Not a Synthetic Maternity: Jane Rule’s Fiction

The Sharon Bottoms case, following fast on the heels of the 1993 debates on gays in the military, seemed a superfluous reminder that social change is slow, uneven, and easily erased if not illusory to begin with.¹ The frank homophobia of a Virginia judge may have struck reporters for The New York Times as “unusual,” delivering “a shock to the nation’s homosexuals,”² but it only confirms what many lesbian mothers say they know. If they want to maintain custody of their children, particularly after a divorce or when there is a biological father who might sue, they do best to