ABSTRACT
Major elements of the changing landscape, especially the communications revolution and the rise and rise of the internet, will have incalculable effects. Scientific breakthroughs and the genetic revolution had opened up new possibilities of resolving issues of infertility and of separating conception from sexual intercourse, and from direct involvement of men, that had once appeared a utopian fantasy when advocated by the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone in her book The Dialectic of Sex in the early 1970s. Britain's sexual and gender topography had always been made up of a complex intermingling of intense local cultures and of wider connections, both European and global. The emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) claims to parenting rights complicated what were already complex issues in relation to access to the new reproductive technologies. There was a variety of family forms and practices of parenting with significant regional and class divides.
