Worst Case Scenario?

I figured I owed to to all the folks who disagree with me to cover this story, which is surely the worst case scenario for my point of view.   (I’m generally fond of functional or de facto parent tests.) 

The threat of a babysitter ousting a legal parent has always been one of the arguments against any kind of parentage analysis that takes account of function.  And, as the article suggests, until now it’s been entirely hypothetical.   No one had ever heard of a real case where it happened.  But now we have. 

Perhaps the most important thing to highlight is that we don’t actually know the real facts here.  The babysitter says the child has lived exclusively with her since he was three days old (he is now two years old) and that he thinks of her and her husband as his only parents.  

Cusband and Wife? And What About the Children?

While I was off eating turkey and the like, a whole bunch of comments piled up here.  I’ve tried to work through most of them, but I wanted to get this up to, even if it is short. 

This story appeared in yesterday’s NYT.   It’s about marriage between first cousins, which is illegal in much of the United States, but permissible in a few states and many countries and cultures.   Indeed, the article notes that slightly more than 10% of marriages world-wide are between first cousins.  (I believe that my grandparents, who came from Eastern Europe, were second cousins or closer.) 

Many people object to first cousin marriages, and quite a few do so based on concerns about the possibility of an increased risk of genetic defects in their offspring.   The article devotes a good deal of space to this concerns and refers to a 2002 study showing less risk than had been expected and also a couple of competing views in the study.  

A Thanksgiving Family

I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday weekend.   This is just a quick post between errands and eating. 

Yesterday my local paper (the Seattle Times) featured this story as a part of their holiday fundraising series.   It seems to me it is a tribute to the resilience of children and the capacity of people to love and care for children.   Sharon Cormier is an admirable parent–to the child she is biologically related to, to the children she has chosen to embrace through adoption, and to the children she raised and is raising as a foster parent.   Her’s is in many ways an extraordinary family and reminder to us, I think, that families come in all sorts of shapes and forms.     Somehow the law has to be flexible enough to recognize and support that diversity.

Gay Dads, Surrogacy and Portable Parenthood

Here’s a new case from Virginia that turned up on Professor Arthur Leonard’s very fine blog.   The facts are rather complicated and the case presents a variety of interesting question. 

Roberto-Luis Copeland and Philip Spivey are a gay couple.   They wanted to become parents.  In 2003 in Minnesota (where I assume they lived) they entered into an agreement with Tanya Prashad.   It’s described in the opinion as a surrogacy agreement. 

Prashad was inseminated with sperm from both men.   She became pregnant and ACC was born in Minnesota on August 10, 2004.   Now I don’t know offhand what the law about surrogacy in Minnesota is.   But I believe, from the events that followed, that Prashad was and remains the child’s mother.  

Figuring out the father at the time of birth is a different matter. 

Two Pending Lesbian Mother Cases Worth Watching

There’s an excellent blog run by the people at Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality.    It’s had a couple of recent postings on pending cases involving claims by lesbian mothers.   One is in New York, the other Puerto Rico.  In both cases the Center has filed amicus briefs.  

The New York case arises in a situation that is all too familiar:  two women decide to raise a child together.    One gives birth.  Both parent the child.  At some point the women break up.  The woman who gave birth has a clear legal right to be recognized as a parent.   The woman who did not give birth does not have such a clear right.  The legal mother asserts that the non-legal mother is not a parent and attempts to cut off all contact between the non-legal mother and the child.  I’ve written about  a number of these cases from various states. 

What Makes DNA So Difficult?

After reading the NYT magazine article, writing about it a bit and then reading the comments to my posts and on the magazine site, I’m left with this question:   What makes DNA so difficult?   Surely it must have seemed that having reliable and relatively inexpensive DNA testing would make legal parentage questions easier.   Why hasn’t it worked out that way.

As one commenter on this blog pointed out, DNA does make determination of biological parentage easy—it’s a scientific test that yields a simple yes/no with a very high degree of reliability.   It guarantees that all children will have two parents (one male and one female.) 

But its very strength is also its weakness.  While DNA gives us a clear and clean answer, the lives of many children are not so clear and clean.   DNA is  inflexible and fail to account for the diversity of children’s lives.   

DNA and the Power of An Idea

One of the most interesting stories in today’s NYT magazine feature on DNA (see yesterday’s post, too) is the tale of Denny Ogden and D’Arcy Griggs.   I’ll summarize it here.  

D’Arcy Griggs was 34 years old when she called Denny Ogden and said he was her father.   Ogden knew that a woman he had had a summer romance with in college had become pregnant and given the child up for adoption.  He’d never traced that child.   He had married and had three more children.   He was 54 when D”Arcy Griggs called. 

She said she had tracked him down after her birth mother died of cancer.   He checked her background to make sure it wasn’t some swindle and then they began exchanging e-mails.  He began to think of her as his daughter.   They reveled in the little things they had in common.   After a few months, they decided to meet and he came to Seattle where she lived.  

Which Man Is Father To The Child?

There’s an excellent and fascinating article in the New York Times magazine (publication date tomorrow, but on-line now.)    It’s  a look at a problem that has arisen with comparatively easy DNA testing.   What happens when men learn that the children they are raising are not genetically related to them.  

I’ve written about this a bit before, but the article offers far more extended consideration than I’ve managed in a short post.   It also raises a number of different issues, primarily using individual stories to make its points and raise its questions.  

There are a few things that stand out for me.    First, as Ruth Padawer (the author) notes, in the cases discussed when a man finds out that the child he has been raising is not genetically related to him he also learns that the woman who gave birth to the child (in these cases his wife) has lied to him.  He learns she has been unfaithful to him.    

Vermont/Virginia Lesbian Mother Lesbian Mother Update

There’s a case that has literally been dragging on for years that I’ve talked about repeatedly.   (The link will lead you to the last most recent post and you can follow it backwards from there.)   A new development is worthy of mention. 

Janet Jenkins and Lisa Miller were in a lesbian relationship.  They had a child together–Isabella.  She is now seven. 

Jenkins and Miller split up in 2003 and fought over parentage of the child.  Miller, who had given birth to Isabella, insisted that Jenkins was not a legal parent.   She went to court in Virginia, a state notably hostile to lesbian and gay couples.   Jenkins went to court in Vermont, a state far more supportive of lesbian and gay relationships.  

Foster Parents to Adoptive Parents

I know I’ve got an ongoing thread to work on and that the NYT magazine has a big story on DNA tests and fatherhood coming out tomorrow, but I feel compelled to take a couple of little detours here.   First, here’s a story from today’s Seattle Times.   It celebrates the transition of 175 foster kids in Washington to adoptive kids. 

It’s just worth stopping to note why this is so important.   Foster parents are great, but they are not full legal parents.  As the article makes clear, they do not have full and permanent legal rights.  Adoptive parents do.   Thus, in order to truly secure a legal relationship to a child, a person must move from foster parent to adoptive parent.   And for the kids who are the subject of this article, that’s what happened yesterday.