Gay and lesbian couples can adopt jointly in roughly 39 countries and territories. Most of the world does not allow it, and many countries restrict adoption further by barring single applicants altogether. Where it is permitted, the conversation often turns on whether prospective parents are being treated equally, whether agencies are complying with equality duties, and whether refusing a placement amounts to discrimination. These are real questions, but they are not the same question as what is the child’s wish.

I have worked with adopted adults and the ones placed with gay or lesbian couples sometimes described something that the official literature does not capture. A felt absence. A longing for a mother and/or a father that their loving home could not provide. A sense of standing out at school in a way that compounded the standing out they already did as adopted children. The pattern was sharper among those adopted when they were already old enough to have a sense of what a traditional birth family was meant to look like, and to feel the gap between that and what they were given. None of them said the question of what kind of family they would have chosen was put to them before the placement was made. This is despite many expressing that they would not change their adoptive parents, who they treasured.

These are not isolated voices. Heather Barwick, raised in the United States by her mother and her mother’s female partner, published an open letter in “The Federalist” in 2015 titled “Dear Gay Community, Your Kids Are Hurting”. She wrote that her father’s absence created a huge hole in her, that she ached every day for a dad, and that her mother’s partner, however loved, could not replace the father she had lost.

The standard response is to point at the research. Population studies, the argument goes, show that children raised by gay or lesbian parents do as well as their peers on wellbeing, development, and academic outcomes. Therefore the family form is irrelevant and any preference for mother and father placements is prejudice in another costume.

Both halves of that argument may be weaker than they sound.

The research base may not be as solid as its defenders present. The most cited UK longitudinal study, by McConnachie, Golombok and colleagues at Cambridge, follows 33 gay fathers, 35 lesbian mothers and 43 heterosexual parent adoptive families. Methodologically respectable, but a small, mostly white, middle class, urban sample recruited in part through support groups for gay and lesbian adoptive parents. Similarly, Mark Regnerus’s larger 2012 study in Social Science Research, which found worse outcomes among adults whose parents had had a same sex relationship, has been heavily criticised for comparing across unlike family situations and has its own defenders and critics.

The honest summary is that the evidence base is contested, the methodologies are imperfect on both sides, and the field has not earned the certainty its loudest voices project.

More importantly, even if the outcome studies were unimpeachable, they would not settle the question. Outcome equivalence on measured variables is not the same as equivalence in every respect that matters to a child. A young person can grow into a well adjusted adult by every scale a researcher can construct and still carry a loss the scales do not see. The question of what a child would have chosen, given the choice, is not answered by showing that the child turned out fine.

The same drift away is visible in the normalisation of single adopters as equivalent candidates to couples. Single people can be, and sometimes are, the right placement for a particular child. But the principle that two parents sharing the load produces more resilience, more time, more income, and a backup when one adult falls ill or dies is not controversial except when it becomes politically inconvenient.

Treating single adopters as routinely equivalent to couples, rather than as the right answer for specific cases, may just be a concession to adult fairness instead of focusing on the child.

In England, for example, where roughly one in five adoptions is now to a gay or lesbian couple, the practical situation is that adopter numbers have collapsed since the pandemic. Around 2,940 children with a placement order were waiting to be matched in mid 2025, against just 1,420 approved adopters, and the average wait for a child between entering care and being placed with a family is now around two years and five months. In that context, a loving gay or lesbian couple ready to take a child is straightforwardly preferable to the alternative, which is continued time in care, and anyone who pretends otherwise is using the child as a prop in someone else’s argument. But the comparison is not always that. Sometimes a mother and father placement may also be available, equally suitable and ready to take the child. In those cases the child’s preference for a family that resembles the one they lost is a real factor. Treating it as if it weighs nothing, because acknowledging it would sit awkwardly with equality policies, is not child centred policy.

There is a related point about ethnicity. Some agencies still weigh racial and cultural matching as one factor among many, particularly for older children with a developed sense of identity. The reasoning is not, for example, that a black child cannot thrive with white adoptive parents. Many do. The reasoning is that the child’s own experience of fitting into the family they are placed into matters, and the placement should reflect that where it can. The same logic applies to mothers and fathers, and pretending it is no factor at all does not survive scrutiny.

What may be needed is not a ban on gay and lesbian adoption or on single adopters but more honesty in the assessment process by acknowledging that the felt experience of the child, including what was lost and what is offered in its place, is a legitimate input, and that two parents are, all else equal, better than one.

Suggested reading:

• The International Bar Association’s review of the international legal framework of LGBTQI+ adoption rights notes that joint adoption by gay and lesbian couples is explicitly legal in 39 countries and territories. ibanet.org/the-international-legal-framework-of-LGBTQI-adoption-rights

• Heather Barwick’s open letter in The Federalist, 17 March 2015, titled Dear Gay Community, Your Kids Are Hurting, describes aching every day for a dad and her mother’s partner being unable to replace the father she had lost. thefederalist.com/2015/03/17/dear-gay-community-your-kids-are-hurting

• The UK longitudinal study by McConnachie, Golombok and colleagues, Adoptive Gay Father Families: A Longitudinal Study of Children’s Adjustment at Early Adolescence, published in Child Development in 2020, followed 33 gay father, 35 lesbian mother and 43 heterosexual parent adoptive families and found few differences between family types. srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13442

• Mark Regnerus’s paper, How Different Are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same Sex Relationships, published in Social Science Research in 2012, found worse outcomes among adults whose parents had had a same sex relationship. The study has been heavily criticised, most notably in an amicus brief by the American Sociological Association. A summary is available at theconversation.com/factcheck-are-children-better-off-with-a-mother-and-father-than-with-same-sex-parents-82313

• Department for Education data summarised by CoramBAAF shows that 20 percent of looked after children adopted in the year ending March 2024 were placed with same sex couples. corambaaf.org.uk/resources/statistics/statistics-england

• Community Care, reporting on Coram-i figures commissioned by the Department for Education, found that 2,940 children with a placement order were waiting to be placed in mid 2025, against 1,420 approved adopters waiting to be matched. communitycare.co.uk/2025/10/28/45-rise-in-number-of-children-waiting-for-adoption-since-2022-as-adopter-numbers-plummet

• Government data reported by South West Londoner in January 2024 showed that children for whom an adoption decision had been made waited an average of two years and five months between entering care and being placed with a family. swlondoner.co.uk/news/10012024-children-in-care-waiting-longer-to-be-adopted