Forty-one percent of married same-sex couples under 50 say they want to have a child, or another child, in the future, according to a Williams Institute study at UCLA School of Law. That’s not a fringe number. It puts married same-sex couples’ parenting aspirations in roughly the same territory as the broader population. What’s stopping most of them isn’t desire, biology, or legal access. It’s money, and specifically, the eye-watering price of the biological path most of them would actually prefer.
The study, led by Clark University psychology professor and Williams Institute affiliated scholar Abbie E. Goldberg, surveyed 263 married same-sex couples under age 50 as part of a larger sample of 448 couples. It found that among couples who want children in the future, 61% see a biological path, donor insemination, surrogacy, or IVF, as their ideal route to parenthood. Only 36% call adoption their ideal option. Yet when researchers asked what these same couples actually expect to do, the numbers flip: 51% say they’ll likely pursue adoption or foster care, while only 41% expect to become parents biologically.
The Gap Between What Couples Want and What They Can Afford
That reversal, wanting biology, planning for adoption, comes down almost entirely to cost. The Williams Institute found that 79% of couples interested in future parenthood named cost as a barrier, making it by far the most commonly cited obstacle, ahead of lacking a biological component like sperm, egg, or a uterus (32%), concerns about discrimination (30%), gaps in health insurance coverage (25%), and personal health challenges (19%). Cost was the only barrier named by more than a third of respondents. Nothing else came close.
It’s easy to see why once you look at the actual numbers. Surrogacy in the United States typically runs anywhere from $100,000 to more than $250,000 once surrogate compensation, agency fees, legal costs, and IVF and medical expenses are added together, according to Axios’s 2026 reporting on the surrogacy industry. Couples whose insurance doesn’t cover the process may also need to buy a dedicated fertility insurance policy costing another $30,000, per data from RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association cited in that same reporting. For a male couple in particular, since neither partner can carry a pregnancy, surrogacy combined with IVF is often the only biological option on the table, which puts the “ideal” path for a meaningful share of same-sex parents out of financial reach before they even start.
Marriage Changed the Timeline, Not Just the Legal Status
The Williams Institute data also found that 28% of respondents said getting married actually increased their interest in becoming a parent, suggesting the legal and social stability of marriage itself functions as a kind of on-ramp to family planning for same-sex couples the way it long has for straight ones. As Goldberg put it in the Institute’s release announcing the findings, “marriage and parenthood are frequently seen as intertwined, particularly within a heteronormative context,” and her research suggests that link is showing up for same-sex couples too, just a decade behind, since nationwide marriage equality only arrived in 2015.
That timing matters. A straight couple weighing IVF or adoption has usually had a lifetime of exposure to the idea that marriage leads to kids. Same-sex couples are working through the exact same aspirations on a compressed timeline, often after years of assuming parenthood wasn’t realistically available to them at all, and they’re doing it while facing costs that dwarf what a fertile heterosexual couple would ever need to spend to conceive.
Why Adoption Becomes the Backup Plan, Not the First Choice
None of this means adoption or foster care is a lesser choice for the families who pursue it; plenty of same-sex parents build their families that way by genuine preference, not just budget. But the Williams Institute data makes clear that for a meaningful share of couples, the pathway to parenthood is being decided less by what they want and more by what they can front financially. When 61% call biological parenthood their ideal but only 41% expect to actually pursue it, the 20-point gap is essentially a receipt for how expensive fertility treatment and surrogacy have become in the U.S.
Employer benefits are shifting, slowly. A 2026 report from corporate healthcare platform Maven found employers increased adoption and surrogacy benefits by 39% year over year, though as Axios noted, coverage gaps remain significant for most families. Until those benefits close the gap further, the data suggests a lot of married same-sex couples will keep making the same trade Goldberg’s research describes: choosing the family-building path they can afford over the one they’d pick first.
