Category: In the News

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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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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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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Remembering David Buckel, the Pioneering Lawyer Who Championed L.G.B.T. Rights

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David Buckel

Sometime in the late nineteen-nineties, the lawyers Evan Wolfson and David Buckel were reading a mutual friend’s obituary together.

“Boy, I can’t wait to read your obituary,” David Buckel said.

What Buckel meant, according to Wolfson, was that an obituary has a way of drawing attention to a person’s work and—in the case of a person with causes—his causes. But the comment didn’t come out quite right, and both men burst out laughing. At the time, both Wolfson and Buckel worked at Lambda Legal, an L.G.B.T.-rights organization, and David Buckel was helping Wolfson litigate a discrimination case against the Boy Scouts of America.David Buckel

Wolfson recounted the conversation to me over the phone on Sunday, the day after Buckel died after apparently setting himself on fire in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. It was Wolfson who had been reading David Buckel’s obituaries instead.

Minutes before David Buckel killed himself, he sent an e-mail to the Times. “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” the message said, according to the paper. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” Buckel was sixty years old.

David Buckel’s husband, Terry Kaelber, told me in a telephone interview on Sunday that Buckel had long been passionate about the right of individuals to choose the time and manner of their death. When he was a recent college graduate, Kaelber said, Buckel worked as a home care attendant and observed the toll that dying takes on family and friends. “He was always very clear that he wanted control over the end-of-life process,” Kaelber said, but added that he had understood Buckel to mean that he favored making end-of-life decisions with family members. No one in Buckel’s family—not his husband, nor their daughter, nor her two mothers—was aware of Buckel’s plan to take his own life.

Buckel and Kaelber met through mutual friends thirty-four years ago. They wanted to adopt, but an adoption agency stonewalled them; Kaelber told me that they sued, and eventually won, but were still denied a baby or child. Soon after the case, they met the lesbian couple, Rona and Cindy, with whom they decided to form a family. The two men, two women, and their daughter have shared a house at the edge of Prospect Park since the girl was an infant. Kaelber works as the director of community engagement at a nonprofit organization; both of the women work in health care.

[In a personal addendum, I had the privilege of working with David Buckel when we assorted together at Lambda where I was doing my student internship during law school.  David was passionate, intelligent and creative in his desire to help LGBT individuals and couples.]

by Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, April 16, 2018

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Chinese Social Media Site Reverses Gay Content Ban After Uproar

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Bowing to intense pressure from millions of internet users, a Chinese social media site, Sina Weibo, said on Monday that it would scrap plans to censor cartoons and video games with gay themes.

The site, Sina Weibo, had announced on Friday that it would target gay content as part of a campaign to remove pornographic and violent material from its site.sina weibo

But its efforts were almost immediately criticized as discriminatory and repressive, spawning an outpouring of #Iamgay hashtags and slogans like “gays aren’t scary.”

On Monday, Sina Weibo said in a post that it would scale back its “cleanup” effort and focus on “pornographic, violent and bloody content” instead of gay material. In a nod to the intense backlash, it thanked internet users for their “discussion and suggestions.”

The company did not say whether it would continue to delete texts, photos and videos with gay themes, which were also listed as targets in the original announcement. Weibo did not respond to a request for comment.

Internet users welcomed the change on Monday. Still, some said the company owed gay people an apology.

“It is totally insincere,” Bai Fei, a feminist activist in Shanghai, said of the announcement. “They have already harmed us. I want them to stand up and make a public apology.”

Others called on the company to restore content that it had already deleted in the campaign, including a popular Weibo account called the Gay Voice, which published cultural news and podcasts for its more than 230,000 followers.

Weibo’s vow to cut gay material prompted an unusually fierce backlash from internet users, who said the campaign would worsen discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in China. Still, some said they saw signs of progress in the company’s decision to change course.

Ma Baoli, the founder of Blued, a popular gay dating app, called the uproar a “historic event” in China. He said Weibo’s response showed a gradual change in attitudes toward gay people.

By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ and ZOE MOUAPRIL – New York Times, April 16, 2018

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Gestational Carrier Bill Clears New Jersey Legislature

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new jersey surrogacy

Twice-vetoed New Jersey Surrogacy legislation that would sanction the type of surrogacy-for-hire contracts famously deemed unenforceable three decades ago in the state Supreme Court’s In re Baby M case has now passed the Legislature.

Twice-vetoed legislation that would sanction the type of surrogacy-for-hire contracts famously deemed unenforceable three decades ago in the state Supreme Court’s In re Baby M case has passed the Legislature a third time.new jersey surrogacy

Lawmakers were hardly unanimous on the issue. On Thursday, S-482 passed the Assembly by a vote of 51-16, with six abstentions. Earlier, on March 26, it passed the Senate 25-10. The votes were along party lines, with majority Democrats voting in favor, and Republicans voting against or abstaining.

S-482 could be met with a friendlier reception from new Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, than its predecessors, which were blocked twice by former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican.

The legality of such contracts has been a historically contentious issue in New Jersey.

Surrogacy arrangements made national headlines in 1988 when the state Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling in In re Baby M, which voided surrogacy-for-hire contracts. In that case, the mother initially agreed to carry the fetus to term and surrender the baby to the biological father and his wife, but had a change of heart—to which the court held she was entitled, given the public policy in favor of biological parents maintaining parental rights to their children.

But, as proponents of gestational carrier legislation in recent years have pointed out, science has advanced since Baby M, and a woman can carry a fetus with no biological connection.

In 2012, the court, in a 3-3 split in In the Matter of the Parentage of a Child by T.J.S. and A.L.S., let stand a lower court ruling that parental rights do not vest in the wife of a man who fathered a child through an anonymous egg donor, which was carried by an unrelated surrogate.

Baby M, meanwhile, has remained good law.

Christie vetoed the legislation in 2012 and 2015. Last year the measure once again passed the Senate, though the Assembly didn’t take action before the close of the legislative session. In his 2012 veto, Christie said not enough research had been done to study the possible ramifications. “While some will applaud the freedom to explore these new, and sometimes necessary, arranged births, others will note the profound change in the traditional beginnings of a family that this bill would enact,” Christie said in a veto statement at the time. In his 2015 veto message, he said the sponsors had done nothing to allay his concerns since the prior attempt.

by David Gialanella, NJ Law Journal

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Oklahoma Adoption Bill Allowing Discrimination Against Gay Couples Clears House Panel

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An Oklahoma House committee has approved a bill that seeks to allow religious child welfare organizations, including adoption and foster care agencies, to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Senate Bill 1140 cleared the Senate last month with an overwhelming 35-9 vote in Oklahoma adoption matter.

The bill states: “To the extent allowed by federal law, no private child placing agency shall be required to perform, assist, counsel, recommend, consent to, refer, or participate in any placement of a child for foster care or adoption when the proposed placement would violate the agency’s written religious or moral convictions or policies.”adoption

Senate Majority Floor Leader Greg Treat, a Republican from Oklahoma City, has defended his bill, arguing that it would increase the number of adoptions in Oklahoma by expanding the pool of faith-based organizations participating.

The House Judiciary Committee advanced the bill to the full House for consideration, adding an amendment that excludes agencies that receive state funding.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest LGBT rights advocate, said that the bill does not take into account the best interest of children.

“SB 1140, if passed, would allow state-licensed child-placing agencies to disregard the best interest of children and turn away qualified Oklahomans seeking to care for a child in need,” Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel at HRC, said during a press conference. “This would include LGBTQ couples, interfaith couples, single parents, married couples in which one prospective parent has previously been divorced or other parents to whom the agency has a religious objection.”

by Carlos Santoscoy, ontopmag.com, April 12, 2018

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Mississippi high court issues pro-LGBT decision

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Mississippi is one of those deep South states that really did not want to allow same-sex couples to marry.

It didn’t want them to adopt children either. And even after the U.S. Supreme Court said states had to let same-sex couples marry, Mississippi fought back for a while to try and keep them from divorcing. So maybe it wasn’t such a big surprise recently when a state court ruled that the non-biological mother of a child born in Mississippi to a lesbian couple married in Massachusetts but now divorcing shouldn’t be able to claim any parental rights.anonymous donor

That’s what happened in 2016. A chancery (or family) court in Mississippi ruled that a child born to a lesbian couple using insemination of an anonymous donor’s sperm was the child of the biological mother and the anonymous sperm donor –not the biological mother’s same-sex spouse.

But on April 5, the Mississippi Supreme Court, one of the most conservative in the nation, ruled unanimously that was the wrong result.

The nine-member court ruled that, because state law prohibits a father from “disestablishing” his paternity to a child conceived by alternative insemination, “the Legislature never intended for an anonymous sperm donor to have parental rights in a child conceived from his sperm –irrespective of the sex of the married couple that utilized his sperm to have that child.”

Beth Littrell, the Lambda Legal attorney who represented the non-biological mother in this case, Strickland v. Day, said that, while the decision is binding only in Mississippi, it can have impact elsewhere. Littrell said it can “help fill the void left by many states when it comes to the rights of children born via [alternative insemination].” And, she said, “it also is significant because it was rendered by a conservative southern state’s court of last resort….”

The Mississippi Supreme Court, said Littrell, “not only added weight to the consensus that biology alone does not establish parentage but did so in a gender-neutral way that recognized that the parties were a legally married same-sex couple at the time the child was born notwithstanding that it was years before Mississippi was forced to recognize marriage equality.”

Mississippi was forced to recognize marriage for same-sex couples in 2015, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in Obergefell v. Hodges) that state bans against equal marriage rights for same-sex couples violates the federal Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

Subsequent to Obergefell, some states –particularly deep South states—tried to buck against that ruling. Mississippi tried to continue enforcing its state ban against allowing same-sex couples to adopt, and it passed a law allowing businesses to deny services to LGBT people and same-sex couples. That latter law is still in effect. Arkansas tried to bar a woman’s name from the birth certificate of a child she had with her same-sex spouse, the child’s biological mother. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, in Pavan v. Smith, but now the case is back before the U.S. Supreme Court because the Arkansas Supreme Court denied the couple’s right to recover attorneys fees.

And though the Mississippi Supreme Court decision in the current case, Strickland, is not binding outside Mississippi, Littrell said “it is persuasive authority that should be helpful whenever any court considers marriage equality, the retroactive application of Obergefell v. Hodges and the parental rights” of couples who use alternative insemination.

 

by Lisa Keen, keennewsservice.com, April 10, 2018

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Arizona Governor Signs New Human Embryo Law

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Arizona

When a couple is unable to conceive naturally or medical treatments — like chemotherapy — make future pregnancies unlikely, there are a variety of fertility options available, including harvesting a woman’s eggs, freezing them and using them at a later date.

Up until now, reproductive fertility law specialists in Arizona would help couples navigate any tricky ethical issues that might arise in the future, like what happens if you split up or divorce before you decide to use the eggs.Arizona Embryo

But, a new law signed Tuesday by Gov. Doug Ducey has the potential to upend any contractual agreements written between husbands and wives or domestic partners, and dictates who is allowed to keep frozen eggs after a breakup.

Cathi Herrod, President of Center for Arizona Policy, said the new human embryo law helps make the law clearer and it is a positive step for Arizona.

“Just like a judge will decide when there are disputes over property, disputes over who gets the family dog — now who gets the family embryos will also be decided by a judge according to the law,” Herrod said.

by Lauren Gilger, KJZZ.com, April 4, 2018

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