A quick run through some news on lesbian and gay parents

Again, my apologies for the lengthy silence.  First I was travelling and in my travels, I managed to contract the H1N1 flu.  I’m prepared to affirm that it is a nasty bug.   I am not yet out of quarantine, but at least I am feeling human again.  

A couple of recent items on lesbian and gay parents.  (I actually think there were more than two, but I’ve lost track.) 

First, here’s a current item from France.   France permits single people to adopt, including single lesbians and gay men, does not permit lesbian and gay couples to adopt.   The rationale?   The absence of a different sex role model in a lesbian or gay couple.  

Seeking Birth Parents-Does Gender Matter?

As is so often the case, yesterday’s Style section of the NYT included a fine little essayin the Modern Love column.   It’s by Kerry Herlihy.   

Herlihy is adopted.   In the essay she considers her relationship with the woman who gave birth to her.   They made contact ten years ago but did not forge an ongoing relationship.   In the essay Herlihy chronicles her struggle over whether to use new technology to re-contact her birth mother.  It’s worth a read.   There’s just one relatively small point I wanted to comment on.  

It’s clear reading the essay that Herlihy’s hopes and expectations with regard to the woman who gave birth are complicated and substantial.   I suppose this is not necessarily remarkable–I’ve read frequently of the quest of an adopted child for the person typically called a “birth parent.”  

But Herlihy’s quest is so clearly focused on the woman who gave birth to her rather than the man who participated in her conception.  Indeed, he is granted only a brief and passing mention in the essay.    

For me this raises a gender question I’ve frequently wondered about.   Is it more important to adopted children to locate birth mothers than birth fathers?  Is the decision of a woman to give up a child for adoption generally different from the decision of a man?  

There’s an obvious reason why this might be so–the woman who gives birth has been pregnant for nine months or so.   The man whose genetic material created the child has not been.  He may have been involved with the process of pregnancy, but he need not be.  

So this really just comes back to a central question in my consideration of  parenthood–are men and women similarly situated?  Does pregnancy matter?   It seems at least in this case that it does.

Lesbian Mothers in Missouri–Siblings Sundered

There’s a new case out of Missouri that falls into the regrettable category of intra-lesbian disputes about parental status.   To recap, these are cases where lesbians who have been raising a child split up and argue not simply about who should have how much time with the child (that’s a simple custody case) but about whether or not both women are actually parents of the child.   

Typically one woman has given birth, and so she is clearly a parent.  The question focuses on the parental status of her former partner.  If that woman is not a parent, then in all likelihood she will have no further contact with the child.   That’s the power of parental rights–You get to decide who the child spends time with.    If she is a parent, then she is entitled to have that custody fight I mentioned above.  

(These problems can be entirely avoided when the second woman obtains legal recognition of her status as a parent in advance of any trouble.  The most common way to do this is through a second-parent adoption, which you can also find discussed frequently here.)      

On Father’s Day

On Mother’s Day I wrote about gendered parenthood and it seems only fair to do the same on Father’s Day.   But before I do that, I’ll start with a nod towards all the families with kids and no fathers.  

I’m thinking here of single-mother households and lesbian mother households (and yes, they overlap.)   Just as Mother’s Day creates a minor crises for motherless families, so Father’s Day creates a crises for fatherless ones. 

Schools have become more accommodating though, offering the opportunity to make a Father’s Day project for a grandfather, an uncle, or any other significant male figure.   The key, of course, is that the recipient must be a man.  

Parenting, Gender, and the Time Bind

There are two different articles in today’s New York Times that tell complementary stories about gender and parenthood.     The articles seem to have landed in the same paper completely by chance—neither makes any reference to the other.

One article appears in a column (blog?) called Motherlode.  It’s and e-mail interview with Jeremy Adam Smith about growing participation of men in actual, hands-on childrearing.

[Although this is not my point, this article also offers a fine example of what I think of as the elusive use of statistics.  At one point  says the Smith says “Since 1965 the number of hours that men spend on childcare has tripled. Since 1995 it has nearly doubled.”   

Gendered Parenthood On Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day today.   A tribute to mothers, and a monument to gendered parenting.  Which is not to say I’m against Mother’s Day, per se, and I’m certainly not against mothers.  But still, I’ll take a few moments to reflect on how very deeply gendered parenting is.

Two separate days, separated by several weeks, are marked out for male parents and for female parents.   Today is the day we celebrate female parents.  They might be single mothers, or lesbian mothers, or conventional-no-modifier-needed mothers.   They might be the household wage-earner or an equal partner in the wage earning.   They might be the household disciplinarian.   They might be genetically related to their children, or have adopted their children, or have given birth to them, or have no recognized legal relationship.

These are not distinctions we make today.   If you are female and you are a parent, then you are a mother and this is your day.   (And now, if I had footnotes to work with, I’d drop a footnote that said something about our blithe confidence that we know what “female” actually means.)  Even the most maternal man doesn’t get honored today.  He waits for Father’s Day.  

The Nature of Gender

Part of the reason I invested the time in writing yesterday’s post, which was rather less connected to my topic than might be usual, was to set up today’s post.   And now I find I can also tie it to the Modern Love column in today’s New York Times.   It’s a lovely column by Jennifer Finney Boylan about her experience of being Maddy.  (Or is it being a Maddy?)

Boylan is transgendered.  She began as her children’s father but, during the course of their childhood, transitioned to female.   It’s her older son who christened her “Maddy” when it became clear to him that continuing to call her “daddy” was going to be absurd.

Part of what Boylan writes about, of course, is gender.  What I want to think about here is gender and parenting.

That’s hardly a new topic for me.     It’s also a topic of particular concern for lesbian mothers and gay fathers and their advocates, as well as for single parents.  That’s because lesbian, gay and single parents are subject to the criticism that their kids won’t/don’t have a mother and a father.  

Gay Fathers/Lesbian Mothers, III

I’m not sure where or how far I want to take this thread for now.   The last couple of posts seem unsatisfying to me–they aren’t clear enough and they lack direction.  Perhaps all I am ready to do at this moment is not that there are both commonalities and differences between lesbian mothers and gay fathers.

I’ve a bunch of other topics queued up for now anyway, so let me just add one more thought here before I move off for now.  This is really the thought that triggered me to write about this topic now, so I might as well at least flag it.

A few posts back you’ll find an entry about some good news from New York state.  It’s a note about a case in which one woman donated an egg which was then combined with donor sperm. The resulting embryo was then transferred to the other woman who brought the pregnancy to term and gave birth.  As is discussed in that post, under the relevant law (there New York law) the second woman is a mother by virtue of having given birth.  The first women has a number of theories under which she might claim motherhood, but in the case is allowed to adopt her the child (a second parent adoption) in order to ensure portable parental rights.

What the women did here is a fairly elaborate procedure, and it bears some resemblance to several different forms of ART discussed.   So, for example, you could look at the first woman as an egg donor and/or you could look at the second woman as a gestational surrogate (a woman pregnant with and giving birth to a child she is not genetically related to).   But that’s not what the women involved intend to be, for neither egg donors nor gestational surrogates generally intend to be mothers.    (Indeed, there’s a well known CA case, KM v. EG, where the lower courts treated the first woman as an egg donor who therefore had no parental rights.  This result was reversed on appeal.)

Gay Fathers/Lesbian Mothers, II

I want to develop yesterday’s post a bit further here.   You can read that to get up to speed.

My basic point is that while gay fathers and lesbian mothers have much in common–for example, both are targeted by anti-gay/lesbian organizations for failing to provide male and female gender role models–there are also significant differences between them.  I think I began to jumble some of the differences in the last post.  That isn’t helpful so let me slow down and try to sort things out a bit more carefully.

First its worth observing that there are different kinds of differences.   Some seem to me to flow pretty clearly from biology (I’ll call that “category 1″), others are differences that may or may not flow from biology but seem primarily tied to the mother/father social role distinction (category 2), and still others are differences in behavior which I observe but for which I do not have any explanation (category 3).

So for example, one difference I discussed yesterday was that the cases I’ve blogged about in which one person challenges her  ex-partner’s entitlement to claim to be a parent all seem to involve lesbians rather than gay men–that’s category 3.    A second difference discussed yesterday–that to have kids lesbians need to obtain sperm while gay men need something more expensive and complicated (like a surrogate)–that’s category 1.   These categories might be useful in thinking about what the possible importance of these differences are.  

Gay Fathers and Lesbian Mothers–Sameness and Difference

If you look back over the past several weeks, you’ll notice that many of my posts are about legal matters related to gay fathers or lesbian mothers.   (You’ll find them if you use the tags.) That’s not surprising.   As I’ve noted, lesbian and gay parents have become a visible center of the broader struggle around lesbian and gay rights generally, and lots of these struggles get worked out either in the courts or the legislature.

In many ways, lesbian mothers and gay fathers have much in common.    Anti-same-sex parenting campaigns rarely if ever distinguish between them.  For example, proposed statutory restrictions bar all unmarried couples–including both lesbian couples and gay couples as well as unmarried heterosexual couples–from adoption.   Lesbian mothers and gay fathers, and perhaps especially lesbian and gay couples who are parenting, are seen to threaten the fundamental gendered dynamic of parenting.   Lesbian and gay parents don’t offer children the proper gendered model of the world.

But even as lesbian and gay parents may challenge gendered practices, lesbian and gay parents also live in a highly gendered world.  As I’ve noted before, there are some real differences between men and women with regard to the process by which children are brought into the world.   I mean, of course, that women are pregnant and give birth while men (with a very small number of exceptions) do not.   Beyond that, while the individual day-to-day performances of male and female parents vary widely, the idea of “mother” is quite distinct from the idea of “father.”