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.

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.   

The Irresponsible Parent

(This is a continuation of the discussion begun in my last post.  You might want to go and read that first.)

In my last post I argued that it’s misleading to criticize some people’s choices to become parents as selfish, because all people’s choices to become parents are equally selfish.    However, I didn’t mean to suggest that no criticism of individual decision-making was possible.  I suggested that the better question was whether the decision to become a parent was responsible.    

Before I go further down that road, a bit of discussion is necessary.    There’s at least an argument that the decision to become a parent is personal and hence, shielded from public examination of the sort I am suggesting.  

To the extent this is true, it seems to me it ought to be equally true for all people.  Thus, it is as true for a single woman as it is for a married couple. 

The Selfish Parent

Recently I’ve been thinking about the assertion that some people’s decisions to become a parent are selfish.   Of course, being selfish is never a good thing, so asserting that someone’s choice is selfish is one way, and perhaps an effective way, of suggesting that their choice to become a parent is not a legitimate or worthy choice.    

You see this argument deployed in many different contexts.   Some assert that the decision of the fifty-ish couple to become a parents via surrogacy (the topic of a recent post) was selfish.  In comments on posts about sperm donors I’ve seen the assertion that using gametes from an unknown provider/donor is selfish.   I’ve seen similar assertions of selfishness leveled at single parents (perhaps most typically single mothers), lesbian and gay parents, and other not-quite-typical parents.  Though I haven’t gone back to reread all my old posts, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that I’d made that point myself in the case of Nadya

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.  

Men as Parents and the Power of Public Appreciation

There was a story in yesterday’s New York Times that I thought worth a little discussion.  The story was in the science section and is about fathers and parenthood.  (I am not sure the NYT headline really suits the article, but that’s really beside the point.)   It made me think about some of the recent discussion here. 

One thing the article notes is detrimental effect of social messaging that excludes men/fathers.   These paragraphs caught my attention: 

Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.

News from the UK: Gay Fathers Reflect

I seem to have allowed myself a de facto sabbatical from my blog last week.   My apologies to you all, but I suppose I needed the time away.   Anyway, I’ll gear myself back up now. 

Here’s a story about gay fathers in the UK.  It isn’t really a story, though. It’s six gay men/couples talking about their experiences adopting in the UK.   Not the sort of thing you see in the mainstream press all that often, really.  

I’ve been thinking a good deal about gay men and parenthood recently, though I haven’t had occasion to write about it for a while.   One so often lumps together “gay and lesbian” parents.  Yet parenthood is deeply gendered (surely I’ve said this thirty times?) and so lumping lesbian and gay parents together misses as much as it captures.   

Sperm Donors, Anonymity and Parental Status: My Last Thoughts (For Now)

I’m still amazed at the discussion that developed in the comments over my last couple of posts.  It’s been helpful to me to be pushed on my thinking.  I’m grateful to those of you who took the time to write.   I want  to take one more run at the question of sperm donor anonymity and sperm donor parental status.    Then I think I’ll move on for now, at least. 

Ultimately the point I want to make is that donor anonymity and donor parental status are necessarily connected.   If you want people to use known or identifiable donors, then you must provide that the donor is NOT a legal parent.   If you insist on both identified donors and legal parental status for donors, then you make the use of sperm donors implausible.    

I will try coming at this from a different direction this time.  I’ll also try to be specific about the assumptions I’m making along the way so that you can figure out exactly where you disagree with, if you do indeed disagree. 

Uncoupled Parents?

I want to pick up on yesterday’s post here.   I left myself with a question–whether there’s a justification for assuming that co-parents need to be or have been romantic partners.   

Actually, before I tackle that, there’s one wrinkle to discuss, which reveals a bit more complexity.   Long ago on this blog I spent a good deal of time discussing the parentage of a child whose conception is the result of a one-night-stand.   Quite apart from what I think the law ought to be, this is a situation in which the law generally does recognize both the man and the woman involved as legal parents even though they are not and have never been romantic partners in any meaningful way. 

Two Parents But Never a Couple?

I’m still following my earlier thread (and still writing off-line, so not really able to add the links I’d like.)   The last post on this topic spelled out at least one main difference between the test for parentage adopted by an Oregon court and that adopted by the DC legislature.   While both tests will clearly benefit lesbian couples raising kids, the DC test is more expansive and will apply to others as well.  (If you look back to that post, check out that Venn diagram.  The additional people covered by the DC test are those in that outer ring.)

Having laid all this groundwork, I want to consider an underlying question.  Is there  any reason why parents need to be (or need to have been) romantic partners?   One major feature of the DC statute is that it allows people who have not been married or partnered or civilly united or romantic partners in any way to become co-parents.