Although she has two half-sisters from her dad’s previous marriage, there was nothing in Jess Pearce’s childhood to make her doubt her biological origins. She tanned, her father tanned; he was tall, so was she. Yet when she was 28, her mother dropped a bombshell.
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theindependent.co.uk by Linda Geddes, August 10, 2015
South Jersey Times – February 9, 2015 by Andy Polhamus
A lesbian couple from Salem County are locked in a custody battle over their son after a sperm donor sued them for parenting time.
The outcome of their case, according to their attorney and a Rutgers law professor, might change the status of reproductive rights for couples around New Jersey who conceive by artificial means.
Sheena and Tiara Yates of Pennsville had a son who was conceived by at-home artificial insemination — known colloquially as alternative insemination — in June 2013 under the counsel of a physician. The couple already had a toddler, also conceived by artificial insemination from a different donor, and had drawn up contracts in which both men relinquished their legal paternity.
It looked for a while as though everything had gone smoothly. In the same five-month span between December 2013 and April 2014, however, both sperm donors came forward and filed for visiting rights with each child.
State law addressing artificial insemination and domestic issues, as the Yateses discovered, says that only when the insemination process is carried out under the direct supervision of a physician, can the non-biological parent be legally considered the natural parent of the child. The law also protects the donor from having any “rights or duties stemming from the conception of the child.”
The Yates family lost the first custody case, and that donor now has visitation time with the older child — a court ruling the couple decided not to dispute. The same thing happened with the second suit in September after a Salem County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the donor, Shawn Sorrell. His parenting time begins with a few hours each weekend in addition to paying $83 a week in child support.
“Emotionally it’s very hard for us,” said Sheena Yates. “All we want is a family, and we can’t have kids without an outside party. It’s a lot for us to have to deal with. It’s not just hard on us, it’s hard on the kids, too.”
The Yateses asked that their children’s names not be revealed to protect their privacy.
The couple’s son is now a year old, and according to Sheena, had not met his biological father until visitation began. Sorrell, of Wilmington, Delaware, is representing himself in the case. He could not be reached for comment.
As they file their appeal with the Superior Court of New Jersey’s appellate division, the Yateses not only argue that the precise location of the procedure should be irrelevant, but also hope one major factor will influence an appellate court’s decision about custody over their younger child. They had no legal recognition of their relationship when their first child was born, but have been in a civil union since 2011 and got married in May 2014.
“The question now is whether the presumption of marriage is stronger than the artificial insemination statute,” said Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor of law at Rutgers-Camden. “You’re battling out two different parts of the statutory scheme and figuring out which one would prevail.”
Without the marriage aspect, she added, the case would be fairly cut and dry.
“It’s a core mistake people make. The court says if you go to a physician and do it their way, [donors] don’t have a legal connection to the child,” Mutcherson said. “When you don’t have that anymore, you have two people on equal footing. At that point it’s just a custody proceeding.”
John Keating, the Glassboro-based attorney representing the Yateses, said he hopes the question of marital status will strengthen their case.
“We think it’s important the appellate division make a decision. Our purpose here is for other couples not to go through this. They set out to start a family together, and they did what they thought was the right thing,” he said. “They entered into contracts with sperm donors, they consulted a physician and are now in a position of raising two children with two sperm donors instead of being two parents and their children. Now there are four parents raising these children.”
Sheena said she hopes bringing attention to her case will help other couples avoid similar problems in the future.
“It’s not just us,” she said. “It’s thousands of others who could go through it, too, and it affects people’s lives every day.”
Keating also argues that their consultation of a physician should hold up in court, despite the fact that the procedure was carried out at home. Furthermore, he said, the court’s interpretation that artificial insemination must be carried out only by a doctor puts lower-income people, gay or straight, at a disadvantage. Fertility clinics carry a hefty price tag, and sperm banks aren’t cheap.
“We don’t think this is an anti-LGBT decision,” Keating said, but noted that even initial fees at most sperm banks tally about $1,000. “But we do think it disparately impacts LGBT couples, and disproportionately impacts lower-income people.”
Mutcherson agreed.
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My family can best be described as a forest. When my daughter created her “Family Tree” for a class project, there were so many branches that it covered an entire poster board. My heart soared. I am lucky enough to be called “papa” by three amazing kids. My son, 9 years old, is the biological child of my husband who we had with the help of a gestational surrogate. I adopted him and he lives with my husband and me. My daughters are 13 and 8 and they live with their mothers, who happen to live in our neighborhood in Manhattan.
I call them my daughters because I am their biological father through sperm donation, but the truth is that I am not their parent. This is a critical distinction that any donor dad must make. I am not a co-parent with my daughters’ mothers. But that doesn’t mean that I do not have a meaningful and reciprocally fulfilling relationship with them, it just means that the major life decisions that relate to my girls are made by their mothers, the two amazing women who taught me how to be a dad.
To highlight the enormity of this journey for me, I need to give you some background. In the 70’s as a closeted teenager and in the 80’s as a closeted young man in my 20’s, if you had told that one day I would have three children, I would have felt relief and seen it as affirmation that I could change my orientation. I desperately didn’t want to be gay and after running from my true self for what seemed to me to be ages; I did what many young people who grew up in my era did: I tried to end my life. My parents walked me around the back yard of our house for hours attempting to allow the effects of the pills I had taken to wear off. I am thankful every day that they did.
That moment changed my life because, with a lot of help from a lot of people, I learned that I could be a happy gay person. Once that switch was flipped, life turned on. My family is the culmination of that awareness and of so much love. But that love had to start with me. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t truly love themselves could be a donor dad. It requires patience, responsibility and, most of all, faith. I had to have faith that my daughter’s moms would allow me to have a relationship with them. They also had to have faith that I would be a man of my word and surrender my parental rights to the non-biological mother. We all had to have faith that we would be able to conquer whatever parenting trials would come our way.
But that faith is constantly tested. When my first daughter was born, my husband and I would babysit for her about once every other week and, once she was old enough, we would have sleepovers roughly once a month. I remember one time right after the adoption hearing had taken place where I formally surrendered my parental rights getting a call from one of her mothers after we returned her from a sleepover night. She was asking about a small burn mark on my daughter’s leg. Neither my husband or I could remember anything that could have caused it. But then remembered one moment when we were all in our tiny NYC kitchen and I was holding her when I turned and brushed up against an open toaster oven door. I didn’t think it had touched her. She didn’t cry and I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But when I realized that I had done this, I was so scared that my husband and I wouldn’t be allowed to see her again. I had hurt my own child! I went through a very short lived freak out until we actually talked to her moms again and they told us of how she had fallen off the changing table, a couple of times, and that I shouldn’t worry.
It is moments like that one when you truly understand perspective. But the one person’s perspective that really was tested by my being a donor dad was my husband’s. He often considered himself the odd man out. While I was busy going to clinics and running out of events because “mom was ovulating,” he was often left alone and feeling out of touch with the whole process. If I could have done anything differently, I would have made sure that he was more involved and included him more in the process. The reality, now that the kids are older, is that all three of them refer to my husband as “daddy” and to me as “papa.” When asked, they are the first to tell you that they have “two mommies and two daddies.” This, to me, is one of the coolest things ever.
Because we are honest with all three kids about where they come from, they feel special. They understand that their mommies and daddies loved them so much that they worked together to make our family a reality. If I can offer any new perspective on being a donor dad, it is that anything is possible with honesty, careful preparation and love. You can have the family of your dreams, no matter what it looks like.
June 2, 2014 – by Anthony M. Brown
Thanks to Our family Coalition in San Francisco for asking me to write this piece!
Sydney Morning Herald – May 11, 2014 by Nicole Hasham
Fertility clinics will be forced to hand over information about anonymous sperm donors so children can learn about their genetic origins, in a move that has divided doctors and offspring advocates.
The state government will also consider bringing in laws to protect donor records, after an inquiry heard “alarming” evidence that doctors had destroyed information to prevent donors being outed.
Health Minister Jillian Skinner plans to establish a central, government-run register of sperm donor records, allowing offspring to apply for non-identifying information about their donor fathers. This could include medical history, ethnicity and physical characteristics such as eye and hair colour.
The register also raises the prospect that more donors and their offspring would make contact, by offering a linking service if both parties consent. Under a current, little-publicised voluntary system, just 21 offspring and 20 donors are registered.
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Associated Press, January 23, 2014
A man who provided sperm to a lesbian couple in response to an online ad is the father of a child born to one of the women and must pay child support, a Kansas judge ruled Wednesday.
Topeka resident William Marotta had argued that he had waived his parental rights and didn’t intend to be a father. Shawnee County District Court Judge Mary Mattivi rejected that claim, saying the parties didn’t involve a licensed physician in the artificial insemination process and thus Marotta didn’t qualify as a sperm donor, The Topeka Capital-Journal (http://bit.ly/LHwLyW) reported.
“In this case, quite simply, the parties failed to perform to statutory requirement of the Kansas Parentage Act in not enlisting a licensed physician at some point in the artificial insemination process, and the parties’ self-designation of (Marotta) as a sperm donor is insufficient to relieve (Marotta) of parental right and responsibilities to the child,” Mattivi wrote.
The Kansas Department for Children and Families filed the case in October 2012 seeking to have Marotta declared the father of a child born to Jennifer Schreiner in 2009. The state was seeking to have Marotta declared the child’s father so he can be held responsible for about $6,000 in public assistance the state provided, as well as future child support.
Click here to read the entire article: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/judge-rules-kan-sperm-donor-owes-child-support-21629154#.UuEtsMuV-Bg.email
NEW HAVEN — THE new movie “Delivery Man” stars Vince Vaughn as a former sperm donor who finds out that he has more than 500 children. Is this a Hollywood exaggeration or a possible outcome? Truth is, no one knows. In the United States, we do not track how many sperm donors there are, how often they donate, or how many children are born from the donations.
Unlike a Hollywood happy ending, however, this lack of regulation has real consequences for sperm donors and the children they help produce. The Journal of the American Medical Association published one case study of a healthy 23-year-old donor who transmitted a genetic heart condition that affected at least eight of 22 offspring from his donated sperm, including a toddler who died from heart failure. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends genetic screening of sperm donors, and many banks do it, but the government does not require it. The risks become magnified the greater the number of children conceived from each donor.
How did we get to this point? Sperm donation has evolved from a practice of customized production to an industry that resembles mass manufacturing.
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At Mombian.com – July 11, 2013
The past couple of weeks have seen a new round of progress in several marriage-equality lawsuits—and just as with the cases that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 (as I wrote a few weeks ago), lesbian moms are again in the forefront, along with a number of gay dads. Two of the cases (in Michigan and North Carolina) even began as challenges to state bans on second-parent adoptions, and later evolved into marriage-ban challenges as well.
Let’s take things alphabetically:
– See more at: http://www.mombian.com/2013/07/11/lesbian-moms-again-in-forefront-in-new-round-of-marriage-cases/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mombian+%28Mombian%29#sthash.cUOuKlfe.dpuf
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May 8, 2013 – BY MARK OPPENHEIMER, NewRepublic.com
Last week, on the day that Sports Illustrated posted NBA player Jason Collins’s essay announcing his homosexuality, I was walking with Rebekah, our six-year-old. We were going to pick up our car at the auto mechanic’s shop on the corner, when across the street I spotted a neighbor going in the other direction, strolling hand-in-hand with her two-year-old son. They waved to me, and I said hi, and then we walked on. “Who was that?” Rebekah asked.
I hesitated. I could have given a very simple answer: “That was Evelyn’s wife.” (Evelyn, as I’ll call her, is a woman Rebekah has met several times.) But I didn’t. I told her something else, something true but a little bit evasive, something like, “That was our neighbor Claire and her son—they live next door to the O’Malleys.”