A baby born in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the first to have three legal parents on her birth certificate under the province’s new law. The girl was born to a lesbian couple and their male friend and sperm donor, reports CBC News. Under the new law, which passed in 2011 and came into effect last year, donors may be listed as parents as long as the parents agree in writing before conception. The family’s lawyer, barbara findlay (who doesn’t capitalize her name), told CBC News, “In the old days, we looked at biology and genetic connections. And that’s no longer true. We now look at the intention of the parties who are contributing to the creation of the child, and intend to raise the child.” That’s an important point. As we open up the possibility of allowing for more than two parents (California passed a similar law last October), we must make sure we only do so when all of the parents agree beforehand. Otherwise, we end up in situations with a donor who wants parental rights that a couple does not want to give, or a couple that wants financial or time commitments that a donor does not want to make.
The return of the biracial Cheerios family, and the image of Mitt Romney’s black grandchild, have re-ignited the public conversation about race and adoption. It might seem like an outdated argument, like whether it is “conventional” to gag about interracial couples or whether birth control is just for women with out-of-control libidos. But both sides of the issue have passionate defenders.
Does transracial adoption harm children or communities? Is it ideal for children to be raised by parents who look like them?
When Amalia C. and Melissa M. decided to start a family, they went through the well-trodden steps most same-sex couples take in New York City.
They married in 2011 and made sure both of their names were on their son’s birth certificate two years later, taking advantage of a New York State law that a child born to a married couple is presumed to be both of theirs, even if conceived through artificial insemination.
And months before Melissa gave birth to their son, Amalia started the adoption process, submitting to a criminal-background check, assembling years of financial documents and hiring a social worker to prepare a report about their household.
“Everyone we had spoken to,” said Amalia, 35, an engineer, “said the process was pretty clean-cut.”
But then a Brooklyn Surrogate’s Court judge, Margarita López Torres, ruled on Jan. 6 that because New York State had enacted same-sex marriage in 2011 and allowed both women to be listed on the boy’s birth certificate, Amalia was already the child’s parent and could not adopt him.
The ruling sent tremors through the ranks of gay couples and has exposed one of the new legal complexities facing same-sex couples with children.
The fear among same-sex couples is that without adoption papers, their parental rights might be questioned if they travel to other states or abroad. They also worry that the nonbiological parent will lose the rights if the family moves to a different state or the couple divorces.
ANDY INKSTER, a transgender man, had always wanted biological children. So when he embarked on the transition from female to male at age 18 — changing his name, taking testosterone and eventually undergoing surgery to remove his breasts — he left his female reproductive organs intact.
In his mid-20s, he decided it was time. He stopped taking testosterone and started trying to get pregnant. Eventually, in 2009, after beginning graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he sought fertility treatment at Baystate Reproductive Medicine. Baystate was one of the few clinics in the country with an anti-discrimination policy for gender identity. And yet, it refused to treat him, arguing that it didn’t have enough expertise to treat transgender patients. Mr. Inkster insisted there was no medical reason to deny him; his baby-making parts were the same as any woman’s.
The more than 700,000 transgender people living in the United States have long faced discrimination by health care providers. Over the past 15 years, activists have fought to compel insurers to cover transgender-related health care — from hormone therapy to gender reassignment surgery — or at least be prevented from excluding transgender clients from buying policies for basic services. Finally, starting this month, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, “transsexualism” can no longer be considered a pre-existing condition. What’s been left out of the spotlight: having babies. Many Americans have come to accept gay parents; the transgender community is next in line for recognition.
Mr. Inkster eventually found another clinic that helped him conceive via in vitro fertilization and donor sperm, and in October 2010, he gave birth to a daughter, Elise. A month later, he sued Baystate for sexual discrimination.
According to court documents, he was denied treatment after failing to comply with a clinic counselor’s request that he supply information from his current therapist that he was emotionally ready to handle pregnancy and parenting. Mr. Inkster argued that nontransgender patients weren’t asked to do the same. This fall, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination — the state’s civil rights agency — found probable cause for Mr. Inkster. The case will next move on to a conciliation conference, and then to a possible settlement.
Admittedly, the idea of a “pregnant man” makes many people uncomfortable, and photos of Mr. Inkster caressing his bulging belly are startling. The issue is controversial even within the transgender community. “Some people believe if you’re a trans man you shouldn’t be wanting to bear kids,” Jamison Green, the author of “Becoming a Visible Man,” told me. “That’s not something men do. Others think, If you have a body part that does something, why can’t you use it? It’s your body.”
The issue brings up unprecedented questions: Do you use your genetic material to reproduce, and at what time during your transition? Before or after hormone therapy? Before undergoing reassignment surgery that will make you sterile? Should a transgender man like Mr. Inkster keep his breasts so he can nurse later? Is it generally psychologically healthier for someone like him to freeze his eggs and have them inseminated and the embryos transferred to a female partner or surrogate, rather than leave his female reproductive parts intact? How might years of estrogen or testosterone therapy affect eggs and sperm?
To read the entire article, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/opinion/the-next-frontier-in-fertility-treatment.html?src=rechp
Gay couples are likely to be happier and more positive about their relationships than heterosexuals, according to a major study by the Open University published today.
However, they are less likely to be openly affectionate towards each other – holding hands in public, for instance – because they still fear attracting disapproval.
The study of 5,000 people – 50 of whom were later followed up with in-depth interviews – aimed at finding out how modern couples keep their relationships on track through life’s difficulties.
It found that simple things – like making a cup of tea in the morning and taking it up to them in bed – were the most treasured by couples as examples of intimacy rather than more dramatic gestures such as declaring “I love you”.
It was on the relative happiness of people within different types of relationships that the survey threw up the most interesting insights into modern day life, however.
“LGBQ participants (lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer) are more generally positive about and happier with the quality of their relationship and the relationship which they have with their partner” the research concludes.
“Heterosexual parents are the group least likely to be there for each other, to make ‘couple time’, to pursue shared interests, to say ‘I love you’ and to talk openly to one another.”
But it added: “Public/private boundaries of ‘couple display’ remain fraught. Many LGBQ couples, especially the younger ones, say they would not hold hands in public for fear of reprisal.”
The study, funded by the Economic and Science Research Council, found that couples without children were generally likely to be happier than parents.
In addition, mothers were the least likely group to be satisfied with their partners.
To read the entire article, go to http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-key-to-a-happy-relationship-be-gay-or-childless-or-make-tea-9057349.html
NEW HAVEN — THE new movie “Delivery Man” stars Vince Vaughn as a former sperm donor who finds out that he has more than 500 children. Is this a Hollywood exaggeration or a possible outcome? Truth is, no one knows. In the United States, we do not track how many sperm donors there are, how often they donate, or how many children are born from the donations.
Unlike a Hollywood happy ending, however, this lack of regulation has real consequences for sperm donors and the children they help produce. The Journal of the American Medical Association published one case study of a healthy 23-year-old donor who transmitted a genetic heart condition that affected at least eight of 22 offspring from his donated sperm, including a toddler who died from heart failure. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends genetic screening of sperm donors, and many banks do it, but the government does not require it. The risks become magnified the greater the number of children conceived from each donor.
How did we get to this point? Sperm donation has evolved from a practice of customized production to an industry that resembles mass manufacturing.
Anti-gay marriage activist Robert Oscar Lopez on Tuesday claimed that allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry leads to human trafficking.
Lopez, who is celebrated among social conservatives due to the fact that he was raised briefly in a same-sex household and claims he was damaged by the experience, appeared on Sandy Rios in The Morning to criticize passage of a marriage law in Hawaii.
“Look [at] what they did in Hawaii, that’s a state where over sixty percent of the population is Asian-American; they’re the people who came from South Korea, from Japan, from the Philippines, countries that have a very, very controversial history with adoption,” Lopez said, according to an account from Right Wing Watch. “And the predominantly white Human Rights Campaign went to Hawaii and ripped apart that state, you heard the testimony, they took a state and they just ripped at their heart.”
November 26, 2013 – New York Times, by Natalie Angier
CHELSEA, MICH. — Kristi and Michael Burns have a lot in common. They love crossword puzzles, football, going to museums and reading five or six books at a time. They describe themselves as mild-mannered introverts who suffer from an array of chronic medical problems. The two share similar marital résumés, too. On their wedding day in 2011, the groom was 43 years old and the bride 39, yet it was marriage No. 3 for both.
Today, their blended family is a sprawling, sometimes uneasy ensemble of two sharp-eyed sons from her two previous husbands, a daughter and son from his second marriage, ex-spouses of varying degrees of involvement, the partners of ex-spouses, the bemused in-laws and a kitten named Agnes that likes to sleep on computer keyboards.
If the Burnses seem atypical as an American nuclear family, how about the Schulte-Waysers, a merry band of two married dads, six kids and two dogs? Or the Indrakrishnans, a successful immigrant couple in Atlanta whose teenage daughter divides her time between prosaic homework and the precision footwork of ancient Hindu dance; the Glusacs of Los Angeles, with their two nearly grown children and their litany of middle-class challenges that seem like minor sagas; Ana Perez and Julian Hill of Harlem, unmarried and just getting by, but with Warren Buffett-size dreams for their three young children; and the alarming number of families with incarcerated parents, a sorry byproduct of America’s status as the world’s leading jailer.
The typical American family, if it ever lived anywhere but on Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving canvas, has become as multilayered and full of surprises as a holiday turducken — the all-American seasonal portmanteau of deboned turkey, duck and chicken.
Researchers who study the structure and evolution of the American family express unsullied astonishment at how rapidly the family has changed in recent years, the transformations often exceeding or capsizing those same experts’ predictions of just a few journal articles ago.
ThinkProgress.org, November 18, 2013 by Zack Ford The case challenging Michigan’s bans on same-sex marriage and adoption will go to trial in February, and state officials announced Friday that they are going to showcase four prominent “researchers” who claim that same-sex parenting harms children: Mark Regnerus, Douglas Allen, Loren Marks, and Joseph Price. Here’s a look at the “research” these four have produced that will likely inform their testimony:
Mark Regnerus
Mark Regnerus is a sociologist at the University of Texas and a social conservative who frequently writes from a perspective of Christian sexual morality. Regnerus’ infamous “New Family Structures Study” claimed that children with same-sex parents had less positive negative outcomes compared to different-sex parents, but the study did not actually address same-sex parenting. Most of the subjects in the study grew up in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, long before marriage equality was available or adoption rights were codified in many states. Only two of the individuals in the sample were actually raised from birth by same-sex parents, whereas almost all of the rest were the product of “failed heterosexual unions” who happened to have had a parent who at some point had a “romantic relationship with someone of the same sex.” An internal audit by the journal that published Regnerus’ study found his conclusions to be “bullshit,” and many academics, including the American Sociological Association, have condemned its results. Regnerus himself has admitted that the study doesn’t address same-sex parenting, but that hasn’t stopped him from using it to repeatedly speak outagainst marriage equality — as recently as this month in Hawaii — which he was coached to do by anti-gay groups.
