Louisiana House gives final approval to surrogate parenting bill that would bar unmarried, gay couples

By Lauren McGaughy, NOLA.com The Times-Picayune

June 03, 2013

Unmarried and gay couples in Louisiana will be blocked from becoming surrogate parents if Gov. Bobby Jindal signs a bill approved by the House on Sunday. The bill would set up surrogacy contract rules in the state as well as define who is eligible to enter into such contracts.

The final version of Senate Bill 162 defines “intended parents” as “married persons,” thus barring unmarried partners and same-sex couples from becoming parents through surrogacy. However, much of the opposition to the heavily amended bill came from religious and conservative groups who consider all surrogacy “anti-life.”

Louisiana law currently states any surrogate contract in the state is “unenforceable” and absolutely null and void, which proponents of the bill says has led to problems surrounding the legal rights of surrogate mothers, their spouses and the intended parents.

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

The Affordable Care Act and LGBT Families: Everything You Need to Know

By Heron Greenesmith, Andrew Cray, and Kellan Baker | May 23, 2013

Center For American Progress

President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA, into law on March 23, 2010. Many Americans have already benefited from the ACA, and millions more will benefit as the law fully comes into effect. By January 1, 2014, the law’s provisions will be underway, ensuring that millions of Americans will be able to afford the health care that they need.

This guide will help couples and parents who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, understand how the ACA benefits LGBT people and their families. The guide provides a basic overview of the Affordable Care Act, a review of how the act helps you and your family, and an explanation of how you and your family can access affordable health insurance.

Health Insurance Marketplaces

The Affordable Care Act established online Health Insurance Marketplaces, and starting January 1, 2014, each state will offer its own Marketplace system. Some Marketplaces will be run by the state itself, some through a partnership with the federal government, while others will be run by the federal government alone.

The Marketplaces will act as a one-stop shop for health insurance. Every American will be able to buy insurance directly through his or her Marketplace website, hotline, or physical office and receive assistance from unbiased consumer-assistance agents called “Navigators.”

An overview of the Affordable Care Act

The ACA requires nearly all Americans to have access to affordable health insurance starting in 2014. If you cannot get insurance for yourself or your family through your employer, you will be able to buy insurance through your state’s Health Insurance Marketplace.

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in Legal / Legislation / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

LGBT: Portuguese parliament approves right to adoption – Portugal

May 17, 2103 – Portugese-Amercian-Journal.com

Portuguese parliament has approved Friday two bills that will allow gay couples to adopt children. The bill was approved with 99 votes in favor, 94 votes against, and 9 abstentions.

The bills were supported by the ruling center-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the progressive Socialist Party (PS).

The Portuguese parliament had approved the right to same-sex marriages in 2010, but without adoption rights. The law allowed gay couples the same rights as married heterosexual couples, including taxes, inheritance and housing, but didn’t offer the right to adopt children.

Portugal is among the first 10 counties in the world to allow same-sex marriage. As recently as 1982, homosexuality was a crime in Portugal.

Today, Portugal has wide-ranging anti-discrimination laws and is one of the few countries in the world to contain a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation in its Constitution.

The first same-sex marriages in the world took place in the Netherlands on April 1, 2001. The countries that followed were Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina and Brazil.

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

Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee Signs Gay Marriage Bill

Ontopmag.com, by Carlos Santoscoy – May 2, 2013

Moments after a gay marriage bill cleared its final legislative hurdle on Thursday, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, an independent, signed it into law on the steps of the State House.

The measure cleared the Senate last Wednesday with the help of all 5 of its Republican members.  It returned to a House committee on Wednesday to reconcile some language differences between a version approved three months earlier in the House.

House lawmakers approved the legislation with a 56-15 vote, a better outcome for supporters than the previous 51-19 vote.

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Delaware Becomes the 11th State to Allow Same-Sex Marriage

By Eric Eckholm, May 7, 2013 – New York TImes

Delaware on Tuesday became the 11th state to permit same-sex marriage, the latest in a string of victories for those working to extend marital rights to gay and lesbian couples.

The marriage bill passed the State Senate by a vote of 12 to 9 Tuesday afternoon.

“It’s a great day in Delaware,” said Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, who signed it within minutes of passage before an overjoyed crowd of activists. “I am signing this bill now because I do not intend to make any of you wait one moment longer.”

Same-sex couples will be eligible for marriage licenses on July 1.

Adoption of same-sex marriage by Delaware came just five days after a similar decision in Rhode Island and followed ballot-box victories last fall in Maine, Maryland and Washington.

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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

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.”

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

Children of Gay Federal Workers May Receive Health Coverage

New York Times  by Tara Siegel Bernard – July 26, 2012

A proposed rule would extend health insurance to the children of gay people who are partnered with federal employees. But the domestic partners themselves would still be blocked from coverage because of the federal law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

The rule, proposed by the Office of Personnel Management last week, was written in response to a 2009 memo by President Obama that asked the agency’s director to figure out where it was possible to extend benefits to qualified same-sex partners of federal workers and their families under the confines of the current law.

The proposal is significant because same-sex couples often have trouble establishing legal ties to their children, as I pointed out in a column published on Saturday. Many states only allow one parent to form legal links to a child, which often leaves both the parent and child vulnerable. The child, for instance, may be unable to receive insurance through the employer of a nonbiological parent, which can be a particularly big burden if that parent is the sole breadwinner.

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Gay couples and women over 40 to receive fertility treatment through NHS

by Edmund Broch
22 May 2012
Pinknews.co.uk

Same-sex couples and women over 40 will be entitled to free in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment through the National Health Service (NHS), for the first time according to guidelines to be published today.

The recommendations, which puts same-sex couples on par with heterosexual couples when it comes to fertility treatment, is issued by the government watchdog for cost-effective treatment in the NHS, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

Then new guidelines also call on health authorities in England and Wales to fund intra-uterine insemination (IUI), which uses donor sperms to help same-sex couples conceive. If IUI should fail for six cycles in a row, then, they should be considered for the more costly, and medically complex IVF, the guidelines will say.

These consequences follow the implementation of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, passed by Labour in 2008, which put same-sex parenting and heterosexual parenting on equal footing in the eyes of the law.

That there has been a concomitant increase in demand from gay couples for fertility services is confirmed by figures: for example, in the three years from 2007 to 2010, the number of lesbian couples undergoing IVF nearly trebled from 178 to 417. Till now, gay couples usually had to resort to private treatment, which cost up to £8,000 per couple, with a reduction in the chances of successful conception with increase in age.

To read the complete article, click here.

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

Zach Wahls, His Two Moms, & The Future of Same-Sex Marriage

in Legislation / Parenting / Videos  by Anthony Brown 0 comments