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New York Times, April 14, 2015 by AP
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s ban on gay adoption is getting tossed out by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature.
The Florida Senate on Tuesday voted 27-11 for an adoption bill that repeals the law first passed in 1977. It now heads to Gov. Rick Scott.
Sen. Don Gaetz, the sponsor of the bill, called the current ban “meaningless” because it is no longer enforced. An appeals court ruled it unconstitutional in 2010.
But Sen. Alan Hays called the repeal of the ban “a poison pill.” He urged legislators to consider the long-term implications of repealing the ban.
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March 27, 2015 by Carlos Santoscoy
A federal judge in Texas has temporarily blocked implementation of a plan to extend family leave benefits to married gay couples.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor granted the preliminary junction sought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (pictured) that stays expansion of the federal definition of “spouse” in the Family Medical Leave Act to include the legal husband or wife of a gay worker.
The change was set to take effect Friday.
Under the law, employers must allow unpaid time off for employees facing certain family emergencies.
Paxton argued that the new regulation would force state agencies to violate Texas’ 2005 voter-approved constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual union.
“This lawsuit is about defending the sovereignty of our state, and we will continue to protect Texas from the unlawful overreach of the federal government,” Paxton said in filing the lawsuit.
“Texans have clearly defined the institution of marriage in our state, and attempts by the Obama administration to disregard the will of our citizens through the use of new federal rules is unconstitutional and an affront to the foundations of federalism,” he added.
Arkansas, Louisiana and Nebraska joined the lawsuit.
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The Baltimore Sun, by Michael Dresser, March 18, 2015
f Fiona M. Jardine had a husband, the expensive fertility treatments she’s now undergoing would be covered by her health plan.
But Jardine, 29, is married to a woman, so she and her wife have to pay out of pocket.
A bill that would grant married lesbian couples the same fertility treatment benefits as husbands and wives is advancing in the Maryland General Assembly. The measure passed unanimously in a House subcommittee Tuesday, and full Senate and House committees are likely to vote this week.
Del. Terri L. Hill, the bill’s House sponsor, said the measure is designed to bring consistency to state law, given Maryland voters’ approval of same-sex marriage in 2012.
“We’re concerned that we correct the law to reflect Maryland’s state on marriage equality,” said Hill, a Democrat who represents Howard and Baltimore counties. “It was about making sure all Marylanders are treated in an equitable fashion.”
Maryland has required state-regulated health insurance plans that offer pregnancy-related benefits to cover the costs of in vitro fertilization since 2000. It is one of a dozen states that require coverage of the procedure, which involves fertilizing the egg outside the woman’s body and implanting the embryo in the uterus.
That law includes a requirement that only the husband’s sperm can be used in any covered in vitro procedure — a provision that excludes lesbians using donated sperm. Hill’s bill, sponsored in the Senate by Montgomery County Democrat Cheryl Kagan, would remove that requirement for same-sex couples.
And if an insurer chooses to provide more extensive fertility coverage to heterosexual couples, same-sex couples would have to be offered the same.
“It’s all about equality. It’s all about updating our laws,” Kagan said.
Jardine, a graduate assistant at the University of Maryland College Park, said she was dismayed to learn that her insurance carrier would not cover the costly form of artificial insemination she needs because of a medical condition. The sticking point was that she and her wife, Jo Arnone, 57, would be using donor sperm instead of a husband’s sperm.
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MyKwartha.com, March 20, 2015 – By Andrea Gordon
Baby Jasmine Chan delivered the ultimate Valentine’s Day gift to her parents this year. It was her first word, clear and deliberate.
“Daddy,” she said, beaming across the dinner table.
Music to her two dads’ ears.
When they met 12 years ago, Paul Chan and Ewan French never imagined they would one day answer to Daddy or Papa.
Chan had recently come out to his family. It was a tough period and his mother was heartbroken. She wanted grandkids. He assumed his own dream of being a father would never come true.
It wasn’t until they married two years ago that the couple started to explore the idea of parenthood. Chan, 33, was confident they could be good, loving parents. French was on the fence.
“I always knew we’d have a strong community around us,” says French, 34, who was born and raised in Scotland.
“But I didn’t want (our child) to face any challenges because of having same-sex parents. Would we be putting her at an unfair advantage because of it?”
According to a new book from University of Cambridge developmental psychologist Susan Golombok, the answer is a resounding “No.”
Golombok, director of the university’s Centre for Family Research, has been studying the impact of evolving family structures on children for almost 40 years.
Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms, which rounds up research from around the world, concludes that children raised by same-sex parents and solo moms by choice or born as a result of donor conception or surrogacy fare just as well as kids raised by a two-parent, heterosexual married couple.
“The main conclusion is that what matters for children is not so much the structure of the family — the gender or sexual orientation of their parents, the number of parents or whether parents are biologically related to their children,” Golombok said in a phone interview from England.
“What seems to be more important is the quality of the relationships within the family.”
In other words, while the traditional model of mom, dad and biological kids was once considered “the gold standard,” four decades of research doesn’t bear that out.
All other things being equal, children manage just as well — and face the same difficulties — whether they have two dads and no mom, or two moms and no father as they do with two heterosexual parents. There is no evidence they have more psychological problems, difficulty adjusting or atypical gender development, Golombok found.
The fluidity of partnerships and family is also the subject of a soon-to-be-released book by Hollywood actress Maria Bello.
Her memoir, Whatever…Love is Love, follows her 2013 Modern Love column in the Sunday New York Times, which drew accolades. Titled “Coming Out as a Modern Family,” it told the poignant story of how Bello explained to her 12-year-old son that she was in love with her best friend, a woman.
The piece, which made the list of the top 10 Modern Love columns ever written, highlights the resilience and adaptability that kids can demonstrate when they have trusting relationships with parents.
It’s something Chantal Saville has seen in her 6-year-old daughter Nikki, who she’s now raising with the help of her own mom.
After Saville’s marriage broke up two years ago and the couple sold the business they ran outside Peterborough, she wondered how she’d make ends meet.
Her mother, widowed a decade earlier, was still living in the Toronto bungalow Saville grew up in as an only child. The two had always been close.
“Now we are effectively co-parenting Nikki,” says Saville, 42, a writer.
In the early days, mom and grandma occasionally locked horns over discipline when the era of, “because I said so” clashed with modern refrain of, “sweetie, here’s why I need you to do what I ask.”
But they’ve learned that communication is key and that whoever is in charge at a given moment gets the final word.
Organizations like American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association have already endorsed findings that the sexual orientation of parents has no bearing on child-rearing abilities or the well-being of kids.
What’s new about Modern Families is it brings together empirical research involving many thousands of families from around the world and explores some of the reasons that more unorthodox families seem to do so well.
Golombok’s career has spanned an evolution in family life, starting in the late 1970s as lesbian moms came out and divorced husbands fought for the right to raise their children, followed by the arrival of the first test-tube baby in 1978.
The book comes amid a huge shift in how society recognizes and accommodates the assortment of families created as a result of assisted reproductive technologies. Modern kids may have a “solo mom” who chose to have a child on her own using donated sperm, or relationships with as many as five parents, including two legal parents, a sperm donor, egg donor and a surrogate.
The careful planning and lengths these parents go to in order to have children may be one reason their kids do well, says Golombok.
It can require years of fertility treatment and facing other barriers like social disapproval. The less motivated give up along the way.
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by Tony Nitti – Forbes Contributor – January 22, 2015
Among the many injustices life dishes out on a daily basis is the fact that many women who are actively trying to become pregnant cannot do so, while every teenager with more hormones and free time than common sense seemingly can’t keep from getting pregnant.
It’s a struggle I witnessed personally when my older sister tried unsuccessfully for years to conceive a child, her painful emotional battle reaching its nadir when an apathetic doctor explained to her that, “some women just aren’t meant to have children.”
Fourteen years and three beautiful girls later, my sister got the last laugh. But the process was far from easy, which is the reality for many women. And this is precisely why the fertility industry has become a billion dollar business.
There are no shortage of available alternatives for women struggling to get pregnant; unfortunately, they are typically intrusive and expensive. One option, which is the thrust of our discussion here, is “egg donation,” whereby a female donor is supplied with hormones that increase her egg production. The eggs are then removed, fertilized in a laboratory, and ultimately implanted in the intended recipient.
The term “egg donation” is a bit of a misnomer, however, because rarely is the egg “donated” in the traditional, altruistic sense. Rather, the donor is typically compensated, and compensated well. This, as you might imagine, has led to a rather big tax conundrum: do the amounts received by the donor in exchange for her eggs constitute taxable income?
The issue has been a huge topic of conversation on egg donor message boards (yes, there is such a thing) and in the fertility industry at large. And for good reason: because until today, there was no answer. Hours ago, however, that all changed, when the Tax Court concluded that amounts received by a donor represented taxable compensation income.
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By Maria Checng – December 17, 2014
LONDON (AP) — New rules proposed in Britain would make it the first country to allow embryos to be made from the DNA of three people in order to prevent mothers from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their babies.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the department of health said it had taken “extensive advice” on the safety and efficacy of the proposed techniques from the scientific community.
“(This) will give women who carry severe mitochondrial disease the opportunity to have children without passing on devastating genetic disorders,” Dr. Sally Davies, the U.K.’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.
Experts say that if approved by parliament, these new methods would likely be used in about a dozen British women every year who are known to have faulty mitochondria — the energy-producing structures outside a cell’s nucleus. Defects in the mitochondria’s genetic code can result in diseases such as muscular dystrophy, heart problems and mental retardation.
The techniques involve removing the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and inserting it into a donor egg, where the nucleus DNA has been removed. That can be done either before or after fertilization.
The resulting embryo would end up with the nucleus DNA from its parents but the mitochondrial DNA from the donor. Scientists say the DNA from the donor egg amounts to less than 1 percent of the resulting embryo’s genes. But the change will be passed onto future generations, a major genetic modification that many ethicists have been reluctant to endorse.
Critics say the new techniques are unnecessary and that women who have mitochondrial disorders could use other alternatives, such as egg donation, to have children.
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villageq.com by Deborah Goldstein on November 17, 2014
On Sunday, November 2nd, Men Having Babies hosted its 10th annual workshop in New York City in an effort to bring together prospective parents, service providers, and experts on the subject of surrogacy. I spoke with a number of participants and attendees who agreed that surrogacy is becoming a more accessible and normative option for gay men looking to start families. Still, surrogacy in the United States presents the kind of obstacles Odysseus faced on his return to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. Men Having Babies tries to take the Sirens and Cyclops out of the equation by hosting these surrogacy workshops, which prove to be an oasis of information and resources. The gods were definitely with everyone that day, providing a safer passage on rocky seas.
“We started 15 years ago. It was literally just a handful of men at The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center who really wanted to gather as much information as we could,” explained Anthony Brown, Chairman of the board at Men Having Babies. “We invited service providers in and basically anybody who could answer the questions that we had. We did it in the form of monthly workshops which we still have the 2nd Wednesday of every month, 6:30-8PM here at the JCC (in New York City), and people can also go online at menhavingbabies.org to events, workshops for information on the whole schedule.”
While surrogacy provides an option for infertile straight couples, Men Having Babies structures panels and break-out sessions specifically for gay men. The speakers at the conference dealt with many of the issues gay men face on their surrogacy journey. Costs are very high. Surrogacy laws and LGBT discrimination laws vary from state to state and can be prohibitive. Surrogacy is unregulated, which means that participants are vulnerable to unethical practices. Fortunately, the prospective parents at Men Having Babies workshop benefit from the knowledge and experience of those who have gone down this path previously and were able to speak to the issues at hand.
THE PRICE TAG
Adding up the cost of egg donors, surrogates, agency fees, legal costs, and trips to visit surrogates, a couple could face a bill close to $150,000, not to mention the emotional costs that accompany the process. Finding the right surrogate and negotiating the kind of relationship a couple wants to have with her can be tricky not to mention the reality of failed transfers or failed pregnancies.
International surrogacy is much less expensive at about one-third of the cost of domestic surrogacy. However, while the financial stresses may be alleviated, some agencies may not act as ethically as others, exploiting poor women for their own economic gain. It is important for prospective parents to do their homework in sourcing agencies who work with surrogates who are financially stable.
I spoke with Ralph, a New Jersey father of three via two different surrogates in the United States. He said, “Neither of our surrogates needed the money. They were solidly middle class. They wanted to do it, and that was important to us. In general, the better agencies wouldn’t allow a woman to come into the program if it was a life and death situation for her.”
Men Having Babies, which is a nonprofit organization, recognized the economic barrier of surrogacy and started a financial relief service, Gay Parent Assistance Program (GPAP). Funding comes from surrogacy agencies that contribute to the GPAP program. Those agencies then receive discounts on the fees to participate in Men Having Babies events. Agencies benefit from partnering with Men Having Babies seminars in major markets such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and Brussels.
THE WILD WEST AND NO SHERIFF IN TOWN
A major obstacle for egg donors, surrogates, and gay men is that surrogacy is unregulated in the United States. There is no licensing body, and there are no requirements requiring agencies to know anything about the law or psychology or insurance or anything else that may support or protect parties from embarking on this journey. Because surrogacy laws are handled at the state level, there is no opportunity for the federal government to enforce laws to protect surrogates and hopeful parents. Recommendations and track records are important factors when shopping for providers.
Egg donors and surrogates face a significant amount of risk if they do not have sufficient support. There are no requirements to educate women about the physical tolls that result from donating eggs and carrying babies. Ralph echoed the opinion of many dads at the workshop when he said, “It shouldn’t be easy for young women to donate a zillion times and risk their health and fertility.”
Unfortunately, for some surrogacy agencies, money is more important than providing would-be parents with a family. Attendant and hopeful father Doron said, “I have dealt with a few agencies, some better than others. This is an industry. It’s a business. There are good people and bad people, and I landed with some bad people.”
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in IVF / Known Donor / Legal / Legislation / Parenting / Second Parent Adoption / Surrogacy
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Gay City News – By Paul Schindler – October 30, 2014
New York finished a more than respectable sixth place in terms of states giving gay and lesbian couples the right to marry, but for gay men who wish to be the biological father to their child, the primary route to doing so — relying on a surrogate mother to carry their child to birth — remains closed to them here at home.
In fact, across the 50 states, New York and New Jersey are among the five most legally restrictive for gay men — or anyone else — taking advantage of the advances in reproductive technology that surrogacy offers.
For the past 15 years, though, Men Having Babies, a New York-based nonprofit group, has worked with gay men here and elsewhere to assist them as they navigate the journey to fatherhood through surrogacy, largely out of state. During that time, demand for surrogacy services has grown dramatically among gay men, but the number of providers of such services that work with the LGBT community has exploded. The result is that costs have come down significantly and access to information and resources has improved.
Men Having Babies is a big part of that changed landscape.
On November 2, the group holds its 10th annual conference and expo, bringing together experts on surrogacy and LGBT families as well as roughly three-dozen service providers, including surrogacy and fertility clinics and attorneys who specialize in family law.
According to Anthony Brown, Men Having Babies’ board chair, the November 2 conference, which will be held at JCC Manhattan, is the largest event in an ongoing schedule of monthly meetings and workshops the group offers in New York for prospective “intended parents” — a legal term of art for the two parents who, in the best case, will be listed on a child’s birth certificate under the terms of a surrogacy contract and the applicable state law.
Under existing New York law, surrogacy contracts are legally unenforceable and, except for specific minor expenses, a woman who carries her own biological child to term or serves as gestational carrier for another woman’s fertilized egg cannot be compensated for giving up parental rights to the child at birth. Brown, who is a family law attorney, said there are such instances of “altruistic” surrogacy, but it is a risky path for intended parents since their legal rights are not secured until after birth.
Out gay Manhattan Senator Brad Hoylman and Westchester County Assemblymember Amy Paulin, both Democrats, have proposed legislation to open up surrogacy rights to New Yorkers but the measure has not yet advanced in Albany. New Jersey does not have the outright ban New York is burdened by, but its case law poses similar barriers to intended parents.
Hoylman and his husband, David Sigal, have a daughter born through surrogacy, and Brown and his husband, Gary Spino, are fathers to Nicholas, born in 2009 with the help of a gestational surrogate. Brown and Spino, whose sperm was used, worked with an egg donor from Florida and a gestational surrogate who lived in North Carolina — a process that had to be structured to comply with the laws of several states. Brown explained that such gestational surrogacy has become more common than “traditional” surrogacy — in which a woman carries her own biological offspring to term — because most instances of a surrogate rethinking and regretting her decision to surrender parental rights involve those who are the biological mother. He emphasized, however, that he and Spino have worked to keep both women involved in Nicholas’ birth a part of the youngster’s life.
According to Brown, the world has changed considerably even since he and Spino became fathers in 2009 — a story that was captured in a Soledad O’Brien special on CNN and in Gay City News’ LGBT Pride issue cover story. He estimated that the total costs incurred — for surrogacy services, hospital expenses, legal fees, and compensation to the surrogate and the donor, not to mention travel — came to $160,000, though without one extraordinary expense typically not incurred the cost would have been $140,000. With the proliferation of providers serving the market of gay intended parents, he said, that has come down to an average of about $110,000, and Brown has seen some full-service providers offering costs as low as $85,000.
That’s still a big hurdle for many prospective parents, and Men Having Babies works to ease the burden on at least some of them. Brown said the group last year distributed about $600,000 in cash and donated services to nine qualified couples or single parents and made provider discounts worth about $1 million available to another 30.
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New York Observer – by John Bonazzo – October 30, 2014
It’s the worst nightmare for any father–missing the birth of your child.
But that’s exactly what happened to Anthony Brown and Gary Spino. The couple lives in the West Village, but, since New York state law prohibits surrogate reproduction, they had to conceive their son Nicholas with the help of a surrogate in North Carolina.
“We had a C-section scheduled, but the surrogate’s water broke early,” Mr. Brown told the Observer. “We had to drive nine hours for our son’s birth, and it turns out we were four hours late.”
Overturning New York’s restrictive surrogacy law is one of the main goals of Men Having Babies (MHB), the organization of which Mr. Brown, a family law attorney, is chairman of the board. Though the state was lauded for being one of the first to pass marriage equality, when it comes to family matters the picture is not quite so rosy.
“New York’s family law is more conservative,” Mr. Brown said. “The capacity of the medical field’s advances has outshot lawmakers’ ability to regulate.”
Several members of the board of directors of MHB are in Albany lobbying for passage of the Child Parent Security Act, which would legalize surrogacy in the state.
Aside from advocating legal protections for surrogates, one of the organization’s main functions is to be “a peer support network for biological gay fathers and fathers-to-be,” MHB’s website states.
Mr. Brown knows well how valuable this peer support is–he, like every other board member, started his involvement with the group by attending one of their monthly workshops, which deal with particular aspects of surrogacy.
“We’re all alumni,” Mr. Brown said. “When we came in, the other members answered questions and allayed fears.”
Mr. Brown and the rest of the board will be on hand this Sunday, when 100-150 families are expected to attend the 10th annual Men Having Babies conference at the Manhattan JCC. The event, the largest of its kind on the East Coast, will feature seminars on surrogacy as well as private consultations with providers.
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