Hi everyone, we are Michaella and Amelia. 

We always struggle to define where home is for us, as it’s changed so many times in the last few years and will hopefully change again in the near future. I (Michaella) am originally from Co. Mayo and Amelia is from Seattle. We met in July 2018 in the George, when Amelia was backpacking around Ireland. Since that meeting we have had to work really hard to be together. 

We did a long-distance relationship for the first year and took the opportunity to meet up in lots of amazing locations; Iceland, Seattle, Vietnam etc. We then moved to New Zealand on a visa programme, but the arrival of Covid meant that getting an extension to our visas was impossible. We were left with no choice but to return to our respective homes in Ireland and the U.S.A. We got engaged at Christmas, when Amelia came to spend the holidays with my family in Mayo. We are now applying for visas from both countries, so that we can make sure that we are never apart again, but you guessed it they are delayed due to Covid - aaargh!!!! 

We plan to get married in Spain in early 2021, and would love to think that we will be able to have children at some point in the not too distant future. Having children is something both of us imagined for ourselves. It would be an amazing opportunity to teach and help a child realise and achieve their goals and dreams.

We don’t know yet where we might have our children, but being honest the legal situation that exists here in Ireland for couples like us would mean that Ireland isn’t a great option. 

Ideally, we would like to have our family via home insemination - we feel it's a very private moment and a setting, such a clinic, would be too, well clinical! However, the terms of the CFRA would force that decision upon us. We’d then have to make sure that our child was born here in Ireland - something that is not guaranteed, given our potential ‘nomadic’ lifestyle. On the other hand, if we decided to have kids in the US, then they would only be granted an Irish  passport provided that I (Michaella) was the birth mother - which may or may not turn out to be the case. With circumstances as uncertain as this, we often find ourselves worrying about the worst case scenario - what if our child were to need urgent medical care and the legally recognised parent wasn’t available to provide consent? Worse still, what would happen if the person who is recognised as the legal parent were to die  leaving the other parent with little/no legal rights to look after their child? 

Children of LGBTQ+ parents should be treated in the same way as the children of every other married Irish couple. It shouldn’t matter, where and how they are conceived and born. 

The inequality present in the Irish legal system for same-sex families, results in LGBTQ+ couples having many choices re how to have a family and how to take care of our children stripped away. That’s not equality!