LONDON, Ontario — Dawn Stefanowicz
says she knows from personal experience that what the American College of
Pediatricians recommends is true.
She is a Canadian woman who grew up
in a homosexual household. She says Americans wouldn’t support same-sex “marriage”
if they understood how it can harm children.
Stefanowicz, author of the book Out From Under: the Impact of
Homosexual Parenting, rejects the claim of homosexual activists that
same-sex households are just as healthy for kids as heterosexual homes.
“That hasn’t been my experience or
the experience of people who have contacted me who have been raised in a
similar situation,” said Stefanowicz. “We’ve all faced negative challenges in
this kind of household.”
Brad Luna, director of communications for the Human Rights Campaign, disagreed with critics of same-sex households with children.
“My response would be to look at
every major psychological and child-welfare national organization,” he said,
“who have all come out and said that children raised with same-sex parents have
no less development than children who were raised in a heterosexual
relationship.”
But one organization that does not
endorse homosexual parenting is the American College of Pediatricians.
“The environment in which children
are reared is absolutely critical to their development,” the college states in
a position statement about homosexual parenting posted in the “Position
Statements” section of its website, acpeds.org.
“Given the current body of research,
the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially
hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old
prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by
reproductive manipulation,” it says. “This position is rooted in the best
available science.”
The American College of
Pediatricians’ position statement references the many studies that have found
that children thrive best in families with a married mother and father.
Dr. Michelle Cretella, a Rhode
Island general pediatrician who is a board member of the American College of
Pediatricians, said Luna is correct in saying that major medical groups have
expressed support for homosexual parenting.
But she said that they have done so
despite the fact that scientific research has not established that such
families are as healthy for kids as married heterosexual families.
Faulty Comparisons
Cretella said that when the American
Academy of Pediatrics endorsed same-sex parenting in 2002, it acted on the
recommendation of a small committee that she says had an agenda.
The academy endorsed homosexual
parents over the specific objections of some committee members who noted the
flaws in the research studies that found same-sex parenting to be as healthy as
heterosexual parenting, she said.
A key methodological flaw in those
studies is that they compared the wellbeing of children in homosexual
households to those raised in difficult circumstances such as single-parent
households that resulted from divorce, Cretella said.
None of the studies compared
children raised by homosexual parents to children with two heterosexual parents
in a stable, loving marriage.
Said Cretella, “Because if you do
that, and we have decades of studies that have compared children in a
traditional home with children of single mothers, children of single fathers,
adoptive children, stepfamilies, children raised by a mother and grandmother,
and across the board socially, emotionally, intellectually and physically
children reared physically by their two biological parents do better across all
those measures.”
Cretella cited a recent meta-study
conducted by two pro-homosexual researchers. It found that girls raised in
homosexual households are more likely to be more aggressive, boys are likely to
be less masculine and that both girls and boys engage in sexual experimentation
at earlier ages and are more sexually promiscuous.
While the researchers who conducted
the meta-study did not regard their findings as negative, Cretella said, “those
of us on the pro-family side look at that and say, ‘No, you’re rearing children
with some gender confusion and you’re putting them at risk for sexually
transmitted diseases.’”
Another documented consequence of
same-sex parenting is an increased likelihood that children of same-sex parents
will claim a homosexual identity themselves. Cretella noted that multiple
studies have found that homosexually behaving teens and young adults suffer
increased rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addictions and
suicidal thoughts.
And in the case of boys who adopt a
homosexual lifestyle because of the influence of their same-sex parents,
Cretella said, they face a 30% chance of being dead or HIV-positive by the age
of 30.
Personal Experience
Dawn Stefanowicz has personally
experienced some of the negative consequences of homosexual parenting.
In
the 1960s and 1970s, from the age of 10 months old, she was raised in a Toronto
household where her chronically ill mother lived along with her father and a
succession of his same-sex partners. Her father eventually died of AIDS in
1991.
Exposure to her father’s promiscuous
homosexuality hurt Stefanowicz in a variety of ways, she says. The fact that he
had multiple same-sex partners generated profound feelings of insecurity, she
said.
“I always had that fear, beginning
as a little child, that I could easily be discarded although I was a dependent
living in this household and he happened to be my biological father,”
Stefanowicz said. “His partners were more important than I was. That was the
sense I had.”
Compounding her insecurity was the
death by suicide of two of her father’s sexual partners, and the confusion she
felt about her own sexual identity because she was a young girl living in a
home where male homosexuality and transsexuality were held up as attractive
qualities.
Said Stefanowicz, “It wasn’t good
enough to be a girl.”
Stefanowicz said she also learned
from an early age that she shouldn’t discuss what her family life was like. One
of the things it included was accompanying her father to sites where the
homosexual cruising subculture was occurring, such as parks and beaches and
bathhouses.
Along with witnessing her father’s
abnormal sexual behaviors, Stefanowicz said she also had to deal with other
problems that he and his partners had, including mental health issues and
addictions.
Other adults who were raised in
same-sex households have told Stefanowicz that they had to wrestle with the negative
consequences of the same kind of
experiences.
Said Stefanowicz, “We see that as
children and we are going to struggle with some of the same issues.”
Ignoring the Consqeuences
American College of Pediatricians
board member Cretella said that the interests of children like Dawn are being
ignored in the renewed debate over the legalization of same-sex “marriage” that
was triggered by last month’s California Supreme Court decision legalizing such
unions in that state.
“The way the issue has been framed
by same-sex marriage activists is purely looking at individual rights — the
rights of adults,” she said. “And they have removed any concept of family from
the definition of marriage.”
Cretella said this ignores the
historical fact that the primary purpose has always been to bond the father to
his children and the children’s mother, in order to create a healthy family
environment where children will thrive.
Said Cretella, “Marriage has
everything to do with family.”
Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Richard
Fitzgibbons, co-author of the Catholic Medical Association’s handbook
“Homosexuality and Hope,” said that highlighting this negative reality for
children is critically important in explaining why same-sex “marriage” should
not be legalized.
“Children should not be placed in
that lifestyle,” Fitzgibbons said. “All of the sociological and psychological
research makes it clear that the gold standard for children is a family life
with a mother and a father who are married.”
Stefanowicz agrees. Through her
Christian faith and years of counseling, Stefanowicz was able to come to terms
with the damage caused by her upbringing and subsequently to marry.
Today, she is an accountant and home
schools her two children and operates a website, dawnstefanowicz.com, dedicated
to providing support and healing to other people reared in homosexual families.
And she’s also determined to tell
Americans about the heartbreak they are inviting if they allow courts and
legislatures to legalize homosexual “marriage” nationally, as Canada’s federal
parliament did in 2005.
Said Stefanowicz, “I’m hoping that
many, many people will wake up and start looking at children’s best interests.”
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