Federal judge orders Utah to put same-sex couple on their child’s birth certificate

July 15, 2015 – Fox13Now.com

SALT LAKE CITY — A federal judge has ordered the Utah Department of Health to put a same-sex couple on their child’s birth certificate, ruling that the state is discriminating against them.

U.S. District Court Judge Dee Benson said that in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, Utah would need to change its laws to reflect that new reality.

“I’m just still trying to see if there’s any way you can, now that same sex marriage is legal, tell me Utah has a rational basis in discriminating against this woman,” he told lawyers for the Utah Attorney General’s Office.

Kami and Angie Roe sued the state after health officials refused to list Angie as a parent of their child. The couple married after Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage was overturned. Kami is the birth mother of their child, Lucy. Angie Roe said she took the exact same steps that a man would if his wife used assisted reproductive services (such as a sperm donor), including signing the same paperwork. But the Utah Department of Health refused to issue a birth certificate with Kami and Angie Roe’s names on it.

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For Two Moms, a Battle to Be on a Birth Certificate

July 14, 2015 – Yahoo Parenting by Esther Crane

Spouses Keri Roberson and Molly Maness-Roberson of Texas, married in 2012, are now fighting for the right to have both of their names on their son’s birth certificate. (Photo: Facebook)

Most parents don’t give a second thought to filling out a new baby’s birth certificate. But for some same-sex spouses like Keri Roberson and Molly Maness-Roberson, who have been legally married since 2012, this routine state document has become a battleground.

Maness-Roberson gave birth to son Boston earlier this month; he was conceived from Keri Roberson’s egg, and donor sperm, according to the Dallas Morning News. Yet the Fort Worth–area couple’s bliss over Boston’s coming into the world was overshadowed by the fact that Texas law currently does not permit both women to be listed as Boston’s parents.

“It just really breaks your heart, that’s the only way I can describe how I felt,” Maness-Roberson told the Dallas Morning News. Roberson and Maness-Roberson did not respond to Yahoo Parenting’s request for comment.

Just like birth certificates in many other states, Texas’ birth document has one line for the name of a father and another line for a mother; there’s no line for two parents of the same gender. The recent Supreme Court decision affirming marriage rights for same-sex partners forced Texas to amend its marriage license — but an equally important document, a child’s birth certificate, still reflects a pre–marriage equality era.

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A Mexican Judge Wants to Allow Same-Sex Couples to Adopt Children Nationwide

July 15, 2015 – towleroad.com via The Global Post – By Ioan Grillo

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican capital’s churches have a new challenge: where to seat same-sex parents during their adopted child’s baptism.

Traditionally, the father sits on the right, the mother on the left. But since a law reform in 2009, various same-sex couples have brought their adopted children to be baptized.

“It creates confusion. So we normally seat them in the order of how they appear on the register,” says the Rev. Hugo Valdemar, spokesman for the archdiocese of Mexico City.

The Roman Catholic Church is against same-sex marriage and opposes adoption by gay and lesbian couples. But it will not refuse to baptize any children.

That baptism seating dilemma could soon be shared across this very big country.

Mexican Supreme Court Judge Margarita Luna announced on July 6 that she will present a motion to make it unconstitutional to deny adoption to same-sex couples.

This would make adoption laws already approved in the Mexican capital, a heartland of socially liberal reforms, effective throughout the country, including in much more conservative states.

In June, Mexico’s high court also ruled it unconstitutional to deny marriage to people of the same sex — shortly before the US Supreme Court did exactly the same thing.

Under a leftist city assembly, Mexico City became the first place in Latin America to legalize gay marriage with the 2009 reform. Adoptions by couples who married under this law have been taking place since 2010.

The northern state of Coahuila, which borders Texas, also legalized gay marriage, in September 2014. And last month, two women became the state’s first same-sex couple to adopt a child.

Still, nationwide, Mexico is not exactly the bastion of liberalism it may sound like. Eighty-two percent of Mexicans identify themselves as Catholic, according to the census. And more staunchly conservative parts of the country are pushing in quite a different direction from Coahuila and Mexico City.

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Alaska issues first birth certificates to same-sex parents

KTVA.com, July 7, 2015 by Shannon Ballard

ANCHORAGE–   Like most people who haven’t lived in Alaska long, Amanda and Pam Bowers learned quickly to get outdoors.

On Tuesday they went for a walk around Kincaid Park. Amanda carried their 8-week-old daughter Ellie Lou Bowers strapped to her chest.

“She was born in Alaska so we have to get her out there to see as much as she can,” Amanda said.

The couple has been legally married since 2008. Amanda gave birth to Ellie but both of the new moms say motherhood feels so natural, which is the reason the Bowers want each of their names on Ellie’s birth certificate.

“Even though I didn’t carry her, she’s my baby, she’s my daughter,” Pam said.

However, Alaska statutes didn’t give that option. If a mother is married when she gives birth, the father’s name would appear on the birth certificate, according to Alaska’s laws. That didn’t apply to the Bowers’ case, as well as several other same-sex couples.

“What would happen is we’d have to go through second parent adoption procedures, which involve getting a lawyer and thousands of dollars,” Pam explained.

But now all that has changed. Acting State Register Andrew Jessen says the statute has been reworded: the word “father” has been replaced with “spouse.”

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Surrogate children can now claim French citizenship, top court rules

RT.com/news July 3, 2015

France’s top court has ruled that two surrogate children born abroad will now have legal status in the country. They can obtain birth certificates and claim citizenship despite a ban on surrogacy in France.

“Surrogate motherhood alone cannot justify the refusal to transcribe into French birth registers the foreign birth certificate of a child who has one French parent,” saysa statement from the Court of Cassation, one of France’s courts of last resort which has jurisdiction over all matters.

The court said in its press release that it was asked to consider two cases. In each of them, a French citizen claimed to be father to a child born by a surrogate mother in Russia.

The court said that the plaintiff “asked for the transcription of the Russian birth certificate into the French birth registers.”

“…the rules pertaining to transcription into French civil status registers, construed in the light of Article 8 of the European Human Rights Convention, should apply to this case. Therefore the theory of a fraud cannot hinder the transcription of a birth certificate,” the court said in the statement.

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Gay couple unable to leave Thailand with daughter

Washington Blade, by Michael Lavers – June 24, 2015

A Florida man claims he and his husband are unable to leave Thailand with their infant daughter because the woman who gave birth to her objects to the fact they are a same-sex couple.

Gordon “Bud” Lake told the Washington Blade during a Skype interview on June 9 that he met the surrogate mother in person for the first time the day before his daughter, Carmen Santos Lake, was born in a Bangkok hospital on Jan. 17.

He said he visited her in the subsequent days, and brought his son Álvaro, who was born through a surrogate in India in August 2013, with him. Lake told the Blade that his husband, who is from Spain, did not accompany him. Lake said the surrogate — who is not the baby’s biological mother — agreed to list him on their daughter’s birth certificate as her father.

He told the Blade the surrogate also signed a consent form that allowed him to take her from the hospital. “All seemed to be going well,” wrote Lake in an email to the Blade earlier this month. “Carmen was beautiful, happy and healthy. The surrogate was fully cooperating and I was looking forward to heading home with my family in a matter of weeks, once all the remaining paperwork was finalized.”

Lake told the Blade he first became aware that the surrogate had an issue with the fact that he and his husband are a same-sex couple a few weeks after she gave birth to their daughter. “She had stated to our lawyer [that] she was fine helping out a couple that had problems that couldn’t have a child on their own and that we weren’t an ordinary family,” Lake told the Blade, recalling the surrogate’s objections. “That’s when I first found out about it. I don’t know if the agency told her before hand.” Lake told the Blade the surrogate — represented by the Women’s Lawyers Association of Thailand — did not show up for a scheduled meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok where he said she was to have provided him with the necessary paperwork that would have allowed him to leave the country with his daughter.

He said the surrogate was also supposed to sign for her American passport. The surrogate made the first of several appearances in the Thai media on March 3. Lake told the Blade that the surrogate on March 19 arrived at the Bangkok apartment building in which he and his husband had previously lived. He said they had already moved because their original lawyer told them “she could come and try to take the baby from us.” Lake said the surrogate and her teenage daughter waited in the lobby for eight hours.

“She asked me to come downstairs and bring the baby,” he said, recalling a conversation he said he had with the surrogate over a Thai social media network. “She wanted to see the baby.”

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Michigan Legislation Allows Adoption Agencies to Reject LGBT Parents

Reuters via New York Times – June 10, 2015

(Reuters) – Adoption agencies in Michigan would be able to refuse service on religious grounds to homosexual couples who want to adopt children under three bills that the state’s Republican-controlled Senate passed on Wednesday.

The bills, which must be signed by the governor to become law, say child-placing agencies shall not be required to provide adoption services under circumstances that conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs contained in a written policy or other document. The agencies are private, but receive state funding.

While the bills do not specifically mention lesbian and gay couples, they are viewed as narrow versions of religious freedom acts passed in a number of states to shield businesses that want to refuse service to same-sex couples from discrimination lawsuits.

Supporters say the acts protect religious freedoms, while others say they are licenses to discriminate. With 37 states now allowing same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court has taken up the issue this year and conservative groups are turning toward backing religious-freedom laws from fighting recent battles on gay marriage.

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Gay adoption ban stricken from Florida laws after 4 decades

AP via The Tampa Tribune

TALLAHASSEE – The nearly four-decade-old law that prevents gays from adopting children will disappear from Florida’s statutes on July 1.

Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill today that removes the language – though the ban hasn’t been enforced for the past five years.

The bill signed by Scott also promotes adoption, but the original language was changed to include a provision removing the gay adoption ban from state law.

While conservative Republicans objected to the idea, others said that it simply changes the law to reflect reality.

A judge ruled five years ago that the state’s ban was unconstitutional.

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Italian surrogacy case goes to ECHR Grand Chamber

By Susan Gately – 05 June, 2015 – CatholicIreland.Net (The implications of this case are huge for European surrogacy but please keep in mind that the tone of the reporting reflects the source.)

The European Court of Human Rights decided earlier this week to refer an Italian surrogacy case on appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Court.

The case Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy was originally heard in the European Court of Human Rights in January this year.

The case involved a couple who obtained a child from a Russian company specialising in surrogacy.

Paradiso and Campanelli paid €49,000 for the baby boy who was produced through in vitro fertilisation and surrogacy. He had no biological connection with them.

Surrogacy is illegal in Italy, so the purchase of the baby was illegal, and passing him off as their own child, was seen as an act of fraud and a breach of public order. The Italian courts prosecuted the couple and the baby was placed with a foster family.

Paradiso and Campanelli appealed to the European Court of Human Rights maintaining that the interference was a breach of their right to “respect for private and family life” which is protected under the European Convention of Human Rights.

In its judgment on 27 January 2015, the Section of the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of the couple and ordered the Italian government to pay them €20,000 in damages and costs.

The Court considered that the Italian authorities had not given sufficient weight to the best interests of the child when balancing them against public-policy considerations.

The authorities had decided to remove the child and to place him under guardianship on the grounds that he had no biological relationship with the applicants and that the applicants had been in an unlawful situation (by contacting a Russian agency in order to become parents and subsequently bringing a child to Italy whom they passed off as their child, they had circumvented the prohibition in Italy on surrogacy and the rules on international adoption).

The Court said in particular, the authorities had not recognised the de facto relationship between the applicants and the child and had imposed an extreme measure, reserved for cases where children were in danger.

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Virgin Islands Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Second-Parent Adoptions

May 23rd, 2015 by Art Leonard

On May 20 the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands ruled that the Superior Court erred when it dismissed a second-parent adoption petition on the ground that the Virgin Islands did not recognize the Canadian same-sex marriage of the petitioners and granting the co-parent’s petition would require terminating the parental rights of the birth mother.  In re L.O.F. & N.M., 2015 V.I. Supreme LEXIS 13.  Eschewing a literal reading of the archaic adoption statutes, the court held that the policy of deciding adoption petitions in the best interest of children provides a basis to “waive” the termination of parental rights when a same-sex co-parent (or stepparent, for that matter) petitions to adopt a child.

The biological mother of L.O.F. and N.M. and her same-sex partner were married in Canada in 2007, and have raised their children together in St. Croix, V.I.  The children were conceived through anonymous sperm donations, the donors having necessarily waived any parental rights.  The women filed an adoption and name-change petition in the Superior Court in December 2012, asking the court to grant an adoption in the partner’s favor without affecting the parental rights of the birth mother so that “all parental rights and obligations [are] shared equally.”  The petition described this arrangement as a “second-parent adoption,” a procedure approved in many court decisions in the United States.  However, Superior Court Judge Denise A. Hinds Roach denied the petition, holding that because the petitioners “filed together as spouses” under “a limited ‘spousal’ or ‘stepparent’ provision in the V.I. adoption statutes and the V.I Code limits marriage to different-sex couples, the court could not grant the adoption.  After the superior court denied a motion for reconsideration, the petitioners appealed to the Supreme Court.

Writing for the unanimous court, Justice Maria M. Cabret found that Judge Hinds Roach had misconstrued the V.I. adoption provisions.  Indeed, the court found that a literal interpretation of those provisions would disallow ordinary stepparent adoptions.  This is because the statute authorizes adoptions only by single people or married couples, and apparently requires terminating the parental rights of natural parents upon the adoption of their children.  Reviewing the history of the V.I. statute, first enacted in 1921 and later incorporated without change in the V.I. Code in 1957, Justice Cabret pointed out that divorce and remarriage were not common phenomena in the Virgin Islands in those days so provision for stepparent adoptions was not made.  However, the court went on to say that a literal reading of the statutory language should be rejected if it would produce absurd results or undermine the statutory objective, which is to “consider the best interests of the child when making decisions that concern the child.”

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