Comments on: Missouri Rules Against Non-Bio Mom; Denies Boys Their Brothers

By: Dana

Dana — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:22:22 +0000

Good points, Theresa. I will note, though, that being married in a state that permits same-sex couples to marry is not enough for a non-bio mom’s parentage to be recognized in other states, even if she is on the child’s birth cert. If another state doesn’t recognize the marriage, it doesn’t recognize her right to be on the birth cert, which is why lawyers recommend the non-bio mom still do an adoption. I think marriage helps, but to Serena’s point, the state-by-state process means it’s not enough. (And there are also plenty of laws that recognize opposite-sex couples as parents even if they are not married, so I don’t think marriage should be the only way for same-sex parents to gain recognition, either. I’m cribbing a lot from Nancy Polikoff here, who has written extensively on the subject.)

As far as a date sometime between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day–that’s exactly why I picked June 1 as Blogging for LGBT Families Day. It’s not exactly in between, but it’s usually within a few days, and it’s also the start of Pride Month. Clearly, there’s a resonance with the date–and some other blogger mentioned using it in a similar fashion recently, though I can’t remember who at the moment. Maybe we should make it into some kind of “non-traditional family” national holiday….

By: Theresa Swayne

Theresa Swayne — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:09:57 +0000

When we lobby for marriage and adoption rights we talk a lot about gooey stuff like love and commitment, but a significant value of these legal structures is to protect partners and children when things go wrong.

As for shaming those who want to deny custody/visitation of their biological kids, or who want to shirk paying child support for their non-bio kids, that’s a job for their friends, and I wish their friends luck. Divorcing partners often go a little bit crazy, and forget the best interests of their children and themselves, let alone the political goals of our community.

Maybe we non-bio moms, and unmarried dads whose partners use ART, could celebrate “Third Party Day” or “Family Friend Day” sometime between Mothers’ Day and Father’s Day to draw attention to the legal erasure of our families. Universal adoption of the ABA Model Act would be a good goal to shoot for, and it has the advantage of being gender-neutral and marriage-neutral.

By: Serena

Serena — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:12:22 +0000

These are all really good questions, Dana. Charlotte Bunch wrote a book in 1994 called Women’s Rights as Human Rights. In it she documents many examples of lesbians being denied parental rights, as well as other instances of lesbians’ human rights being denied both here in the US and around the world. Part of the problem here is that the US hasn’t ratified the Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Bunch argues that the CEDAW is the most important thing that women’s rights advocates could be advocating for, because it holds governments accountable to the international community. Every country that has ratified the CEDAW has seen marked improvements in women’s lives across the board – from education, health care, work, etc.

I think that we need to stop focusing on things on a state by state or single issue strategy. The US’s refusal to ratify the CEDAW is flat out embarrassing. Even China has signed onto the CEDAW. I’m not fool hardy enough to believe that this would immediately ameliorate all of our human rights problems in the US. We need to recommit ourselves to the principles of the International Criminal Court and all of the of UN statutes on human rights. Thanks to Bush, we’re no longer a party to any of them. But I think the CEDAW would go a long way to addressing the problems of parental rights, as well as reproductive rights, and we could have uniform laws across the country since international law trumps both state and federal statutes.