Co-maternity

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The state of being a co-mother; a mother to a child carried by another partner through reciprocal IVF (in vitro fertilization where one female partner supplies the ovum and the other carries the pregnancy). countable, uncountable

    "Developments in jurisprudence and legislation thus suggest a growing openness to identifying a birth mother and her same-sex partner as a child’s ‘natural’ or ‘original’ parents whether that child has been conceived through assisted reproduction. But the idea of co-maternity still seems limited and tenuous."

Example

More examples

"Developments in jurisprudence and legislation thus suggest a growing openness to identifying a birth mother and her same-sex partner as a child’s ‘natural’ or ‘original’ parents whether that child has been conceived through assisted reproduction. But the idea of co-maternity still seems limited and tenuous."

Etymology

From co- + maternity.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.