It Is Time for the U.S. to Cover IVF (for Gays and Lesbians Too)

Huffington Post, March 18, 2013 – Dov Fox and I. Glen Cohen

This week the United Kingdom joined the ranks of countries like Israel and Canada that provide in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment to citizens under a certain age (42 in the U.K.) who can’t have children without it. That includes gays and lesbians. When it comes to helping people form the families they long for, the United States is woefully behind. The U.S. has among the lowest rates of IVF usage of any developed country in the world, owing in part to boasting the highest cost for the procedure, on average $100,000 per successful pregnancy.

Among the handful of states that require insurers to cover IVF, many carve out exclusions for same-sex couples and people who aren’t married. These singles, gays, and lesbians are sometimes called “dysfertile” as opposed to “infertile” to emphasize their social (rather than just biological) obstacles to reproduction. The U.S. should expand IVF coverage for the infertile and include the dysfertile too.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the inability to reproduce qualifies as a health-impairing disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The commitment to universal health care that we renewed in President Obama’s health reform act invites us to understand the infertile and dysfertile alike as needing medicine to restore a capacity–for “[r]eproduction and the sexual dynamics surrounding it”–that is, in the words of the Supreme Court, “central to the life process itself.”

It is true that dysfertility fits less comfortably within the medical model. But why should that alone make less worthy the desires of gays and lesbians to have a genetic child? Joe Saul, the protagonist in John Steinbeck’s 1950 play Burning Bright, put it best:

A man can’t scrap his bloodline, can’t snip the thread of his immortality. There’s more than . . . the remembered stories of glory and the forgotten shame of failure. There is a trust imposed to hand my line over to another.

My impulse to create a biological family, to raise “my own” children, to “hand my line over to another” is shared by people single or married, black or white, gay or straight. And the arguments against IVF subsidies fall short.

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in IVF / Legal / Legislation / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Pediatrics Group Backs Gay Marriage, Saying It Helps Children

March 21, 2013
New York Times

The American Academy of Pediatrics declared its support for same-sex marriage for the first time on Thursday, saying that allowing gay and lesbian parents to marry if they so choose is in the best interests of their children.

The academy’s new policy statement says same-sex marriage helps guarantee rights, benefits and long-term security for children, while acknowledging that it does not now ensure access to federal benefits. When marriage is not an option, the academy said, children should not be deprived of foster care or adoption by single parents or couples, whatever their sexual orientation.

The academy’s review of scientific literature began more than four years ago, and the result is a 10-page report with 60 citations.

“If the studies are different in their design and sample but the results continue to be similar, that gives scientists and consumers more faith in the result,” said Dr. Ellen Perrin, a co-author of the new policy and a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine.

Other scientists called the evidence lackluster and said the academy’s endorsement was premature. Loren Marks, an associate professor of child and family studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said there was not enough national data to support the pediatric association’s position on same-sex marriage. “National policy should be informed by nationally representative data,” he said. “We are moving in the direction of higher-quality national data, but it’s slow.”

The academy cited research finding that a child’s well-being is much more affected by the strength of relationships among family members and a family’s social and economic resources than by the sexual orientation of the parents. “There is an emerging consensus, based on extensive review of the scientific literature, that children growing up in households headed by gay men or lesbians are not disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents,” the academy said.

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in Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Kansas Supreme Court Upholds Co-Parenting Agreement

According to this February 22, 2013 decision, “A coparenting agreement is not automatically rendered unenforceable as violating public policy merely because it contains the biological mother’s agreement to share the custody of her children with another, so long as the intent and effect of the arrangement will promote the welfare and best interests of the children.”

The court basically stated that same-sex couples have the same rights as opposite sex couples in parenting.  Way to go Kansas – Who knew?

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Married Gay Couple In Iowa Fighting For Both To Be Listed On Child’s Birth Certificate

By    On Top Magazine Staff
Published:    March 04, 2013

The Iowa Supreme Court is considering a legal challenge brought by a married lesbian couple denied the right for both to be listed on their child’s birth certificate.

In a landmark 2009 decision, the state’s highest court unanimously struck down the state’s law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

However, the Iowa Department of Public Health has refused to issue birth certificates listing married spouses of the same gender as the legal parents of newborn children.

Heather and Melissa Gartner are one such couple.  Despite being married, only Heather Gartner, their daughter’s biological mother, is listed on the birth certificate.

“When you have somebody tell you that your marriage is not equal to your counterparts, because of who you’re married to, you can’t be a parent to this child – it’s very hurtful,” Melissa Gartner told CNN Radio.  “I mean, honestly, when the first birth certificate came, it felt like someone had smacked you.”

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

Republicans Sign Brief in Support of Gay Marriage

February 25, 2013
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Dozens of prominent Republicans — including top advisers to former President George W. Bush, four former governors and two members of Congress — have signed a legal brief arguing that gay people have a constitutional right to marry, a position that amounts to a direct challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner and reflects the civil war in the party since the November election.

The document will be submitted this week to the Supreme Court in support of a suit seeking to strike down Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative barring same-sex marriage, and all similar bans. The court will hear back-to-back arguments next month in that case and another pivotal gay rights case that challenges the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The Proposition 8 case already has a powerful conservative supporter: Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under Mr. Bush and one of the suit’s two lead lawyers. The amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief is being filed with Mr. Olson’s blessing. It argues, as he does, that same-sex marriage promotes family values by allowing children of gay couples to grow up in two-parent homes, and that it advances conservative values of “limited government and maximizing individual freedom.”

Legal analysts said the brief had the potential to sway conservative justices as much for the prominent names attached to it as for its legal arguments. The list of signers includes a string of Republican officials and influential thinkers — 75 as of Monday evening — who are not ordinarily associated with gay rights advocacy, including some who are speaking out for the first time and others who have changed their previous positions.

Among them are Meg Whitman, who supported Proposition 8 when she ran for California governor; Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York; Stephen J. Hadley, a Bush national security adviser; Carlos Gutierrez, a commerce secretary to Mr. Bush; James B. Comey, a top Bush Justice Department official; David A. Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director; and Deborah Pryce, a former member of the House Republican leadership from Ohio who is retired from Congress.

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With No Shortcut to a Green Card, Gay Couples Leave U.S.

February 17, 2013
New York Times

Not long ago, Brandon Perlberg had a growing law practice and a Manhattan apartment he shared with his partner, who is British. They hosted themed dinner parties and wine tastings for a wide circle of friends.

But Mr. Perlberg, an American who is gay, now lives in London. Early last year he reluctantly left his law firm, rented out his apartment and said goodbye to friends. After nearly seven years in the United States on legal but temporary visas, his partner had not been able to obtain a visa as a permanent resident. The two were facing the possibility of permanent separation.

Americans with a foreign-born spouse of the opposite sex are able to get them resident visas, or green cards, with relative ease. But federal law does not allow Americans to petition for green cards for same-sex spouses or partners. Eventually, they face a choice of remaining in the country with the immigrant here illegally or leaving the United States.

“Ultimately, we resolved that staying together was the most important thing for us,” Mr. Perlberg said. “And the only way to guarantee that we got to stay together was by making this move.”

Mr. Perlberg is part of a diaspora of gay Americans who have found they had to uproot and leave the country to continue to live with foreign partners. And this year, binational gay couples like his are a new — and controversial — focus of the debate in Washington on an ambitious overhaul of immigration laws. In a blueprint that President Obama presented last month, he pledged to give citizens, and also immigrants who are legal residents, the ability to petition for a green card for a same-sex foreign partner, if they can show they have “a permanent relationship.”

The Supreme Court will also take up same-sex issues this year, with hearings in March on two cases that challenge the definition of marriage as being a union between only a man and a woman. One case deals directly with a 1996 statute, the Defense of Marriage Act, that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage and governs the exclusion of gay couples from visas and other immigration benefits.

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France: Children born via surrogates overseas to be granted citizenship

04 February 2013

By James Brooks

Appeared in BioNews 691

The French Justice Minister’s instruction to courts to accept citizenship applications for children born via surrogates in other countries has unleashed a political and popular furore.

The minister, Christiane Taubira, issued the instruction during a debate on gay marriage. Immediately, ministers from the opposition UMP party accused the government of attempting to underhandedly introduce liberal legislation on surrogacy and access to IVF for gay couples. Surrogacy is illegal in France and fertility treatment only available to heterosexual couples.

After Taubira had presented the instruction to the French parliament, the head of the opposition UMP party, Jean-François Copé, declared that the government had ‘let its mask drop’ and that the instruction should immediately be withdrawn.

UMP MP Laurent Wauquiez, who leads a movement calling for a popular referendum on gay marriage, told a full French parliament that ‘the law being presented is the start rather than the finish line and test-tube babies and surrogate mothers are the destination’.

According to the Associated Press, the debate ‘has sent thousands into the streets, turned the bridges over the Seine into billboards and prompted charges that women’s bodies will soon be for rent in a society that still has surprisingly deep conservative roots’.

Faced with such vociferous opposition, both Taubira and President François Hollande have sought to clarify their position. Talking to the press after a cabinet meeting, Taubira said: ‘There isn’t the slightest change in the position of either the President or the government. In law surrogacy is forbidden – there is no debate on that point’.

In fact the instruction concerns only children who are born via surrogacy overseas and ensures that they will be given French civil status – similar to nationality – when they arrive in France.

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India Bars Gay Couples From Surrogacy Services

BY Trudy Ring – the Advocate

January 18 2013

India, which has been a popular destination for gay would-be parents seeking surrogacy services, will be so no more, with new regulations barring foreign same-sex couples and single people from entering into surrogacy arrangements there.

The new rules, posted on the Indian Home Ministry’s website, “say foreign couples seeking to enter into a surrogacy arrangement in India must be a ‘man and woman [who] are duly married and the marriage should be sustained at least two years,’” Agence France-Presse reports. Some proponents of the move said they were concerned about exploitation of impoverished young Indian women by affluent foreigners. India legalized commercial surrogacy in 2002.

Several fertility specialists and activists, meanwhile, decried the new regulations. “This is a huge heartbreak for homosexual couples and singles,” fertility doctor Anoop Gupta told AFP. Gay rights advocate Nitin Karani added, “It’s totally unfair — not only for gay people but for people who are not married who may have been living together for years, and for singles.”

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

A Doubly Trying Tax Season for Same-Sex Couples

February 9, 2013
New York TImes

FOR Colette Hayward and Margaret Selby, the problem is this: Maryland recognizes their 2009 marriage, but the federal government does not.

The ramifications are maddeningly complex, no more so than when they deal with the Internal Revenue Service. Two years after taking legal action to assert their rights as a married couple, they are paying a price when they pay their taxes.

For Ms. Hayward, 47, a lawyer who owns two construction businesses, and Ms. Selby, 48, a Baltimore County police officer, a big issue involves insurance benefits they fought to achieve. They are paying taxes on those benefits, even though such benefits for spouses normally are not taxed.

For same-sex couples across the United States, an offshoot of being married is a dizzying set of complications in computing taxes. Although nine states and the District of Columbia have approved same-sex marriages — two others recognize marriages conducted elsewhere — the federal 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prohibits such unions from being recognized by the federal government.

Ms. Hayward, 47, and Ms. Selby, 48, have two children and three grandchildren. They were together for 18 years before they married in Massachusetts. Soon after their marriage in 2009, Ms. Selby filed a request with the Baltimore County Police Department to add Ms. Hayward to her health care coverage and to make sure she was eligible for other benefits available to officer’s spouses. She was turned down.

Lambda Legal, the gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy organization, filed an administrative grievance, arguing that denying benefits to a married couple, gay or straight, was contrary to Maryland law. It cited a 2010 opinion by the Maryland attorney general, Douglas F. Gansler, which noted the state’s longstanding law recognizing out-of-state marriages, including same-sex ones.

In 2011, an arbitrator ruled in the couple’s favor. But the victory came with a catch. Generally, health insurance benefits are not taxable, and adding a spouse or child to an insurance policy has no tax consequences. But because of DOMA, their insurance is treated not as a spousal benefit, but as imputed income, and thus subject to federal income tax. Ms. Hayward said Baltimore County told the couple that adding her to the policy increased the cost of the insurance by about $8,000 a year. She figures that it will increase their overall tax bill by about $2,500 to $3,000.

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in Estate Planning / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

NJ Court’s Split Decision Provides Little Clarity on Surrogacy

October 24, 2012
New York Times By

Unable to conceive, the New Jersey couple did what an increasing number of 21st-century parents have done: they got an egg from an anonymous donor, and made an agreement with another woman to carry the child for them.

And knowing that there are any number of ways that having a child by surrogate can end in heartache, they tried to protect against it. They had the surrogate legally renounce her right to the child, and had a judge pre-emptively order that their names appear on the birth certificate.

But for all their efforts, their case has become an object lesson in how much modern babymaking has outpaced the law, leaving even the most careful would-be parents relying on little more than crossed fingers.

On Wednesday the New Jersey Supreme Court deadlocked over how to handle the wife’s plea to be named the mother of the child that she and her husband are raising, ending a lengthy legal battle while providing little new clarity. The state had sued, successfully, to strip the wife’s name from the birth certificate. The couple argued this was discrimination: State law automatically makes an infertile husband the father if his wife uses a sperm donor, so why should the same presumption not apply to an infertile wife? An appeals court disagreed with that distinction, siding with state officials who argued adoption was the only option for a mother with no genetic connection to a child.

The court’s split had the effect of affirming the appellate court’s ruling and leaving the child, now 3, legally motherless. It also neatly captured the continued uncertainty across the country, 25 years after New Jersey was at the center of what remains the best-known surrogate custody dispute, over a child known as Baby M.

Three justices agreed with the couple that the law should not treat infertile women differently from infertile men. Three others argued that allowing women who hire surrogates to bypass adoption would give special privileges to those who can afford expensive reproductive technologies.

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