The biggest issue is what Hymowitz identifies as the "unmarriage revolution."  Even in the 1970s, some lesbians were turning to artificial insemination in an effort to have babies, but this was usually without the service of a doctor or a sperm bank.  Today, the picture is quite different:

Now they're more likely to go to the sperm store like everyone else, especially since a 2006 American Society for Reproductive Medicine Ethics Committee report calling for equal access to fertility treatment for gays, lesbians, and singles. These days, anyone can buy sperm: married couples, gay couples, and single women; women on the AARP mailing list, women barely out of college, 40-year-old women who have tried desperately to find husbands and have no other hope of becoming mothers, and 20-something women who--well--just want to, that's all; rich and famous women like Annie Leibovitz, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Cheney; and divorced third-grade teachers who live in modest two-bedroom condos and are fed up with men. Whoever. The California Cryobank, the country's largest, estimates that about 40 percent of its customers are unmarried women. The Sperm Bank of California says that two-thirds of its clientele are lesbian couples. Most professionals believe that about 1 million American children are the progeny of sperm donors--the large majority of them anonymous--with 30,000 more boosting the ranks each year.

The courts have generally made a mess of the questions surrounding AI, and those questions are truly important.  As Hymowitz explains, "In unwitting alliance with a fertility industry fiercely protective of anonymous gamete donation, the courts have given their imprimatur to two nonsensical biological conditions: children who have no fathers and fathers who have no children. The old Uniform Parentage Act had it that a donor had no paternal standing, because at the time the law needed to resolve the potential problem of two fathers: the donor and the mother's husband. It should be obvious that in the case of a single or lesbian mother, the problem is quite different: there is no 'other father.'"

The legal questions surrounding artificial insemination are constantly increasing. Consider these:

Can a sperm donor be a father? Can his mother be a grandmother? Can a child conceived through AI inherit property from her biological father? Can a child have two mothers and no father? How about two mothers and a father? Can the lesbian partner of a biological mother have custody rights if the couple breaks up? Can she be required to pay child support? And, again, who are the grandparents?

The courts have no mechanism or tradition of reasoning that is up to the task of answering these questions -- largely because these questions would never have made sense in the past.  So now we have courts ruling that children have no fathers, multiple parents, two mothers, two mothers and a father, and so on.  It should be no surprise that sociologist Amy Agigian would argue that artificial insemination, while originally intended to support the traditional family, would end up undermining the very notion of a traditional family.