I Can't Think Straight ends with Leyla informing Tala that they must have children. She seems to want this primarily as a means of compromising with her family, who are not 100% happy with her being gay. The real women this is based on had two sons.
  • The villains of Pink Flamingos kidnap women, impregnate them, and sell the babies to lesbians.
  • Spike Lee's She Hate Me exaggerates the trope in all its clichĆ©d glory. Big time. Basically, a story about a Chick Magnet straight donor who has to give his semen to a bunch of lesbians who pay him in return. And he and his gigantic... sperm bank... bring every one of them to orgasm. Roger Ebert's review theorizes that the film was a Stealth Parody, given Lee's reputation and the over-the-top offense.
  • Summerland (2020): Vera left Alice over her desire to have children, marrying a man so she could become a mother. Alice was left alone and unhappy after that. However, they get back together. Alice then becomes a second mother for Vera's son Frank.
  • This formed part of the plot impetus for the film Under the Tuscan Sun. The protagonist's friends had booked a tour of Italy but gave the tickets to her when their artificial insemination was successful.

    Literature 
  • Change Room: Shar's ex-girlfriend Giselle really wanted kids, while Shar had no desire for them. Giselle thought she'd simply come around and be happy having them together even so. Since this wasn't the case, Shar ended their relationship.
  • Heralds of Valdemar:
    • Somewhere offscreen in the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, Herald Vanyel fathered a child on one of a lesbian couple who were friends of his, though as an exceedingly busy person without particular interest in fatherhood he didn't keep much contact with little Arven. Notably, despite being gay Vanyel performs this service for three sets of friends: two women, two men (with the help of a willing female surrogate), and for the mistress of a king who couldn't afford to be seen as infertile.
    • In Vows and Honor (set hundreds of years later) Tarma and Kethry are good friends with another lesbian couple who both went and got pregnant at the same time and gave birth at just about the same time too.
  • Leslea Newman's short story Mothers of Invention deals with this, with a bit of a subversion—the narrator herself is pretty ambivalent about having children at all, and mostly goes along with it to please her partner.
  • Presidential: Sutton, Emily's sister, is a lesbian like her and she chooses to have a baby with her wife Rebecca. Emily is overjoyed and ecstatic for them.
  • Averted in Rangers At Roadsend by Jane Fletcher. Due to magic/technology that makes it possible to impress the genetic information of one woman onto the ovum of another woman, Homosexual Reproduction is not a big deal and a sperm donor is not needed. There are plenty of lesbians who don't want kids, too.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In the Spanish Dramedy AquĆ­ no hay quien viva Bea has a kid after being inseminated with Mauri's (a gay man) sperm.
  • Avocado Toast: Rosie, the main lesbian character, is having a baby and she's heavily pregnant when the series starts. She's had her baby, a boy, in Season 2.
  • The Bisexual: Leila and Sadie had been looking into having children during their relationship (but with some reluctance on Leila's part, before they broke up, while she turns out to also be bisexual). Afterward though it's shown that Sadie is still looking into sperm donors.
  • The HBO series Bored to Death features a storyline about a lesbian couple who hit up one of the male main characters for sperm in a coffee shop. Like you do. When he obliges, they turn around and sell his sperm on the black market to all the other lesbians in the neighborhood, all of whom are also desperate to reproduce.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • This has been averted with Willow, despite having been in two long-term relationships.
    • It's brought up again in Season 8 when a run-in with Willow's ex-boyfriend Oz shows that he now has a child. Willow is upset; Oz assumes it's because of this trope and tells her there are ways for her to have a child. She reveals that her anger has nothing to do with him having a child but rather that he's allowed to have a normal future, while she can't when she is one of the top people in the Slayer organization and a sorceress supreme with much inner-darkness.
  • This seems to be the catalyst for the breakup between Caitlin and Alicia on the cancelled Sex and the City clone Cashmere Mafia.
  • A recurring subplot throughout Chicago Fire's first season is paramedic Leslie Shay's quest for a child of her own. At one point, unable to afford artificial insemination, she's desperate enough to ask her best friend Kelly Severide to impregnate her the natural way.
  • Fiona "Tosh" Mackintosh in EastEnders was desperate for a baby. Her partner Tina wasn't quite so eager, leading Tosh to violently take it out on her.
  • A chapter of textbook example of this trope is played straight in ER with Dr. Kerry Weaver and her firefighter girlfriend complete with custody battles, melodrama, and death. It should be noted, however, that Kerry was shown to love children and have a strong maternal instinct from her very first appearance, long before she realised she was lesbian.
  • FlashForward (2009)
    • Played with when Janice, a lesbian, quite bluntly says she does not want kids, but is pregnant in her vision of the future.
    • Played straight later, however, when after getting shot, she becomes obsessed with getting pregnant to the point of sleeping with her male best friend Dimitri to conceive the baby on time (there was a sort of deadline... yeah, it's a bit confusing). Moreover, said best friend is actually in a committed relationship... that he doesn't seem to remember when offering to impregnate Janice.
  • Averted in Friends, as Susan fell in love with Carol independently of her getting pregnant by her then-husband, Ross.
  • In Hannibal, Margot and her bi girlfriend Alana steal sperm from Margot's brother so Alana can become pregnant and they can raise the child together as the (male) heir to Margot's family business. Earlier in the show, lesbian Margot has sex with a man for the same purpose (it doesn't work out).
  • The only recurring lesbian couple in How I Met Your Mother are an example of this trope. But on the other hand, everyone wants kids on this show... except Robin, of course (and she can't have any anyway).
  • If These Walls Could Talk 2. In the segment 2000, Fran (Sharon Stone) and Kal (Ellen DeGeneres) decide to have a baby together. A turkey baster is involved.
  • Unsurprisingly in a show with a Cast Full of Gay, The L Word covered this topic, but with only one of the many couples - Tina and Bette. When Helena is introduced, she bonds with Tina over motherhood, but her children are Put on a Bus after season two.
  • Addressed in a rather unusual way in the otherwise LGBT shot Metrosexuality. Cindy, Max's sister who's a lesbian, is framed as your usual baby-crazed lesbian whereas her girlfriend Doris, while happy with the kids, never really intended to have kids. When Cindy complains that now their life is quite boring, Doris points out that Cindy was the one to want kids, not her, partially because she feared that it would happen.
  • In New Girl, the recurring lesbian couple (and the only lesbians on the show) are the only ones to get pregnant, though their pregnancy does alert the rest of the female cast to their biological clock as well.
  • In NYPD Blue, Det. Abbey Sullivan and her partner got Det. Greg Medevoy to donate his sperm.
  • Played with in One Big Happy. Lizzy plays it straight. Her ex Erica is surprised at first but warms up to it in an attempt to get Lizzy to come back to her. Kate doesn't mind the kid part, but still can't date Lizzy because she's her nurse and that'd violate protocol.
  • Puppets Who Kill had a woman who seduced Buttons and brought him back to her apartment for what he assumed to be sex. Instead, she and her girlfriend hooked his crotch up to a vacuum-like device they had built to suck out his sperm. Naturally this process was purposely very painful in order to play up the other stereotype about lesbians.
  • Referenced in QI episode "Holidays", when Rob Brydon jokes that "a family runaround with an excellent safety record" would be a much better slang word for lesbian than "dyke."note 
  • Queer as Folk (US):
    • The token lesbians decide to have a baby; naturally they select their friend, gay man Brian, to be the biological father, which seems a bit less insane once you think about that part of the plot was based on the British version, where Brian's counterpart is more of a nymphomaniac Manchild than Jerkass Brian.
    • Later, in the third season, said token lesbians (Lindsay and Melanie) decide to have another child together. They select another friend, Michael, to be the baby's biological father, and, in a remarkably strange way of going about it, Lindsay actually uses a turkey baster to impregnate Melanie.
  • Parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch about Cherry Grove, a fictional Distaff Counterpart of the reality show Fire Island. Fire Island is about six gay men sharing a beach house, while Cherry Grove is about five lesbians doing the same. In the first scene, the women are all cradling babies.
  • Single Drunk Female: Olivia and Stephanie, the show's lesbians (a married couple) are trying to have a baby via IVF in Season 1. It turns out this worked, as Olivia is pregnant by Season 2.
  • In Station 19, Carina wants to have a child with Maya. Maya is reluctant at first, but then warms up to the idea, even going so far as to ask Jack to be their sperm donor—who Maya previously cheated on Carina with.
  • Averted in Supergirl (2015) with Maggie, who really doesn't see herself as a mother, possibly because her own childhood was crappy (her family kicked her out after finding out about her sexual orientation). This ends up driving a wedge between her and Alex, as Alex desperately wants kids and knows that Maggie will never change her mind. They do end up parting ways as Amicable Exes.
  • Two examples that exist on opposite ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism when it comes to the custody aspect are What Makes a Family and Two Mothers for Zachary respectively, the latter being based on a real-life case.
  • Played with in The Wire: while her partner Cheryl avidly wanted a baby, Kima was initially unenthusiastic, and the baby is one of the many things that ends up coming between the two. The idea of being a mother eventually grows on her, and she ends up getting more involved in their son's life in season five.
  • In an episode of Without a Trace, an unknowing pair of women assumed to be a lesbian couple finally receiving a baby to adopt have said baby taken away from them as it was the missing person of that episode - they didn't kidnap it, they were just caught up in a conspiracy.

    Video Games 
  • Not for Broadcast: Megan and her wife Kate have been trying for a child for a long time. She takes the news that Advance have spiked the water supply with anti-fertility drugs in an attempt at population control spectacularly poorly.
  • Defied in The Outer Worlds, where Junlei Tennyson states that she will be the last Tennyson to captain the Groundbreaker since she has no desire for children, meaning that she will have to look for and train successors from elsewhere.

    Webcomics 

  • Alluded to in El Goonish Shive. Nanase mentions to her girlfriend Ellen that she thinks she'd like to have a couple of kids someday. Ellen then points out that they have access to Gender Bender technology that was specifically designed for situations like this (albeit by an alien species with a very different view of gender). Nanase is both comforted and creeped out by the thought, particularly since in order to use said technology, they'd have to go through her Chivalrous Pervert cousin, Tedd.
  • Most of the women in Part 1 of Ennui GO! are bisexual, but it's the three lesbians that either express a desire for kids (Darcy) or already had one by the time the comic started (Adelie and Bella). By the time of Part 2, most of the other women are also shown to be pregnant, but it's unclear if they actively wanted kids or if it was just a consequence of the fact that Everybody Has Lots of Sex.
  • Shortpacked! has an odd version due to its sci-fi elements: Leslie and Robin decide to have kids and consult Joe about some form of Homosexual Reproduction. He devises a way that can make a man's sperm carry one of their DNA to impregnate the other. (He may have gotten this idea from Justice League Unlimited.) He notes that while they could certainly do this "the fun way," they could also just have whatever man they choose to donate sperm. (The usual turkey baster joke is replaced by a Super Soaker.) The couple asks their gay friend Ethan to allow his DNA to be overwritten with Leslie's and Robin carries the resulting triplets to term (which, thanks to her Super-Speed, happens in one month).
    Robin: Just make sure you keep an eye where you're pointin' that thing so that in nine months you don't give birth to yourself.

    Western Animation 
  • American Dad! had an episode about gay adoption that featured homosexuals of both genders wanting kids. However, the episode's climax involved Stan kidnapping two children from their lesbian mothers.
    • He also kidnapped the male couple's child. The lesbian couple tries to get him to give her back by showing that gay couples can have a loving normal family.
  • In the Family Guy episode where Peter gets a vasectomy, he goes to the sperm bank just in case he and Lois decide to have another child down the line. While there, he accidentally spills all the sperm samples and refills them with his own. Shortly thereafter, a lesbian couple arrives to get a specimen so one of them can conceive. Months later, Bertram is born.
  • Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World:
    • Played straight, if very much for laughs. Dana and Kirsten, the show's token lesbian couple, announce their plans to conceive in the pilot episode, and every one of their stories in subsequent episodes revolves around wacky sperm-seeking hijinks, pregnancy, and motherhood. The stereotype is tweaked a little bit, though, as it is clear that Dana really isn't all that into the whole "motherhood" thing.
      Kirsten: I can't wait to nurse!
      Dana: I can't wait till your boobs get bigger.
    • Pretty much every other lesbian who appears on Rick & Steve has or is trying to conceive a baby. In one early episode, Kirstin pretends to be a gay man so she can hook up with a gay guy through the internet and steal his sperm. Her hookup turns out to be... another lesbian also seeking sperm. And on the gay cruise episode, all the lesbians onboard are there for the Lamaze classes, while all the guys are there to party and hook up. This shouldn't be too surprising, though, since Rick and Steve is built around exaggerating ridiculous gay stereotypes.

Alternative Title(s): All Lesbians Want Children

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