By BRENDAN FARRINGTON Associated Press for ABC.com
The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that a woman who donated an egg to her lesbian partner has parental rights to the child.
The court issued its ruling Thursday and ordered a lower court to determine custody and visitation rights.
The case involves two lesbians who began raising the child together. One donated an egg that was fertilized and implanted in the other. That woman gave birth in 2004.
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ThinkProgress.org, November 4, 2013 – By Bryce Covert
Families paid more for childcare in 2012 than in 2011, with the costs of center care rising by 2.7 percent for an infant and 2.6 percent for a four-year-old, according to a new report from Child Care Aware of America. They rose even faster for care in a family’s home, which went up 3.7 percent for an infant and 4.8 percent for a four-year-old. While the average annual cost of full-time center care ranges state by state, it is now as much as $16,430 in Massachusetts for an infant and $12,355 in New York for a four-year-old. For both children, it can be as much as $28,606.
This cost eats up a huge amount of families’ budgets. Putting two children in full-time center care represents the biggest single expense for a household in the Northeast, Midwest, and South, and it is only exceeded by the cost of housing in the West. It is more than annual median rent in every state and more than mortgage payments in 19 states and DC. The cost of putting an infant in a childcare center is more than what the average family spends on food in every region in the country. It can even be higher than college tuition: The costs are higher than a year of public college a four-year institution in 31 states and DC for an infant and 19 states and DC for a four-year-old.
It’s also high for a family budget in percentage terms. The Department of Health and Human Services considers spending 10 percent of a family’s income on childcare to be the benchmark of what is affordable. Yet for single parents, the average cost of center-based infant care is more than 25 percent of the median income in every state. For a married couple, the cost for an infant is more than 10 percent of median income in 38 states an DC and the cost for a four-year-old exceeds that limit in 21 states and DC. The cost of putting an infant in full-time center care will eat up anywhere from 7 percent to 19 percent of a married couple’s income.
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By Zack Ford, ThinkProgress.org, October 28, 2013
Two marriage equality cases are advancing to the Ninth Circuit of Appeals from the states of Nevada (Sevcik v. Sandoval) and Hawaii (Jackson v. Abercrombie). In both cases, marriage equality lost at the district court level, distinguishing them from the case challenging California’s Proposition 8 and essentially freeing them of the jurisdictional issues that complicated the Prop 8 case. This means that the two cases provide an opportunity for the court to directly consider the constitutionality of states banning same-sex marriage.
Numerous professional organizations submitted amicus briefs last week advising the court about why it should support marriage equality and in particular, addressing the question of same-sex parenting. Opponents assert that same-sex marriage should be banned because children fare better with different-sex parents than with same-sex parents. Not only does this ignore the fact that joint adoption is already legal for same-sex couples in both Nevada and Hawaii, but as the scholarly community points out, it disregards the consensus of scientific research endorsing same-sex parenting.
In a brief filed by the American Psychological Association, National Association of Social Workers, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, American Psychoanalytic Association, and Hawaii Psychological Association, the scholars outline three factors that research has determined leads to good parenting:
The groups point out that these factors are not impacted by sexual orientation, and thus there is no reason to conclude same-sex parents would be inferior in any way.
In a complementary brief, the American Sociological Association (ASA) expanded upon what research says specifically about the outcomes for children of same-sex parents:
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By MARILYNN MARCHIONE 10/16/13
BOSTON — BOSTON (AP) — Fertility clinics have put a new twist on how to make babies: A “two-mom” approach that lets female same-sex couples share the biological role. One woman’s eggs are mixed in a lab dish with donor sperm, then implanted in the other woman, who carries the pregnancy.
A New York doctor described 18 of these cases Tuesday at a fertility conference in Boston that featured other research on ways to help same-sex couples have children. Dr. Alan Copperman is medical director of Reproductive Medicine Associates, a New York City clinic that does the “two-mom” approach.
A New York couple — Sarah Marshall, 40, a recruiter for law firms, and Maggie Leigh Marshall, 35, a real estate broker — used it to have their daughter, Graham, now 18 months old. Maggie’s eggs were used to make embryos that were implanted in Sarah, and both women are listed as parents on the birth certificate.
“It allowed us both to participate,” Sarah Marshall said. “I had to mentally and psychologically give up the idea of, is she going to look like me or my family. But from the time I started carrying her up to now, she is definitely mine.”
Maggie Marshall said she had no interest in being pregnant, but “Sarah really wanted to have the experience. We also thought it would be a great way to bond with a kid that ultimately would look a lot like me.”
It wasn’t cheap — the couple spent nearly $100,000 on multiple failed attempts before the last one worked. A single in vitro fertilization attempt can run $15,000 to more than $20,000, depending on how much embryo testing is done and whether some embryos are frozen to allow multiple attempts from one batch.
One Canadian study suggests that more lesbian couples have been seeking fertility services in Ontario since same-sex marriage was legalized in the province a decade ago. Some doctors think interest also is up in the U.S. For male couples, many clinics offer egg donors and surrogate moms, using one or both men’s sperm.
“The modern family is created in a way that would be humbled by traditional fertility treatments,” said Copperman. “We’re seeing more and more couples come in and want to share the parenting experience,” and their medical forms more often say “wife” rather than “domestic partner.”
“This is something that a lot of lesbian couples choose to do” if they can afford it, said Melissa Brisman, a reproductive law specialist in Montvale, N.J., who has advised many such couples. “Some doctors really have a problem doing this for non-medical reasons” because any medical procedures carry risks of infections or other complications, she added.
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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – October 22, 2013
A draft bill that would have stripped gay parents of their children has been withdrawn from the agenda of the Russian parliament.
Russian lawmaker Aleksei Zhuravlyov of the ruling United Russia party said the bill will be resubmitted for debate to Russia’s State Duma after changes are introduced.
He did not elaborate.
The draft was submitted to the State Duma last month.
The head of the State Duma committee on family, women, and children, Yelena Mizulina, said earlier that it was unlikely that the proposed bill would be adopted as it would have been impossible to implement because of the difficulty in identifying parents with “nontraditional sexual orientations.”
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artleonardobservations.com, October 8, 2013
The evil that courts do lives on… On October 4, 2013, the New York Law Journal published Rockland County Family Court Referee Dean Richardson-Mendelson’s opinion in Matter of A.F. v. K.H., V-00918-13, rejecting all attempts by a lesbian co-parent to obtain judicial relief against her former partner’s action of excluding her from contact with the children they had been raising together. The principal barrier to her case is the N.Y. Court of Appeal’s old decision, Alison D. v. Virginia M., 77 N.Y.2d 651 (1991), which held in similar circumstances that the co-parent was, despite her relationship parental relationship with a child since the child’s birth, a “legal stranger” who did not have standing under New York law to obtain a declaration of her parental rights, custody or visitation, and that the circumstances that the women had agreed to raise a child together did not amount to “special circumstances” required under New York law to enable a legally-unrelated third party to seek custody of a child.
In A.F. v. K.H., the parents had registered as domestic partners, but the court mentions this only in passing and does not specify the jurisdiction. A.F. and K.H. were living together as a couple when they decided to have children, using anonymous donor insemination for K.H. to conceive two children. They lived together raising the children until they separated in July 2011, but continued to live on different floors in the same house, facilitating continued contact between A.F. and the children, who lived with K.H. In February 2012 K.H. moved out with the children to her mother’s house in New Jersey, but then relocated back to another town in New York State in August 2012. A.F. continued to have visitation two days a week and alternate weekends, until a promotion at her job made weekday visitation impossible.
A.F. contributed to the support of the children financially. In May 2012, K.H. had filed a petition in Rockland Family Court seeking formal child support from A.G. In support of this claim, her petition was full of factual allegations seeking to persuade the court that A.F. was a parent of the children who should be held to this responsibility. But in August, she withdrew the petition, and the Support Magistrate marked it as withdrawn.
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By Zack Ford on Jul 10, 2013, thinkprogress.com
A new study has once again confirmed that same-sex couples are just as effective at raising children as opposite-sex couples. Focusing specifically on children adopted at an early age, the study compared gay and lesbian couples to straight couples who were all becoming parents for the first time. Though there were differences in the children’s psychological adjustment, they were not affected by their family type.
What the study actually found is that when parents adopt, how prepared parents were and how depressed parents were impacted their children:
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At Mombian.com – July 11, 2013
The past couple of weeks have seen a new round of progress in several marriage-equality lawsuits—and just as with the cases that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 (as I wrote a few weeks ago), lesbian moms are again in the forefront, along with a number of gay dads. Two of the cases (in Michigan and North Carolina) even began as challenges to state bans on second-parent adoptions, and later evolved into marriage-ban challenges as well.
Let’s take things alphabetically:
– See more at: http://www.mombian.com/2013/07/11/lesbian-moms-again-in-forefront-in-new-round-of-marriage-cases/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mombian+%28Mombian%29#sthash.cUOuKlfe.dpuf
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