In honor of the NBC’s new series One Big Happy, a show about a gay woman who is pregnant with her best friend’s baby, we’re counting down the best pregnant lesbian moments on TV. Here’s to love-however it enters the world. Grey’s diehards might agree that one of the show’s stand-out moments was when Arizona decided that she and Callie were not only going to make their relationship work, but that Callie being pregnant with Mark’s baby hardly made the baby any less Arizona’s. Then there’s the scene that changed everything: In Season 7, Callie and Arizona are arguing in the car when Arizona accuses Callie of giving Mark the “straight, Catholic, [Callie] that loves baby showers,” while Arizona only gets the gay Callie for “twenty minutes” at night if she’s lucky. Callie tells Arizona she’ll do whatever she wants, so Arizona asks Callie to marry her. Then they get into a life-changing car accident that almost takes Callie and Baby Sofia’s lives, but they survive. Their child keeps the couple together then, even though now they are officially separated. Longtime couple Audrey and Jeff wanted to have a baby, but Audrey isn’t able to get pregnant. They make arrangements with their friend Brenda (Sara Rue), a lesbian on Jeff’s softball team. Their friendship is adorable, and Jeff is there with Brenda’s water breaks. “That’s not pee,” he says. Audrey and Jeff have scheduled a wedding on the same day (it’s the season finale), but the nuptials and celebrating must wait! Baby Shea has arrived. Brenda immediately says, “Oh, thank God-I can drink again!” The surprise twist? Audrey announces she’s pregnant!
When Season 2 began for the hit show, star Sherri Saum’s real-life pregnancy was worked into the script. When Lena discovers she is not only pregnant but has developed pre-eclampsia, she makes the dificult decision to terminate her pregnancy and have an abortion. What this episode did for mainstream television was acknowledge abortion on TV. Forget the sexuality of the person having it-this was a moment for Lena-her own life, and for all women who are in charge of their reproductive rights, who have faced similar hard decisions. In one particular scene, Lena’s mom (Lorraine Toussaint) is comforting her in the hospital, as Lena shares her fears about not being her kids’ “real mom.” Lena’s mom tells her, “Love will always be a stronger bond than blood.” When Today correspondent Jenna Wolfe came out to the world in 2013, she announced that she and her partner, Stephanie Gosk, were also expecting a baby. Seated across from her fellow correspondents, she cracked joke after joke about being a new mom-just like any other new mom would. (What are breast pumps all about, anyway?) “I didn’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is,” Jenna told People. The couple just had their second child. It was “Dare Week” on The Talk this past fall when our favorite Conner girl, Sara Gilbert, said she couldn’t complete her dare-laying on a bed of nails, with a bed of nails on top of her, a cinder block on top of that, and then someone hammering the cinder block into smithereens. A tearful Sara started to explain that she couldn’t do it because she’s PREGNANT! That’s was the moment when her fellow co-hosts burst out of their chairs in excitement, tears rolling down their faces. The audience joined in this spontaneous celebration. This was Sara’s first child with her wife Linda Perry. Rhodes Emilio Gilbert Perry was born on February 28, 2015. In the pilot of Friends (also known as “The One Where It All Began,”), an angst-riddled Ross (David Schwimmer) must face his new reality: His now ex-wife is a lesbian. Credit great writers for blazing that trail in 1994. The irony wasn’t lost on us when Carol (Anita Barone, later Jane Sibbett) dropped the bomb to Ross at their workplace, the Museum of Prehistoric History, standing in front of a display of cave persons. She tells him she’s also pregnant with his baby. Throughout the series, we see Ross “coping” with the news, but his greatest doubt lies not in whether Carol is truly gay, or if she and Susan will make great parents-but if he, Ross, will make a good parent. A big moment to remember involves Carol, Susan and Ross attending Lamaze class (“The One With Two Parts”), Susan consoles Carol, who is having a major freak out about giving birth, telling her, “We’re going to be parents for the rest of our lives!” In the next scene, Ross is seen clutching a pillow at Central Perk muttering, “I’m going to be a father.” Tina (Laurel Holloman) tells Bette (Jennifer Beals) that she’s ovulating in the series pilot, and it begins with their uttering of “Let’s make a baby.” Of course, we don’t meet baby Angelica until after many plot twists: a miscarriage, a secret insemination, the carpenter, and more. But in that first season, when Tina sets a place for a third guest at the dinner table as an irritated Bette is on the verge of shredding Tina for inviting someone over at such a stressful time, she suddenly sees it-the pregnancy strip confirming that Tina’s expecting. Bette flashes those pearly whites and her best Bette tears, and it’s moments like this one that make all of the future dramas(like Bette thinking she’s the last to know, or Tina’s miscarriage and Bette’s affair, Helena playing fill-in mom-to-be by setting up that nursery for Tina) so riviting. By the time Angelica was walking and talking, it was clear that the very real, long, and difficult journey Momma T and Momma B went on only brought them closer-destined from the start.
One Big Happy premieres on Tuesday, March 17 at 9:30pm.
