“Two mothers” give birth to a lovely daughter

A wedding photo of Kim Kyu-jin and her spouse in Jeju-do in 2020. Courtesy of Kim Kyu-jin

Kim Kyu-jin (31) and Kim Sae-yeon (34), the first lesbian couple in Korea to make public their pregnancy, gave birth to a daughter.

On August 30, Kim Kyu-jin shared the news of the baby’s birth by posting the message “Ochulwan (meaning I gave birth today hehe)” on social media. Kim gave birth to a baby girl, Rani (baby’s nickname), weighing 3.2 kg at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The couple successfully had the baby through artificial insemination with sperm donated from a fertility clinic in Belgium last December. In South Korea, hospitals only provide sperm to heterosexual couples who are legally married or who are in a de facto marriage, so getting pregnant in Korea was out of the question. The couple obtained a marriage license in the state of New York in 2019 and had a wedding in Korea in November that year. They tried to register their marriage at a local government in South Korea, too, but it was not accepted. Theirs was a same-sex marriage, which could not be accepted according to existing law.

The delivery was smooth. Kim Kyu-jin gave birth in the hospital where Kim Sae-yeon worked. Kim Kyu-jin wrote, “None of the staff I met thought it strange that my wife was my guardian, and they wrote ‘spouse’ under ‘relation’ every time,” on her social media account. She is currently recovering. She also joked, “They published an article about us delivering a baby. It was placed right next to the article about the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.7, so people couldn’t express hatred in the comments and seemed confused.”

Since the state does not recognize them as a legal couple, they are expected to face more challenges than other couples in the process of raising their newborn daughter. They are parent and daughter, but they cannot be legally recognized as a family. According to the law, Rani will grow up in a single-parent home, and Kim Sae-yeon will not be able to go on parental leave even though her spouse gave birth to a child. Currently, the living partner relation bill, which will include various forms of families in the legal boundary, and the three bills on the right to form a family (act on support for childbirth by a single person, the living partner relationship act, and the equal marriage act) have been proposed in the National Assembly, but the government has said that enactment was premature.