Month: April 2018

Children of same-sex couples officially recognized in a first for Italy

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Three gay couples in the northern city of Turin have been able to legally register their children to both parents, in a first for Italy.

“Today an important page of history has been written,” said the mother of one of the children, Turin councillor Chiara Foglietta.2nd parent adoption, second parent adoption, second parent adoptions, second parent adoption new york

Foglietta, who gave birth after undergoing artificial insemination in Denmark, said staff at the public records office had told her “no form exists” to recognize the child’s birth through the procedure, which is subject to strict rules in Italy.

Instead, the staff reportedly told Foglietta she should declare that she had had the baby with a man. On Monday, the councillor said she “cried with joy” after signing the documents in which both she and her partner, Micaela Ghisleni, were recognized as parents of their son.

The couple’s son Niccolò was one of four children who were officially registered to same-sex parents on Monday, with city mayor Chiara Appendino signing the birth certificates. The other families included two men who are fathers to twin boys, and another lesbian couple whose son was officially recognized.

Appendino, who had earlier vowed to “force the issue” after the registry’s initial refusal to acknowledge the LGBT families, said the recognition was “a strong gesture in a legal vacuum”.

Although the Five Star Movement mayor said that it was not yet possible to make a change at a legislative level, she said she hoped the recognition of these four children was a first step towards such a change.

On Twitter, Appendino wrote: “Today is one of the days when every drop of energy put into politics feels worth it.”

by Catherine Edwards, the local.it, April 23, 2018

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Source: Time for Families

Some L.G.B.T. Parents Reject the Names ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’

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When Amanda Davidson, a 42-year-old Los Angeles-based artist and writer, welcomed her firstborn child in December — a boy named Felix — with her partner Isaac Schankler, 39, a composer, she chafed at the assumptions the medical staff members made about how the pair wanted to identify themselves as parents.

“‘Hi, Mommy! Where’s Daddy? Mommy needs to know this, but so does Daddy,’” she said with a big laugh. The binary clashed so much with how the couple sees themselves and exists in the world — she’s queer-identified, and her partner goes by pronouns they/their/them and uses the gender-neutral title Mx. — she refrained from calling herself anything vis-à-vis Felix for the first two weeks of his life.

She eventually settled on Mama. “I was racking my brain for a mama-alternate, but it feels right for the moment,” she said, adding that in her universe, “identity wiggles around,” and she’s open to other possibilities.estate planning

Mx. Schankler remembers reading the queer writer Andrea Lawlor’s essay on identifying as “Baba” (as opposed to some iteration of mother) in Mutha magazine and thinking that “dad” or “daddy” wouldn’t work for them either, so they opted for “Abba.” It means “dad” in Hebrew, providing a link to their Jewish heritage: “It does feel more gender-neutral, or at least doesn’t have quite the same baggage that dad and daddy have,” Mx. Schankler said.

Naming is particularly important to the pair as a means of signaling their queerness, since they “pass” as a straight couple. “We don’t look visibly queer,” Ms. Davidson said, “So in some ways, our choice of names helps us affirm our identities.”

The duo’s ambivalence about traditional monikers is reflected in a study, currently under peer review, on the naming practices in same-sex adoptive families. The study, by Abbie E. Goldberg, Clark University’s pioneering L.G.B.T. family scholar; Melissa Manley, a doctoral student, and Emma Frank, a recent Clark graduate, is one of the few on the topic. It found that of 80 participants — 20 lesbian couples and 20 gay couples — recruited from adoption agencies across the United States, including cities with high concentrations of lesbian and gay populations, all opted for derivatives of mother and father.

A quarter of them, however — 20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples — participated in some version of “undoing gender.” Many do this by taking parental names from their native cultures or religions that strip away the binary in this cultural context, collapsing the dichotomy between terms by merging them, such as “Mather,” a fusion of mother and father, or creating nicknames (“Muzzie,” in one instance).

Ellen Kahn, the director of the Children, Youth & Families Program at the Human Rights Campaign, said the gender binary that underlies “mother” and “father” doesn’t jibe with some parents’ self-understanding and self-presentation: “For queer parents who don’t think of themselves as gender conforming, ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ may be a little discordant with the way they think about themselves.”

Both Dr. Goldberg and Ms. Kahn surmise that the couples who are using new terminologies are willing to do so because of the hard-won rights L.G.B.T. people have secured, particularly the right to marry. “Now there’s more willingness to push some of those boundaries,” Dr. Goldberg said, “because of greater legal recognition and acceptance.”

by Stephanie Fairyington – New York Times April 26, 2018

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Source: Time for Families

Doctor refuses to treat 6-day-old baby because her parents are lesbians

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When Jami and Krista Contreras became parents, their beautiful child was everything to them. But when they took the baby to a local pediatrician, the doctor made sure they knew the lesbian couple was nothing to her.

Even worse? The couple lives in Michigan where it’s perfectly legal to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

The couple met with Dr. Vesna Roi before the birth of their daughter, Bay Windsor. But it wasn’t until the girl was 6 days old and they were waiting at the practice for her first checkup that they learned of the pediatrician’s decision.

“‘Is our doctor coming in?’,” Krista told ABC-7 the couple asked when a different doctor entered the waiting room. “She said ‘No. I’m going to be your doctor; your doctor prayed on it and decided she won’t see you all today’.”

“I was completely dumbfounded,” Krista Contreras told the Detroit Free Press. “We just looked at each other and said, ‘Did we hear that correctly?’”

“We spoke to other people and they would say well they can’t do that… that’s not legal and we looked into it and it was legal,” Jami told the station.

The couple said Roi later wrote them a handwritten letter saying that “after much prayer,” she felt she could not “develop the personal patient-doctor relationships” that she usually builds with patients.

While the incident happened in 2015, the Contreras are telling their story to highlight the need for federal nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community as part of a new national campaign called Beyond I Do.

The campaign highlights states that continue to allow discrimination in employment, housing, credit, public accommodations, and social services.

LGBTQNation.com, by Bill Browning – April 25, 2018

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In a first, 2020 census to count same-sex couples

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LGBTQ advocates say the 2020 census change is “a step in the right direction”

The U.S. Census Bureau recently submitted to Congress its planned questions for the 2020 census, and for the first time ever, the decennial survey is expected to allow respondents to specify that they are part of a same-sex couple.

“As our population and communities change, so do their needs,” a Census Bureau spokesperson told NBC News via email. “To better collect more detailed data about types of coupled households, the Census Bureau expanded the single response option of ‘husband or wife’ or ‘unmarried partner’ to the two response options of ‘opposite-sex husband/wife/spouse’ and ‘same-sex husband/wife/spouse,’ and ‘opposite-sex unmarried partner’ and ‘same-sex unmarried partner.’”2020 census

The spokesperson said the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S., “furthered the need” to revise the survey to include same-sex couples.

“Step in the right direction”

The expansion of the relationship question is “a step in the right direction,” according to Meghan Maury, policy director at the National LGBTQ Task Force and a member of the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, but “nowhere near what we’d love to have one day.”

Maury’s organization is among a number of advocacy groups, lawmakers and federal agencies that have been calling on the Census Bureau to include questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on the 2020 census. But while the survey will include same-sex couples, the Census Bureau announced last March it found “no federal data need” to ask individuals about their sexual orientation and gender identity.

While Maury expressed disappointment in the bureau’s decision not to ask individuals about their LGBTQ status, she said the revised relationship question will help “capture more nuanced data with a much lower error rate” regarding gay families.

In prior census surveys, researchers have counted same-sex couples by cross-referencing answers from the relationship question with the respondent’s gender, according to D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at Pew Research Center. However, she said analysts found some people would accidentally mismark the gender box, leading to an over reporting of same-sex couples.

Why the census matters

Census information is used to help allocate more than $400 billion in federal funding each year on everything from infrastructure to job training services, according to the Census Bureau’s website.

“Many people — policy-makers, businesses, the public — use our information to make far-reaching decisions. Our role is to give them timely, accurate, trustworthy information to make those decisions,” the Census Bureau spokesperson explained.”

The relationship data the decennial census collects can be used in a number of ways, the spokesperson added. This includes planning and funding government programs that provide services for families, ensuring available housing in a community meets the needs of residents and exploring whether existing programs are making a difference for families.

Cohn said the change to the relationship question will help to reduce errors in reporting, but she said it will not be able to accurately count the number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals in the U.S.

“This is not the universe of LGBT or even L and G,” she said. “Only people who are couples, and for that matter, couples in the same household, are counted.”

wsls.com, April 25, 2018

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Source: Time for Families

Lesbian mum in Italy told baby won’t be legally registered because she is gay

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A woman claims she has been told her newborn baby will not be legally registered because she is gay.

Chiara Foglietta, a councillor in the Italian city of Turin, says authorities won’t recognise her baby, because he was conceived through artificial insemination.

Due to Italian laws, fertility treatments are only available to heterosexual couples.

When she and her partner, Micaela Ghisleni, tried to register their son Niccolo Pietro after his birth on Friday last week, she was told to say she had had sex with a man.

In a Facebook post, Ms Foglietta said she was told by authorities: ‘You must declare you had union (sexual relations) with a man to register your son.

‘There is no form to say you had artificial insemination.’

She said the legal black hole is due to a 2002 ministerial decree that does not foresee that a woman, rather than a heterosexual couple, would seek artificial insemination.

Ms Foglietta used artificial insemination in Denmark to get pregnant, with sperm donated by an anonymous man.

She was told she could lie about the child’s origins but she refused, writing on Facebook: ‘Every child has a right to know his own story.’

She argued that her son came into this world because she and Micaela had wanted a child, and that ‘he is our son’.

Further in her post, Ms Foglietta urged people to do more to tackle the issue.

‘You have an important role and you can do so much more. We can do more together,’ she said.

‘Not for me, but for Niccolo, for all rainbow children, for families who do not have the same strength to face these battles, for the children of single women and those with partners who have chosen medically assisted procreation with external donor and want to tell the truth.’

Metro.co.uk buy , April 22, 2018

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The post Lesbian mum in Italy told baby won’t be legally registered because she is gay appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Three Parent Family in NY Affirmed by Family Court

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three parent family in NY

A three parent family in NY recently appeared in New York County Family Court.  The outcome shows movement toward acknowledgment and acceptance of modern families.

A three parent family in NY was granted the rights of custody and visitation on April 10, 2018 by family court Judge Carol Goldstein.  The issue before the court was whether the husband of the biological father of the child had an equal right to sue for custody and visitation as did the biological father and mother.

Over brunch in 2016, Raymond T. and David S., a married couple, agreed to have a child and co-parent with Samantha G., a friend of the married couple.  They agreed that the child would be raised in a “tri-parent arrangement.”  While the parties never executed a written agreement, they did engage an attorney to assist them in drafting one.  They agreed that the mother would continue to live in New York City and the married couple would continue to live in Jersey City, NJ, but would consider themselves a “family” for the purposes of raising their child, named Matthew Z. S.-G.Three Parent Family in NY

The parties proceeded to act like a three parent family in NY.  They made joint announcements on social media of the pregnancy.  The male couple attended childbirth classes with the birth mother and they created a joint savings account for the child, to which the non-biologically related father contributed 50%.

It was only after Matthew was born and a DNA test was administered did they find David to be the biological father.  Both fathers had contributed sperm over a period of eight days, each man alternating every other day.  They referred to one another as “Momma,” “Daddy” and “Papai,” which is Portuguese for father.

This case began when David and Raymond filed a joint petition for “legal custody and shared parenting time.”  Samantha filed a cross petition seeking sole legal custody, but allowing the fathers “reasonable visitation.”  The issue in the case is whether Raymond, the non-genetically related father has standing to sue for custody and visitation.  New York law states that the husband of a woman who gives birth is presumed to be the father of a child born into that marriage.  The unanswered question is whether the husband of a man who donates sperm to conceive a child with a woman that he is not married to has the legal authority to seek custody and visitation.  The court answered yes.

What the court did not address, and what is potentially the more monumental question, is whether Raymond as the non-genetically related parent is a legal parent under NY law.  This issue touches the heart of this three parent family in NY.  The Judge did ask the parties to prepare memoranda of law asking the question of whether legal parentage exists between Matthew and Raymond.  While the mother consented to custody and visitation, she opposed Raymond’s legal status as a parent and asked the court to make that distinction.three parent custody

Legal parentage would bestow much more than the ability to eek custody and visitation.  It would create intestate, or estate, related rights between the father and child.  There would be no question as to whether the child would qualify for the parent’s health insurance or other employment related benefits that flow from a parent to a legal child.

While this decision regarding a three parent family in NY is significant, it does leave unanswered questions.  Perhaps after the issue has been briefed to the court, we will know more about how the law treats a three parent family in NY.

If you are thinking about creating your own three parent family in NY, or any other state, please contact Anthony at [email protected] for more information.

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