If you plan to use sperm from a sperm bank, the donor could be Australian or come from overseas. Make sure you involve your partner in the discussions and give the potential donor plenty of time to think about it. If it is someone you know, think carefully about what you are looking for in a donor, what level of involvement you want him to have with the child, and why he would consider donating to you. This could be someone you know, or an unknown donor who has donated their sperm to a sperm bank. IVF can be more expensive, and it also doesn’t always work.Įither way, you will need to find a sperm donor. The mother will need to take fertility drugs. This is when the sperm are introduced to the egg in the lab. If you have fertility problems, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is another option. You don’t always need to take fertility drugs, and the procedure is quite quick and inexpensive. Sperm from a donor are injected directly into the womb and, hopefully, the woman will become pregnant. Some women inseminate themselves at home, but many choose to be inseminated in a clinic using a process called intrauterine insemination (IUI). The most common way for a woman in a same-sex relationship to become pregnant is to use donated sperm. If you are thinking of conceiving a child, there are several fertility options available. Or you may have a co-parenting arrangement with a gay male couple. One or both of you may have children from a previous heterosexual relationship. One partner may have the baby, or you may choose to adopt. The Lady of Heaven is released in cinemas on 3 June.Same-sex families can be created in many different ways. And for a film that aims to promote religious diversity and freedom of thought, its metronomic alternation between time frames, narrative slavishness and laughable coda have a suffocating sense of orthodoxy.
The Lady of Heaven has precious little of the poetic flair of Muhammad: Messenger of God, Majid Majidi’s 2015 treatment of the prophet’s early years, or indeed the uncanny rigidity of 1977’s The Messenger, often shot from the prophet’s first-person perspective. But with some half-baked performances, and the odd tinge of cockney creeping in, it feels a bit too apparent that the cast hail from closer to Mile End than Medina. The production values are decent, with impressive mud-brick sets and the kohl-eyed, vibrant-cloaked pagan rabble contrasting nicely with the austere Muslim camp. Only after Muhammad’s death, with the depiction of the emerging tyranny of his father-in-law Abu Bakr (Ray Fearon), does this flat-footed telling start to chime with present-day religious intolerance. Instead, The Lady of Heaven gives a stilted walkthrough of the nascent outsider religion that is more drawn to her eventual husband Ali, a martial badass with vehement anime eyes. The strange thing is that the film, until its closing stretch, hardly features Fatimah – who in any case is the only Islamic luminary whose face is never shown, which along with an embarrassingly plummy vocal performance, hobbles our attachment to her. Laith is adopted by a soldier from Baghdad, and the serviceman’s mother comforts the youngster by telling him the tale of the saintly Fatimah, whose example of strength she promises will keep him going in dark times. Director Eli King and writer Sheikh al-Habib attempt to give the Islam origin story a contemporary parallel: it has a framing sequence in which Laith (Gabriel Cartade), a young boy from Mosul, is orphaned when his mother is executed by Islamic State soldiers for teaching him a blasphemous song.
While claiming, as per the title, to be about Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, this is largely focusing on his cousin and successor Ali. Presumably, this is enough to placate Islam’s prohibition on visual representation of the prophet, but this is a Shia-aligned film that is evidently a little more lenient on the issue. And, as a nervous initial disclaimer points out, their faces, often shown in dazzling sunbursts, are computer-generated. No single actor is credited with playing him, or any of the other holy figures in his entourage. T his British-made epic earns a significant accolade: it is the first film to put the “face” of the prophet Muhammad on screen.