By Evan Pondel - MinnPost.com, 4.21.10 TEL AVIV, Israel — At an age when most people are welcoming their first grandchildren into the world, Avishay Greenfield, 59, gets little sleep as a father of twin babies. For Greenfield, it is a dream come true after waiting several decades to have children with his partner. But this later-in-life scenario isn’t only a function of family dynamics and finances. In the last several years, the coming of...

April 26, 2010 TheStar.com Rick Westhead ANAND, INDIA—Like all new parents, the Canadian couple was ecstatic about taking home their new children — twins born in one of India’s roughly 350 fertility clinics. The Canadians, both doctors, had paid a woman in India to carry their fertilized eggs to term. The going rate for a surrogate mother is close to $7,000, a windfall in a country where many labourers earn $1 a day. The couple headed to the...

By Carlos Santoscoy Published: April 30, 2010 An immigration reform “framework” proposed Thursday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and fellow Democrats includes gay families. The inclusion is likely to anger social conservatives and major immigration allies. Included in the “framework” are key provisions of the Uniting American Families Act. The legislation was previously offered as a standalone bill by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont...

By Bill Barrow, The Times-Picayune April 27, 2010, 12:55PM Lengthy and passionate testimony in the Senate Judiciary A Committee today ended with a 3-1 party line rejection of a measure that would have expanded gay adoption in Louisiana. Senate Bill 129, which ended up as a combination of two measures by Sens. Ed Murray and J.P. Morrell, would have allowed unmarried couples to jointly adopt and allow an existing parent to petition a court to add a...

By GLAD.org 04.19.2010 7:00am EDT Niles and Thiago da Silva met on a Sunday morning in 2002 at the Quincy Center T stop just outside of Boston. They struck up a conversation, had a lot to talk about, and agreed to get coffee together in Boston. Coffee turned into lunch, lunch turned into a hike, a hike turned into more coffee, which turned into dinner. They were engaged six months later and legally married in Massachusetts in 2004. “We knew from...

April 8, 2010 New York Times By JOHN SCHWARTZ The scene was similar to one that plays out thousands of times a year in gyms and auditoriums around the country: a college fair. The folding tables, the school banners, the admissions officers with a student representative or two, and the brochures and tchotchkes laid out. The only thing that might have made this one appear out of the ordinary was the preponderance of handouts with rainbow designs, and...

Posted on 16 April 2010 Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK — A circuit judge today stuck down Arkansas’ ban against unmarried couples adopting or foster-parenting children. Act 1, passed by voters in 2008, unconstitutionally burdens non-marital relationships and acts of sexual intimacy between adults by forcing them to choose between becoming a parent and having any meaningful type of intimate relationship outside of marriage, Circuit Judge Chris...

By Dana Rudolph, Keen News Service 04.14.2010 3:30pm EDT It doesn’t always pay off to have a seat at the table. Case in point: The Obama administration’s proposal to reform the nation’s educational system includes no specific call for anti-bullying programs in schools, and no mention of protections for students from harassment or discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This is despite the fact that an openly gay man with...

April 15, 2010 New York Times By CLIFFORD J. LEVY MOSCOW — Russia formally announced on Thursday that it would suspend all adoptions of Russian children by Americans, responding to the case of a 7-year-old boy who was sent back to Moscow alone last week by his adoptive mother in Tennessee. The case of the boy, who was named Artyom in Russia before he was adopted last year, has caused widespread anger here, and Russian officials said new regulations...

By John Corvino, columnist, 365gay.com 04.09.2010 9:05am EDT Those who argue that same-sex parenting “deprives” a child of its mother or father sometimes ask, “How would you feel if your mother or father were taken away?” My answer to that question is, of course, “I’d feel terrible.” But that fact scarcely settles the matter. I’d feel terrible if anyone close to me were taken away. But that presupposes that the person “taken away”...