NOM compares potential gay parents to rapists, sexual predators

By: Tuesday October 9, 2012 Pams House Blend

Pay attention, gay folks. There is seems to be a quiet war going on against our rights to be surrogate parents.

Via the NOM blog, I found this highly offensive piece, The New Sexual Predators. In it, the author, Alana S. Newman compares gay couples and older woman to human traffickers out to steal the eggs of younger women.

Every portion of this piece is gag-worthy drivel:

Young women now have to defend themselves not only from stereotypical sexual predators, but also from older women and gay men who seek their eggs.

. . . there are new predators on the scene, for whom we do not have a script. There are new characters eager to exploit our daughters’ bodies, who enjoy unsullied reputations, passing detection even as they blatantly hunt for eggs and wombs with checkbooks in hand. And historically they have been the people women should fear the least. These new players vying for access to young women’s bodies are older or infertile women, and gay men—quite often our friends and members of our family.

. . . Our gay friends and family members may now also be after our daughters’ bodies. These are the only men in the world we thought we could trust because they weren’t interested in our bodies. That is, until they grew older and discovered they wanted to be parents. Today, more and more often, gay men are using egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children on purpose. Toleration of these attempts to create families follows a timeline of slipped slopes and fallen barriers. If heterosexual couples can use sperm donors to create children who are separated from their biological fathers, so the logic goes, then lesbians should be able to do the same thing. To them, it’s not biology that matters—kids just need two parents. And if lesbians use sperm donors to create fatherless children, then it’s only equal and fair for gay men to be able to use egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children too. Because again, it’s not biology that matters; kids just need two parents. At present, all those who believe in gender equality rather than gender complementarity are being urged to accept this often violent (against women) form of third-party reproduction.

It’s not just the the piece itself which we should be paying attention to but also who is promoting it. Yet again, the National Organization for Marriage undercuts its false claim of simply attempting to protect marriage and continuous whine about “falsely” being called bigots. By promoting this piece on its blog,  it is now even more apparent that NOM has declared war on same-sex families.

Click here to read the entire article.

in In the News / IVF / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

NOM Defends Child Kidnapping Because Of A Parent’s ‘Biological Connection’

By Zack Ford  on Oct 1, 2012 – ThinkProgress.org

The National Organization for Marriage is once again insulting the adoptive relationships of parents who do not have a biological connection with their children. Jennifer Thieme of NOM’s Ruth Institute wrote recently that banning same-sex marriage is the “compassionate choice” for children, ignoring the millions of children already being raised by same-sex couples. In an attempt to raise alarm about what will happen if heterosexual couples no longer have special recognition on government paperwork, Thieme cites the tragic case of Lisa Miller, who embraced an ex-gay identity and kidnapped her daughter away to Central America to prevent her ex-partner, Janet Jenkins, from having legal guardianship:

Conservatives, and libertarians for that matter, should be extremely alarmed at the change from gendered marriage to genderless marriage. How many have heard the story of Lisa Miller, the bio mom who lost custody of her bio daughter to her former lesbian lover due to their civil union? The lover is not related to the child by blood or adoption, and this did not matter to the judge who made the ruling. Lisa escaped with her daughter to Central America. Her name appears on the FBI and INTERPOL Wanted Lists for parental kidnapping, and the Amish pastor who helped her escape has been convicted of “aiding an international parental kidnapping of a minor.” He might be looking at three years jail time.

Lisa’s biological connection to her own daughter was disregarded in favor of a public policy aimed at promoting equality. The objective, natural, and pre-political reality lost, and the subjective, artificial, and state defined reality won.

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in In the News / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Houston woman claims gay couple duped her into being a surrogate

DallasVoice.com, September 20, 2012

A Houston woman has filed a lawsuit after she gave birth to twins in July for a man who now says she served as a surrogate for him and his partner.

Houston businessman Marvin McMurrey III and Cindy Close met in 2005 and were both in their forties.

They’d never been married and never had sexual relations with each other, but wanted children. So, over time they decided to become co-parents, Houston’s Fox 26 reports.

McMurrey fertilized a donor egg through in vitro fertilization and Close carried the child, which turned out to be twins. But after delivering a girl and boy in July, a social worker informed her that she’d been a surrogate for McMurrey and his partner Phong Nguyen.

Click here to read the entire article.

in In the News / Legal / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Rupert Everett Tries to Soften Offensive Gay Parent Remarks

The Advocate – September 19, 2012

Rupert Everett attempts to soften the controversy surrounding his speaking out against gay parenting by saying he realizes he’s “very out of kilter with the rest of the world.”

The 53-year-old openly gay actor has received continued scorn for remarks he made during an interview for the magazine section of London’s Sunday Times last weekend. “I can’t think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads,” he said.

While appearing on U.K. talk show This Morning, Everett stated that he was just expressing his opinion as an individual, joking that it’s good news he isn’t running for public office.

“I have lots of gay friends with children,” he said. “I have lots of gay friends who have got married, I’ve been to lots of gay weddings, but I’m not big into marriage straight or gay to be honest.”

Click here to read the entire article.

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Same-Sex Adoption Flip-Flops: The Unbearable Lightness of Mitt Romney’s Convictions

When will Mitt Romney get it?  The sheer number of contortions he has performed on the issue of adoption by gay and lesbian parents has earned him a gold medal for political flip-flopping. He’s morphed from the congenial former governor of blue-saturated Massachusetts, where gay adoption is both legal and supported by a majority of the populace, to the Republican candidate for president in a party that has lurched far right for a cuddle in the arms of anti-equality crusaders.

Apparently, behind the scenes at last month’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, there was quite a showdown between social conservatives and more moderate voices over whether or not to add language to the GOP platform condemning adoption by same-sex couples. Socially conservative members of the GOP platform committee attempted to wrestle their opposition to gay adoption into the formal document.  Insiders report that members of the committee belonging to the Log Cabin Republicans, a national political organization that represents gay and lesbian issues, torpedoed the attempt. As for Romney?  It seems he remained mute on the issue.

Currently, gay adoption laws vary widely across the United States.  Openly gay couples are legally permitted to adopt in just 13 jurisdictions (D.C., New Jersey, New York, Indiana, Maine, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, Florida, and Guam), and although single gay and lesbians are generally able to adopt, most states continue to ban adoption by gay couples.  (As a side note, Paul Ryan has sided with those who oppose equal parental rights for gays and lesbians, voting against allowing gay adoptions in the District of Columbia).

So, where is Romney on the issue?  Well, a better question might be: Where isn’t he?  Over the past several years he’s taken both sides of the issue and filled in each with shades of grey.

In 2006, while he was working to exempt religious organizations from allowing gay couples to adopt in Massachusetts, he told the Boston Globe, “I know that there will be some gay couples who will say that this could be discriminatory against us, except that there are many, many other agencies that can meet the needs of those gay couples, and I recognize that they have a legitimate interest in being able to receive adoptive services.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in Adoption / In the News / Legislation / Second Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia

August 22, 2012
New York Times

Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age, scientists reported on Wednesday, in the first study to quantify the effect as it builds each year. The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.

Experts said that the finding was hardly reason to forgo fatherhood later in life, though it may have some influence on reproductive decisions. The overall risk to a man in his 40s or older is in the range of 2 percent, at most, and there are other contributing biological factors that are entirely unknown.

But the study, published online in the journal Nature, provides support for the argument that the surging rate of autism diagnoses over recent decades is attributable in part to the increasing average age of fathers, which could account for as many as 20 to 30 percent of cases.

The findings also counter the longstanding assumption that the age of the mother is the most important factor in determining the odds of a child having developmental problems. The risk of chromosomal abnormalities, like Down syndrome, increases for older mothers, but when it comes to some complex developmental and psychiatric problems, the lion’s share of the genetic risk originates in the sperm, not the egg, the study found.

Previous studies had strongly suggested as much, including an analysis published in April that found that this risk was higher at age 35 than 25 and crept up with age. The new report quantifies that risk for the first time, calculating how much it accumulates each year.

The research team found that the average child born to a 20-year-old father had 25 random mutations that could be traced to paternal genetic material. The number increased steadily by two mutations a year, reaching 65 mutations for offspring of 40-year-old men.

The average number of mutations coming from the mother’s side was 15, no matter her age, the study found.

“This study provides some of the first solid scientific evidence for a true increase in the condition” of autism, said Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. “It is extremely well done and the sample meticulously characterized.”

The new investigation, led by the Icelandic firm Decode Genetics, analyzed genetic material taken from blood samples of 78 parent-child trios, focusing on families in which parents with no signs of a mental disorder gave birth to a child who developed autism or schizophrenia. This approach allows scientists to isolate brand-new mutations in the genes of the child that were not present in the parents.

Most people have many of these so-called de novo mutations, which occur spontaneously at or near conception, and a majority of them are harmless. But recent studies suggest that there are several such changes that can sharply increase the risk for autism and possibly schizophrenia — and the more a child has, the more likely he or she is by chance to have one of these rare, disabling ones.

Some difference between the paternal and maternal side is to be expected. Sperm cells divide every 15 days or so, whereas egg cells are relatively stable, and continual copying inevitably leads to errors, in DNA as in life.

Still, when the researchers removed the effect of paternal age, they found no difference in genetic risk between those who had a diagnosis of autism or schizophrenia and a control group of Icelanders who did not. “It is absolutely stunning that the father’s age accounted for all this added risk, given the possibility of environmental factors and the diversity of the population,” said Dr. Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of Decode and the study’s senior author. “And it’s stunning that so little is contributed by the age of the mother.”

Click here to read the entire article.

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Pastor Convicted in Parental Kidnapping Case

New York Times – by Erik Eckholm, August 14, 2012

After only four hours of deliberation, a federal jury in Burlington, Vt., found an Amish-Mennonite pastor guilty of abetting international parental kidnapping in a widely publicized case involving same-sex unions and conservative Christian opposition to homosexuality.

The pastor, Kenneth L. Miller of Stuarts Draft, Va., could face up to three years in prison. He was convicted of helping Lisa A. Miller flee to Nicaragua with her daughter, Isabella Miller-Jenkins, in September 2009 to evade court-ordered visits with Ms. Miller’s former partner in a civil union in Vermont.

After the verdict, about 100 of Mr. Miller’s supporters from the Beachy Amish-Mennonite sect, the women in traditional long dresses and head scarves, gathered outside the courthouse to sing “Amazing Grace” and other hymns.

After splitting up with the former partner, Janet Jenkins, in 2003, Ms. Miller, who is not related to Mr. Miller, declared herself a born-again Christian, denounced homosexuality, soon began interfering with visits and tried to strip Ms. Jenkins of her legal rights as a parent. Ms. Miller moved to Virginia and, in 2009, as a frustrated Family Court judge in Vermont threatened to transfer custody of the girl, disappeared with her daughter.

The Beachy Amish-Mennonites regard homosexual behavior as a sin.

In the trial, Mr. Miller’s lawyer, Joshua M. Autry, did not dispute the evidence that Mr. Miller had helped arrange for Ms. Miller and her daughter to fly from Canada to Nicaragua and obtain shelter from missionaries in his sect. But Mr. Autry argued that Mr. Miller did not realize that Ms. Miller was defying any court orders at the time of the flight.

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Christie vetoes bill that would have eased tough rules for gestational surrogates

Wednesday, August 08, 2012 – NJ.com

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie today vetoed a bill that would have relaxed New Jersey’s strict surrogate parenting law, saying the state hadn’t yet answered the “profound” questions that surround creating a child through a contract.

According to the governor’s statement explaining the veto obtained by The Star-Ledger, “Permitting adults to contract with others regarding a child in such a manner unquestionably raises serious and significant issues.”

“In contrast to traditional surrogacy, a gestational surrogate birth does not use the egg of the carrier,” the governor wrote. “In this scenario, the gestational carrier lacks any genetic connection to the baby, and in some cases, it is feasible that neither parent is genetically related to the child. Instead, children born to gestational surrogates are linked to their parents by contract.”

“While some all applaud the freedom to explore these new, and sometimes necessary, arranged births, others will note the profound change in the traditional beginnings of the family that this bill will enact. I am not satisfied that these questions have been sufficiently studied by the Legislature at this time,” according to the statement.

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in In the News / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Trial Due for Pastor in Dispute on Custody

 

August 6, 2012
New York Times

The curious involvement of an Amish-Mennonite sect in a high-profile case of international parental kidnapping will be on display — and perhaps become clearer — in a courtroom in Burlington, Vt., this week.

Jury selection is to begin Tuesday in the criminal trial of a pastor charged with helping Lisa A. Miller flee the country with her young daughter to prevent the girl from staying with Ms. Miller’s former partner in a civil union.

Kenneth L. Miller, 46, the leader of a Beachy Amish Mennonite church in Stuarts Draft, Va., is accused of helping Ms. Miller, who is no relation, violate custody orders, aiding her in her flight with her daughter, Isabella, to Nicaragua, where they were sheltered by missionaries of the sect. The pair have been missing since September 2009 and are believed to be in Central America.

The bitter and widely publicized custody battle that preceded Ms. Miller’s flight pitted conservative Christians using the slogan “Protect Isabella” against the courts and supporters of gay rights.

Ms. Miller repeatedly defied orders by a Vermont family court to allow Isabella to visit  Janet Jenkins, Isabella’s other legal parent. The Vermont civil union was officially dissolved in 2004; Ms. Miller, the birth mother, was granted custody, and Ms. Jenkins was awarded visitation rights.

Ms. Miller became a cause célèbre among evangelical opponents of same-sex marriage after she declared her newfound religious objection to homosexuality and spent years in court trying to end Ms. Jenkins’s parental rights. In September 2009, as a frustrated Vermont judge ordered one more visit and threatened to transfer custody of the girl to Ms. Jenkins, Ms. Miller and Isabella, then 7, disappeared from their home in Lynchburg, Va.

Federal agents eventually learned that the pair had flown to Nicaragua, where they were sheltered by missionaries of the Beachy Amish Mennonites, sect members have acknowledged. The group believes that same-sex marriage is a sin.

Mr. Miller contacted a fellow pastor in Nicaragua to ask if he would buy one-way airplane tickets for Ms. Miller and her daughter, meet them at the Managua airport and arrange a place to stay, according to recovered e-mails, telephone records and the deposition of the missionary in Nicaragua.

Ms. Miller and Isabella remain missing, but federal agents believe they remain in hiding somewhere in Nicaragua, possibly with covert help from conservative Christians.

How Kenneth Miller met Lisa Miller and who drove the pair to the Canadian border so they could fly from Toronto remain mysteries.

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in In the News / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

First inscription of two fathers in Argentina

Tomorrow morning, in Buenos Aires, the first inscription of the birth of a baby with two fathers will be done in Argentina. Tobías is a boy who was born a few weeks ago in India after a surrogacy process. He’s now arrived to Argentina and both his fathers will be registered with no distinction between the biological one and the other one.

 

Although Marriage Equality Act states that no difference should be made between children of same or different sex couples, and besides the fact that many birth certificates with two mothers have already been made, it wasn’t easy to get to this point as the Civil Registry was at first reluctant to do it, but the work of the Legal Staff of the FALGBT made it possible. I want to recognize my colleagues at that point.

 

Moreover, a modification to Argentina’s Civil Code is being debated in the Congress which would made this kind of registrations standard in all the country. We’ll keep you up to date about this process.

 

in Adoption / In the News / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments