Known donors aren’t legally compelled to relinquish their parental rights until after the baby is born, so there’s always the chance that a donor’s paternal instinct will kick in when he sees a kid that looks like him. They considered using sperm from a friend or a family member, but their fertility doctor advised against it. Adoption would be too expensive and arduous, and they worried their same-sex status would work against them, a concern that seems almost antiquated a decade later. The couple spent months mulling over their reproductive options. Ten years ago, they decided to have a baby. department at a private school in their hometown of Port Hope, Ont., and Hanson teaches music at a school in Toronto, about an hour away. Both are teachers: Collins works in the phys. Collins is now 46, with elfin features and a folksy energy, while the blond, 56-year-old Hanson is quiet and sober-minded. In 2002, she met a woman named Beth Hanson on LavaLife, and they fell in love. “I thought if I was a nun, I could live at an orphanage, and those could be my kids.” By the time she was in her late teens, she’d pinpointed the source of her aversion to marriage: She is gay. “I always wanted to be a mother, but the marriage part didn’t appeal to me,” she says. When Angie Collins was a kid, she planned to become a nun.
