WE CARE

We care because your experience is valuable and your story deserves to be told to the world.

We care because researchers, healthcare providers, birth workers, organizations, and support services are failing to meet the unique family-building needs of the LGBTQ+ community.

We care because current family formation and perinatal research fails to include and address the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and families. This is important because research informs how resources and funding are allocated.

We care because feeling safe and supported during the family formation journey is known to impact health and may contribute to our community’s health disparities.

We care because you deserve to have the kind of experience you want during this transformative time in your life.

WE HOPE

We hope these studies will allow LGBTQ+ families to document the challenges as well as the joys related to the family formation journey and bring visibility to issues the community cares about most.

We hope that by documenting LGBTQ+ family formation experiences, we can use this knowledge to educate healthcare professionals, advocacy organizations, and support services on our unique needs.

We hope that using images, along with stories, will be a compelling way to speak to people in power and spark changes in policy that support and celebrate LGBTQ+ families.

We hope this study will contribute to the development of future research studies that uplift and resource the diversity of people who bear children and their families.

WE BELIEVE

We believe in community-informed research that privileges the expertise of community members and values their priorities and needs. QT PREG was developed out of concerns raised in a LGBTQ+ perinatal support group founded by Kodiak in 2015. QT PREG II builds off the original QT PREG study, as we found family formation experiences were key in setting the stage for perinatal experiences. Whenever possible, survey questions and response options were adopted from LGBTQ+ community-engaged research studies, and all aspects of the study continue to be informed by a community advisory board.

We believe that knowledge should be accessible to all. The study findings will be published in academic journals as well as in informal outlets and a community-facing project. The community advisors will direct where and how the findings will be shared.

We believe that knowledge should represent the diverse and intersectional identities of real-world families. To this end, our eligibility survey was designed to maximize the varied experiences of the LGBTQ+ community within the limitations of the funding and study period.

We believe in LGBTQ+ resiliency and research that focuses on the strengths of our community. There is a need for LGBTQ+ research to go beyond a risk-focused approach and towards a strengths-based approach to understand LGBTQ+ people and their health.

We believe in mutual aid or the voluntary and reciprocal exchange of resources or services for mutual benefit. The activities and compensation for participants and community advisors were intentionally designed to be of mutual benefit for scientific discovery and individual gratification.

Ready to learn about what it takes to participate?