New York Lesbian Co-Parent Custody Claim Precluded under 12-Year-Old Decision

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  But in August, she withdrew the petition, and the Support Magistrate marked it as withdrawn.

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in Legal / Legislation / Parenting / Second Parent Adoption  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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Kentucky Appeals Court reverses trial court ruling against lesbian mother

Beyoned (Straight and Gay ) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff – October 19, 2012

It still happens today.  Lesbian mothers lose custody of their children to their ex-husbands because they are lesbian.  Hard to believe, in this era when conservatives often support civil unions — just not marriage — for same-sex couples.  But it’s true.
And that’s what happened to Angela Maxwell and her three children earlier this year when a Hardin County, Kentucky judge awarded sole custody to the children’s father, Robert. The judge also limited Angela’s time with the children and said neither parent could live with a nonmarital partner while the children were with that parent. For more than a year before the trial, the children who were about 14, 12, and 6, had been alternating weeks between the two parents.  That temporary arrangement included a prohibition on unrelated guests spending the night when the children were there, so it appears that Angela was not living with her same-sex partner, Angel.  At the custody trial, Angela asked that the joint custody continue and that the overnight restriction be lifted.
The trial judge was not subtle about the reason he awarded sole custody to Robert.  “The [mother] is seeking to live an unconventional life-style that has not been fully embraced by society at large,” the judge ruled, “regardless of whether or not same-sex relationships should or should not be considered sexual misconduct.  Like it or not, this decision will impact her children in ways that she may not fully have considered and most will be unfavorable.”

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Alabama appeals court denies Mobile woman right to adopt partner’s son

By Brendan Kirby – October 12, 2012 – AL.com

MOBILE, Alabama –€“ Cari Searcy considers herself the parent of 6-year-old Khaya in every important way, but an Alabama appeals court ruled today that legally, she is not.

The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upheld a decision by Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis to deny Searcy’s adoption petition. Although she has been with her partner, Kim McKeand, for 14 years – and legally married her in California in 2008 – the court ruled unanimously that Alabama law does not recognize same-sex unions.

“Of course, I was disappointed, but I guess we were kind of expecting it,” Searcy said this evening. “But you always hope for the best.”

Searcy said she and McKeand have discussed appealing the ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court or, perhaps, taking the case to federal court. But she said she has made no decisions.

Searcy’s lawyer, Vivian Beckerle, said the cost of an appeal is one of the factors her client will have to consider.

“It does begin to get expensive to carry it forward,” she said. “I’d like to see them do it, because it is something the state needs to confront head-on.”

This is the second time Searcy has tried to adopt the child. Davis denied an earlier petition in 2006, ruling that the adoption was not permissible because Searcy and McKeand were not married.

Contest paid for marriage trip to California

In 2008, the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau held a contest asking same-sex couples from other states to write about why they wanted to get married. Searcy, who owns a video production company, said she made a YouTube video chronicling her story and won a trip to the Golden State in September of that year.

Searcy also has told her story on a documentary entitled, “I am a Parent.”

After California voters made same-sex marriage illegal again in a hotly contested referendum, Searcy said, she and McKeand waited to see how the courts would treat marriages that occurred before the vote. Ultimately, the California Supreme Court ruled that those marriages would stand.

In Mobile, valid marriage license in hand, Searcy again petitioned to adopt Khaya.

“We’re not asking for the state to legally marry us,” she said. “I’m just asking for the right to legally adopt our son so I can make medical decisions for him, educational decisions, the normal parental things.”

It is not merely a theoretical exercise.

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in Adoption / In the News / Legal / Second Parent Adoption  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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Georgia appeals court upholds a second-parent adoption on narrow grounds and expresses doubt about whether such adoptions are allowed in Georgia

July 24, 2012 – Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff

It’s another lesbian-behaving-badly case, this one entitled Bates v. Bates.  In 2007, a lesbian couple, Nicole and Tina Bates, successfully petitioned a Georgia trial court for a second-parent adoption that made Tina a legal parent of the child Nicole gave birth to after conception through donor insemination.  Three years later, after the couple split up, Nicole went back to the same court and asked for the adoption to be set aside.  (Even after all these years, and everything I know, I cannot write this last sentence without screaming inside.)  The court denied the motion, finding that Georgia law did not allow an adoption to be challenged after six months.  Nicole unsuccesfully petitioned to appeal that order.
Meanwhile, Tina had filed for custody in a different county.  After Nicole lost her initial attempt to void the adoption, she moved to dismiss Tina’s custody action by arguing, again, that the adoption decree was not valid.  The judge granted Nicole’s motion to dismiss and so threw out Tina’s custody petition.  The trial judge found that Georgia does not allow second-parent adoption.  It also ruled that it could not adjudicate custody of the child because the Georgia Constitution prohibits courts from ruling on the “respective rights arising as a result of or in connection with [a relationship between persons of the same sex].”
Tina appealed, and in the Bates decision issued two weeks ago, the Court of Appeals of Georgia, Third Division, ruled in her favor.  But it did so on the narrow ground that Nicole had had her shot at claiming the adoption void and had lost.  Having lost once, she could not relitigate the same issue in a different court. (This legal doctrine goes by the Latin term res judicata.)  In the process of ruling for Tina, however, the court expressed skepticism about whether Georgia does, in fact, allow second-parent adoption.  It suggested Nicole’s argument had “merit,” and called the practice of second-parent adoption in Georgia “doubtful.”   The court therefore sent Tina’s custody petition back to the trial court.  The court noted that adjudicating the custody of the child arises out of the adoption decree and not the relationship between Tina and Nicole and therefore does not run afoul of the state constitution. There is no indication in the opinion about when Tina last saw her child.

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I.R.S. Denying Lesbians Legitimate Adoption Credit

New York Times
December 13, 2011
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

Since the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriage, such couples are viewed as strangers in many spheres of their financial lives. They need to file separate federal tax returns, for instance. And sometimes, that can come with certain advantages.

Take the adoption tax credit. If you adopt your spouse’s child, you cannot claim the credit. But since same-sex married couples are not considered spouses under federal law, they are permitted to use the credit — at least until their unions are recognized.

So when several lesbians seeking to adopt a partner’s child received letters from the Internal Revenue Service that said they could not use the credit, they couldn’t help but wonder: Is the government choosing to recognize our unions only when it’s to the government’s benefit?

As it turns out, the I.R.S. keeps close tabs on many refundable credits: The adoption credit is refundable in 2010 and 2011, which means that the credit reduces the amount of tax you owe, dollar for dollar. And if the amount of the credit exceeds your tax bill, you get to collect that extra cash. Because it’s such an enticing break, it’s also ripe for abuse.

As a result, the I.R.S. conducted more audits by mail last year, and required many couples — gay and heterosexual — to provide more documentation. (In fact, 68 percent of the nearly 100,000 returns on which taxpayers claimed the adoption credit were audited by mail, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, which reviewed the I.R.S.’s strategy to ensure taxpayers were rightfully claiming the credit.)

But at least two of the reasons that the I.R.S. gave to the lesbians who it turned down were not rooted in the law, according to Patricia Cain, a professor at Santa Clara Law and an expert on sexuality and federal tax law, who blogged about the topic and has assisted some couples who were denied.

The most common explanation for the denial, she said, was that the birth mother did not terminate her rights as part of the adoption. And while it’s typical for many birth mothers to do so when her child is being adopted, that’s obviously not something a lesbian birth mom would do when her partner is simply performing a “second parent” adoption. Nor is there anything in the tax code that requires the termination of parental rights, Professor Cain said.

Another reason the I.R.S. provided for the denials: the adoptive mother is the domestic partner of the birth mother. But again, she said there is nothing in the tax code that says domestic partners cannot claim the credit. “Nobody thinks the adoption credit was created to help lesbian mothers,” Professor Cain said. “But they are certainly entitled to it as long as the clear meaning of the statute grants it to them.”

The report from the Government Accountability Office said that the I.R.S. didn’t adequately inform its tax examiners regarding certain aspects of the adoption credit. So you can argue that the I.R.S. probably didn’t give them specific instructions on how to handle adoptions with same-sex parents either. A spokesman for the I.R.S. said that they were aware of an isolated number of cases where they made a mistake, and that they corrected the errors after they were notified by the taxpayers. In a statement, the agency said that it regrets the inconvenience and that it has provided more training to the examiners on this issue.

The credit, which is for as much as $13,360 in 2011, can only be used once. So if two men, two women, or two other unmarried people adopt a nonbiological child, only one adoptive parent can claim the entire credit or they can split it.

If you or your partner receive any notices from the I.R.S. requiring more information during this coming tax season, send your response to the I.R.S. within the time period allotted. “Most taxpayers, after pushing back hard, have had the credit allowed,” Professor Cain added.

That is the result that Beth Jennings is hoping for. She said that her partner, Coleen Jennings, adopted her biological daughter, Hazel, in 2010, four months after she was born. A couple of months after filing her return, she received a letter from the I.R.S. stating that the adoption credit was under investigation.

After sending more documentation, her partner was denied the credit, a decision they are now appealing. And when they called the I.R.S., Ms. Jennings said the agent seemed confused about the reason for the denial, even though they provided all the required paperwork and went as far as having their lawyer sign an affadavit. “There is probably a place in the flow chart for the guy answering the phone, and it probably stopped or didn’t include this scenario,” Ms. Jennings said, referring to instructions on how to assist same-sex couples.

The I.R.S. said that any taxpayers who feel that they were improperly denied the credit should contact the I.R.S. And if you need more assistance, you can also contact advocacy organizations like the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which may be able to provide more guidance.

Have you or your partner (or spouse) encountered any problems with claiming this credit? If so, let us know in the comment section if and how you were able to resolve the issue.

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

New Numbers, and Geography, for Gay Couples

By SABRINA TAVERNISE – New York Times – August 25, 2011

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — So much for San Francisco.

The list of top cities for same-sex couples as a portion of the population does not include that traditional gay mecca, according to new census data. In fact, the city, which ranked third in 1990 and 11th in 2000, plummeted to No. 28 in 2010. And West Hollywood, once No. 1, has dropped out of the top five.

The Census Bureau data, finalized this week and analyzed by Gary Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, gives the clearest picture to date of same-sex couples in America. In absolute numbers, they jumped by half in the past decade, to 901,997.

Most surprising is how far same-sex couples have dispersed, moving from traditional enclaves and safe havens into farther-flung areas of the country.

Consider, for example, the upstarts on the list: Pleasant Ridge, Mich., a suburb of Detroit; New Hope, Pa.; and this beach town in southern Delaware. All three have been popular destinations for gay people locally but had never ranked in the top 10.

The No. 1-ranked town is Provincetown, Mass., at the tip of Cape Cod.

The reordering reflects a growing influence of baby boomers, who became adults in the 1960s and 1970s, when the social stigma was starting to ease, and are more willing than previous generations to stand up and be counted, Mr. Gates said.

Now that generation, arguably the first in history with such a large contingent that is out, is beginning to retire, and its life transition is showing up in the data, with older cities as the new popular choices.

“As the baby boomer generation ages into retirement,” Mr. Gates said, “we see its impact really strongly in the geography.”

The pattern was in evidence in Rehoboth Beach, a family resort town of 1,300, which was fourth on the list of same-sex couples per capita and did not figure in the top 10 rankings in 1990 or 2000.

“The change was pretty dramatic,” said Rick McReynolds, 58, a resident. “It used to be all these boys,” but now, he said, the gay population in town is older and has less of a singles scene.

But people who used to party here, like Bob Moore, a retired communications professor from Pennsylvania, have since returned with their partners to live. Mr. Moore, who came out in his 40s, after two children and a divorce, said he and his partner were looking for a place that was gay friendly, but not an exclusive enclave.

“We liked the fact that it was gay without being the Castro” neighborhood of San Francisco, said Mr. Moore, 59, who was sitting with his partner, Steve Ortleib, in Rigby’s Bar and Grill on Tuesday night.

He said they had visited four top retirement destinations for same-sex couples — two in California and two in Florida — before settling on Rehoboth.

In interviews in San Francisco on Tuesday, several gay people said the city attracted people who did not always want to become part of a couple. The census does not ask about sexual orientation.

“You settle down in small towns because there is not much to choose from,” said Nick Meinzer, 41, a hairstylist who works on Castro Street. “In urban areas we wait longer to settle down. I’ve been single for two years. They’re not counting those of us who are single.”

Of the top cities like Pleasant Ridge, Mr. Meinzer said: “I’ve never even heard of those places. You’d think if they were so great you’d have heard of them.”

Dennis Ziebell, 61, the owner of Orphan Andy’s, a Castro neighborhood diner he opened 35 years ago, said he did not believe the count was accurate. “Take another survey, that’s all I can say,” he said. “I’ve been in a relationship for 36 years and nobody from the census asked me about it.”

Last year was the third time the Census Bureau counted same-sex couples. The count included people of the same sex in the same household who said they were spouses or unmarried partners (spouses were not included in 1990). Mr. Gates calculated how many same-sex couples there were for every 1,000 households within towns and cities across the country.

New York is too big to figure prominently in top city rankings for same-sex couples per capita (it was 67th in 2010, Mr. Gates said), but it does rank by county, alongside more the more traditional locations. Manhattan is No. 5, after San Francisco County, Hampshire County, Mass., Monroe County, Fla., and Multnomah County, Ore.

The city ranking is a barometer of the changing demographics among the population of same sex couples, which has grown more diffuse throughout the country over the past 20 years.

In interviews here this week, several couples said that social attitudes had softened overt time and that living farther afield was now easier to do. Mr. Gates compared the phenomenon to immigrants who no longer sought the safety of an enclave.

Steve Elkins, who runs a nonprofit community center called Camp Rehoboth, which acts as a liaison with the gay community, said cultural training classes for the summer police force would be met by stony stares in the early days. More recently, when he asked the police officers if they knew a gay person, two people in the class raised their hands to say they were gay.

“It’s a generational change in thoughts and attitudes,” he said. Rehoboth, he likes to say, used to be an island of tolerance in a sea of homophobia, and now is an island of tolerance in a sea of outlet malls.

Further evidence, Mr. Elkins said, was the quick passage of a civil unions bill that is set to take effect in Delaware on Jan. 1.

TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE, GO TO: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/us/25census.html

in Adoption / IVF / Parenting / Second Parent Adoption / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Who’s on the Family Tree? Now It’s Complicated

July 4, 2011 – New York Times –
By LAURA M. HOLSON

Laura Ashmore and Jennifer Williams are sisters. After that, their relationship becomes more complex.

When Ms. Ashmore and her husband, Lee, learned a few years ago that they could not conceive a child, Ms. Williams stepped in and offered to become pregnant with a donor’s sperm on behalf of the couple, and give birth to the child. The baby, Mallory, was born in September 2007 and adopted by Ms. Ashmore and her husband.

Then the sisters began to ponder: where would the little girl sit on the family tree?

“For medical purposes I am her mother,” Ms. Williams said. “But I am also her aunt.”

Many families are grappling with similar questions as a family tree today is beginning to look more like a tangled forest. Genealogists have long defined familial relations along bloodlines or marriage. But as the composition of families changes, so too has the notion of who gets a branch on the family tree.

Some families now organize their family tree into two separate histories: genetic and emotional. Some schools, where charting family history has traditionally been a classroom project, are now skipping the exercise altogether.

Adriana Murphy, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at the Green Acres School in Rockville, Md., said she asked students to write a story about an aspect of their family history instead. At Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, KC Cohen, a counselor, said the family tree had been mostly relegated to foreign language class, where students can practice saying “brother” or “sister” in French and Spanish.

“You have to be ready to have that conversation about surrogates, sperm donors and same-sex parents if you are going to teach the family tree in the classroom,” Ms. Cohen said.

For the last six years, according to United States census data, there have been more unmarried households than married ones. And more same-sex couples are having children using surrogates or sperm donors or by adoption. The California Cryobank, one of the nation’s largest sperm banks, said that about one-third of its clients in 2009 were lesbian couples, compared with 7 percent a decade earlier. Even birth certificate reporting is catching up. New questions are being phased in nationally on the standard birth certificate questionnaire about whether, and what type of, reproductive technology was used, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tracing a family tree, though, is more than just an intellectual exercise. There are medical and legal implications, particularly when it comes to death and inheritance. Families, said Melinde Lutz Byrne, president of the American Society of Genealogists, are mostly concerned with who inherits property when a biological relative dies.

Ms. Williams and her sister, though, had other issues to resolve. Ms. Williams, who has a lesbian partner, had a biological child, Jamison, 6, who was conceived through a sperm donor, too. And the sisters wondered how to describe the relationship between Mallory and Jamison, who are not only biological half-siblings, but also cousins. And where did the sperm donors fit in?

After months of discussion, they came to a resolution: “Mallory is my daughter and Jennifer is her aunt,” said Ms. Ashmore, 38, who lives close to her sister near Minneapolis. At home, Jamison sometimes refers to Mallory as his sister. But at school, said Ms. Williams, 40, “she’s his cousin.” The sperm donors, they agreed, had no place on the family tree.

For some children, having to explain their family tree can be alienating.

“It can cause kids pain in unexpected ways,” said Peggy Gillespie, a founder of Family Diversity Projects, a family education advisory group.

At Green Acres last year, Ms. Murphy said, two kindergartners were playing outside when a boy, the son of a single mother, told a classmate that he had an older sister. “You can’t have an older sister; you don’t have a dad,” Ms. Murphy recalled the girl saying. The boy protested; he said he knew his sperm donor, who had a daughter of his own.

Sue Stuever Battel and Bob Battel of Cass City, Mich., will soon have four children. The oldest, Addy, 8, was conceived naturally; Dori, 5, was conceived via a sperm donor. They are adopting two toddler boys. “All four of our kids are 100 percent in our family tree,” Ms. Battel said. “The genetic connection has never mattered.”

But the Battels understand that their children may have questions. So they have prepared two sets of baby books: one outlining life with the Battels, the other about each child’s birth parents. The children can choose which details they want to share.

Ms. Battel and her husband also debated whether to include other children born using their donor’s sperm. After all, those children would be biological half-siblings to Dori. Their verdict: “We decided they are not half-siblings, but donor siblings,” Ms. Battel said. “We honor them, but they are not part of the family.”

Jeannette Lofas, founder of Stepfamily Foundation, a family counseling service based in New York City, eschews the traditional family tree for a network of circles (females) and squares (males), with dotted and straight lines to connect married and blood relatives. A live-in lover or nanny can be included, too, though with no connecting lines.

“That is how complex we have to think,” Ms. Lofas said.

Rob Okun, a 61-year-old magazine editor from Massachusetts, agreed to donate his sperm to a lesbian couple 16 years ago. Mr. Okun already had two biological children with a longtime female partner and two stepchildren with his current wife. He wanted no role in parenting the children born with his donated sperm, but did want them to know who he was.

The couple, Patricia Kogut and Lynne Dahlborg, agreed, and Ms. Kogut gave birth to Lucyna and Nathaniel. Ms. Dahlborg then adopted both children.

“There is the family tree and there is the day-to-day structure of the family,” Ms. Kogut said.

She described the family as having a “triple family tree” that included her, Ms. Dahlborg and Mr. Okun.

For a long time, though, Mr. Okun was uncomfortable with the connection, largely because his mother disapproved. It wasn’t until after her death in 2004 that he considered including the children in his tree. Now, he said, “I make no distinction between my biological and stepchildren.”

For now, Ms. Williams and her sister said they were happy that Mallory and Jamison shared a special bond. But what if one day the two children want to place themselves as brother and sister on their family tree?

“I think I’m fine,” Ms. Ashmore said, tentatively.

Then she added, “But we’ll have to think about it.”

in Adoption / Anonymous/Known Donation / IVF / Legal / Parenting / Second Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

“Non-Bio” Gay Dad Prevails in Texas Parentage Battle

Huffington Post – Frederick Hertz – March 8, 2011

A recent decision by the Texas Court of Appeals in Houston illustrates the complexity — and the nastiness — of one particularly ugly gay divorce. The partners lived in Houston but they traveled to Canada in 2003 to get married and then they registered as domestic partners in California in 2005. Because of the restrictions on gay partnerships and parentage in Texas, they arranged for a surrogate in California to bear their child (with sperm donated from one of them). Prior to the child’s birth they obtained a pre-birth declaration of parentage under the Uniform Parentage Act, which is lawful in California. A pre-birth parentage judgment is one of those newly-created legal devices to establish parentage for gay male couples using a surrogate,with both men designated as legal parents even though only one of them has a biological connection to the child. The non-standard nature of this proceeding has become the subject of legal conflict, now that the couple has broken up.

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