The Mail
I read with great interest Ian Parker’s article on the contentious custody battle between a separated gay couple, a case that has the potential to change the ways in which the courts define parenthood and family (“Are You My Mother?,” May 22nd). For gay parents, parenthood necessarily requires an immense amount of planning. There is no accidental pregnancy. In my own experience, motherhood did not begin the moment my daughter was born. It didn’t even begin nine months earlier, at her conception. In the case of Circe Hamilton and Kelly Gunn, it was Hamilton who first instigated the adoption, and Hamilton who continued to pursue it after she and Gunn separated. Hamilton acted as a mother during this time, while Gunn distanced herself from the process. This does not diminish the intensity of feeling Gunn has for the child, Abush. However, while Gunn describes her “instant connection” with him as having formed when she met him at Heathrow Airport, Hamilton had become connected to her child—if not to Abush specifically—many months earlier. I imagine that—like me stroking my pregnant belly—she did not need to see her child to be a mother.