Category: Known Donor

Parentage Orders New York

PFLAGLI

Parentage Orders New York

Parentage Orders in New York have just become an easier option for lesbian families.

Parentage orders in New York are a reality after the passage of the Child Parent Security Act, a long-awaited statute that acknowledges how gay and lesbian couples and individuals have families and offers a direct course to legal parentage.  As of February 15, 2021, New York has joined the legion of states that not only legalize gestational surrogacy, but also recognize how gay and lesbian couples and individuals have families and assist them in protecting those families with a direct pathway to parenthood.parentage orders New York

Parentage Orders in New York are now a reality.  Before February 15, 2021, the only clear way of establishing parentage in New York was through second or step-parent adoption.  Many couples still choose to establish parentage through the adoption process because it is the gold standard of parentage.  There is Supreme Court precedent for the recognition of adoption orders when the court refused to hear a case challenging the validity of an adoption order for a gay couple.  There are still specific indications when adoption is preferred over a parentage order, however, if you are not a couple that travels Internationally or if you have no plans to move to a gay-unfriendly state, the New York statute will provide the protection your family deserves.

The process for a parentage order differs slightly between Counties, but there is some regularity that you can count on.  First, the question of jurisdiction remains one that hinges on the cost of the process.  If you choose to file in Supreme Court, you will receive an Order from that court that will most likely result without a court appearance.  There are some costs associated with this method.  When you file in Supreme Court, one of the procedural elements is the filing of a Request for Judicial Intervention (RJI), which comes with the cost of a $350.00 filing fee.  When you file in Family Court, the case is heard by a Support Magistrate.  There is no filing fee, however, there may be an appearance required. 

parentage orders new yorkIf COVID-19 restrictions apply, appearances are virtual.  This means that you will not have to go to court but log in to a virtual hearing online.  COVID-19 will at some point in the future be an issue of the past.   Families will have to weigh the costs of filing and the costs of appearing in court. 

The specifics of filing will include a Petition, which collects the necessary information the court needs to process the request.  The court also wants to hear from either the clinic that facilitated the pregnancy, the anonymous provider of sperm or the petitioners if they used home insemination to get pregnant.  The Court wants to make sure that all Parties who should be notified of the proceeding are accounted for.   The Petition verifies that the petitioning couple has lived in the State of New York for the last six months, that they consented to the Assisted Reproduction, the proposed name of the child and when the child is due to be born, or when they were born. 

For couples who have their families with the assistance of an anonymous sperm donor, the court will require a letter from the sperm provider to affirm that the donor was indeed anonymous and has no legal parentage rights to the child.  For couples who work with a known, or directed, donor, the court will view a Known Donor Agreement as proof that the donor does not intend to be a parent.  If there is no Agreement in place, your Attorney will have to draft an Affidavit that the Donor would sign to affirm their intentions to the court.  The Support Magistrate hearing the case may also request that your donor appear at your hearing.

Parentage Orders New York

The fact that we now have Parentage Orders in New York is a huge step forward for LGBTQ families.  While some couples will still choose to create legal parentage through second or stepparent adoption, we have another, lower cost option.  Parentage Orders in New York are a simple, straightforward way to affirm a family’s legal status and are available in many States across the Country.  Thanks to The Child Parent Security Act, our families are more secure and the Courts are learning more about how we have our families and protect them from challenge.

 

By Anthony M. Brown, June 1, 2021. www.TimeForFamilies.com

 

 

The post Parentage Orders New York appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Will Obergefell Survive The New Supreme Court?

PFLAGLI

Will Obergefell survive the new Supreme Court

Will Obergefell survive the new Supreme Court?

This is the greatest concern / fear of many in the LGBTQ community.  From the moment we learned of the heartbreaking death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this question became the most frequently asked by scholars, activists, lawyers and members of the LGBTQ community.  What started as a hypothetical question became real on Monday, November 23, 2020.Will Obergefell survive the new Supreme Court

What happened? 

The Attorney General for the state of Indiana petitioned The Supreme Court in the case of Box v. Henderson, which poses the question, “Does a married same-sex parent have the same rights as a heterosexual married parent in regards to the presumption of parentage which attaches to marriage?”  The presumption of parentage is the rule of law that creates a legal relationship between the spouse of a woman who gives birth to a child and the child to the spouse of the birth mother.  How does this effect the Obergefell decision, which made marriage equality the law of the land in June of 2015?  The answer to that question poses serious issues of equality and judicial conduct that we are just beginning to understand.

What did Obergefell say?

Will Obergefell survive the new Supreme Court?  First, we need to understand exactly what Obergefell said.  In the Obergefell decision, the court stated not only that all states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, that other states must recognize same-sex marriage licenses and that same-sex couples are entitled to marriage, “on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.”  That means that all protections, including the marital presumption of parentage, shall redound to same-sex married couples. 

Judicial bias?

The arrival of Box v. Henderson at The. Supreme Court is questionable for a few reasons.  First, the case was last heard in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, where a conservative three judge panel unanimously upheld the protections conferred in Obergefell to the 8 plaintiff married couples who are the heart of this case.  But, they waited 3 years to issue an opinion.  The average time between when this court hears a case and when it issues its decision is 3 months.  If this case was handled in the normal time frame, it would have been before a Supreme Court that had already decided this issue twice before in favor of extending all marriage rights to same-sex couples.  But now the court make-up is different, which leads me to the second issue that raises concern: the current Supreme Court requested that the Indiana Attorney General make the Writ of Certiorari, the petition to hear the case, directly.  Why would a court that has twice decided an issue ask to rehear that same issue?

Will Obergefell survive the new Supreme CourtThe court first decided this issue in Obergefell, and then again in 2017 in the case, Pavan v. Smith.  In Pavan, the court held that states must issue birth certificates to same-sex couples in the same manner they issue them to opposite-sex couples.  This means that the presumption of parentage (once referred to as the presumption of paternity) would make the father of a child born to his wife, even if that child was conceived with donor sperm, the legal parent of that child.  The 8 plaintiff couples in the Box case are asking the court to have the presumption apply to their marriages the same way it applies to heterosexual married couples, even when there is not a biological connection between the spouse of the mother and the child. 

To answer the question, “will Obergefell survive the new Supreme Court?”, we must look to the strained strategy of the Indiana Attorney General, Curtis Hill.  Hill is falsely declaring that a state should have the ability to acknowledge the, “biological distinction between males and females.”  He is inferring that because only a man and a woman can biologically have a child together, only an opposite-sex married couple should have the protections that the martial presumption of parentage applies.  Furthermore, one plaintiff couple in the Box case includes a woman who donated her egg to her partner who then gave birth.  Both parents are “related” to the child under the law. 

States rights

This insidious “state’s rights” approach gives the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the ones who asked for this case to be heard in the first place, the ability to drive a wedge directly into the heart of marriage equality.  If the conservative Supreme Court sides with Indiana in Box, it will allow other states the ability to make distinctions between same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage.  It would mandate that same-sex parents go through a costly and invasive adoption process to secure their legal right as a family.  What the court would fail to realize is that the children would be the victims of this strategy.  Leaving a child in legal limbo only serves to create insecurity in that child’s family. 

Will Obergefell survive the new Supreme Court?  We will soon get a clue.  The new Supreme Court recently heard the case of Fulton v. The City of Philadelphia, which asked whether, among other questions, the government violates the First Amendment by defining a religious agency’s ability to participate in the state sponsored foster-care system mandating the inclusion of same-sex couples as foster parents.  This religious liberty approach to equality, I fear, will be the first sign of the new Supreme Court’s willingness to strip the rights of same-sex couples away. 

What can we do?

If there is anything to learn from this potentially disturbing road that the court appears to be heading down, it is to fight at your local level to ensure that protections are in place and that equality in marriage is preserved.  Do everything you can now to prepare for the worst: get your estate plan in place, petition for a step-parent adoption or birth order if your state allows and start telling all of your friends and family about what is going on. While we may have thought that battle was a thing of the past, we are still warriors.  We have always had to fight to protect our relationships and families, we know how to do it. 

Anthony M. Brown, Esq. – www.timeforfamilies.com November 28, 2020

The post Will Obergefell Survive The New Supreme Court? appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

French Senate passes bioethics law allowing lesbians to artificially procreate

PFLAGLI

French Senate

The bill passed by the French Senate is watered down but still extremely transgressive.

The French Senate adopted the draft bioethics law currently under discussion in that body by a relatively small margin of 10 votes on Tuesday. One of its most spectacular elements, the legalization of access to artificially assisted procreation for single women, including those in lesbian relationships, was confirmed, as well as the widening of possibilities for research on human embryos. Other articles of the law were modified by the Senate, which canceled some of its more shocking propositions.French Senate

Although the higher chamber in France still has a right-of-center majority, the text, which remains deeply transgressive, obtained 153 votes in its favor, while 143 senators voted against and 45 abstained. The voting was not uniform right and left — 97 of the 144 “Les Républicains” mainstream right-wing senators rejected the law presented by Emmanuel Macron’s left-wing government, while 25 voted for the text, thus bearing responsibility for its adoption.

The presidential party “La République en marche” (LREM), created for the last presidential election and not very strong in the Senate, was itself divided: six of its 24 senators voted against the text.

Almost all the 348 senators were present, a sign that the revision of France’s bioethics laws is being taken seriously. The first such law was adopted in 1994 and was already transgressive because it legalized artificial procreation and embryo selection.

From the start, it was decided that the bioethics law would be revised every five years in order to take medical and scientific progress and new techniques into account. As a matter of fact, the laws were revised over larger intervals. Each time, new possibilities for embryo research, pre-implantation diagnosis, and other such transgressions were added.

The draft bioethics law now being discussed has been substantially amended by the Senate and will therefore return before the National Assembly, probably in April. Laws are adopted definitively without a second reading in France only when adopted by both chambers in exactly the same terms.

Lifestienews.com, by Jeanne Smits, February 7, 2020

Click here to read the entire article.

The post French Senate passes bioethics law allowing lesbians to artificially procreate appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

More LGBTQ millennials plan to have kids regardless of income, survey finds

PFLAGLI

LGBTQ millenials

 The price of parenthood can be costly for LGBTQ millennials, and all LGBTQ families, especially those dependent on assisted reproductive technology.LGBTQ millenials

Since they married in 2015, LGBTQ millennials, Jonathan Hobgood, 37, and his husband, Kerry Johnson, 36, have wanted to be dads. At first, the couple saw adoption as the best path to parenthood, but South Carolina, where they live, is one of 10 states with religious exemption laws that make it more difficult for same-sex couples to foster and adopt, and they worried that adopting would set them up for a legal nightmare down the road.

“Our concern was that if we did a private adoption and the birth mother decided a couple of years later that she wanted her child back, we would be in for a rather extensive legal battle to try to keep the child,” Hobgood told NBC News. “So we just decided, ‘Well, let’s take ourselves down the surrogacy path from there.’”

In reality, a court-ordered private adoption would have provided the secure, legal parent-child relationship Hobgood and Johnson were looking for, but it is common for prospective parents to have misconceptions about how the law treats parental rights, according to Denise Brogan-Kator, chief policy officer at Family Equality.

The couple did their research. The cost of hiring a female surrogate, they learned, would be steep — $120,000 to $150,000, a price that Hobgood, a project specialist for a medical insurance company, and Kerry, a management analyst with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, could hardly afford. But it did not deter them.

“I knew I wanted to be a child’s father,” Hobgood said. “I really just wanted to go through and enjoy bringing up this wonderful child who is a part of our family.”

Hobgood and his husband are among an increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people in the U.S. planning to have children, according to data released this year by Family Equality, a national nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ families. And despite the additional financial barriers for many prospective parents in this group, this increased desire to have children was found across income levels, according to a report the group released this month, “Building LGBTQ+ Families: The Price of Parenthood.”

Family Equality polled LGBTQ millennials -500 LGBTQ and 1,004 non-LGBTQ adults, and found that the desire to become parents is nearly identical among both lower- and higher-income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Forty-five to 53 percent of LGBTQ people between the ages of 18 and 35 are planning to become parents for the first time or add another child to their family (compared to 55 percent for their non-LGBTQ counterparts, a gap that has narrowed significantly compared to older generations).And those making less than $25,000 a year plan to have children at a similar rate to those making over $100,000, according to the report.

Amanda Winn, the organization’s chief program officer, was surprised by the findings.

“I was expecting that folks who were living at the poverty line would report lower rates of wanting to bring children into the home knowing that finances were tight, but that’s not the case,” Winn told NBC News. “That innate, strong desire to have families exists regardless of income levels.”

LGBTQ prospective parents are more likely to face financial hurdles than their heterosexual peers, according to the report. Reasons include their relatively lower annual household incomes and the additional costs associated with having a child using an option other than sexual intercourse, which is considered by only 37 percent of LGBTQ people planning to start their families or have more children.

Assisted reproductive technology: ‘an impossible barrier’ for some

Thanks to advancements in assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, more LGBTQ people can have children through nontraditional methods, and interest is growing. Forty percent of LGBTQ people are considering such technology to conceive children, according to a Family Equality survey published in February — but many of these prospective parents will pay for it out of their own pockets, and the technology can be expensive.

“Most LGBTQ+ individuals will learn that their health insurance plan does not cover the cost of fertility treatments at all, and, if they do, the individual or family unit must prove that they have been ‘trying’ to conceive for 6-12 months before coverage begins,” the Family Equality report states. “This stipulation in the policy results in high monthly expenses for some and creates an impossible barrier for others.”

nbcnews.com, by Julie Compton December 27, 2019

Click here to read the entire article.

The post More LGBTQ millennials plan to have kids regardless of income, survey finds appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

The Anonymous Donor Myth

PFLAGLI

anonymous donor myth

The anonymous donor myth was, only a few years ago, not a concern to the many anonymous sperm and egg donors who have helped countless families around the world.

The anonymous donor myth has only in the recent past become an issue that anyone considering becoming an anonymous donor, or anyone considering using an anonymous donor, must confront and plan for.  ART (assisted reproductive technology) lawyers must also factor into their counsel with all parties to an ART agreement the reality that there simply may be no such thing as anonymous donation anymore.  This counsel must address not only gamete (sperm and egg) donation, but also embryo donation and adoption.anonymous donation myth 2

If you think about it, there really is no such thing as anonymity any more.  This year, Facebook has over 2.3 billion monthly active users.  YouTube has 1.8 monthly active users.  Twitter has 320 million monthly active users.  With other social platforms such as Instagram, WeChat and Snapchat providing information on its users to anyone who has not perfected the art of keeping an account private, there are literally millions of ways to locate and identify a person with just a small amount of information.

I was recently in Seattle for the annual conference of The Academy of Adoption and Assisted reproduction Attorneys (AAAA) where a fascinating presentation was given on just this subject.  One speaker demonstrated how, with the scant information she had provided when she was an anonymous egg donor, how it took her less than 5 minutes to find herself on social media.  She essentially did a facial recognition search which yielded a direct hit result.  And this was just possible from the picture she used in her egg donor profile.  That picture, coupled with her educational background, made a google search of her provide instant confirmation of identity.

The anonymous donor myth becomes even more implausible when you consider the influx in popularity of commercial DNA testing kits such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com.  And the implications for anonymous donors go way beyond gamete donation, but adoption as well.

The reality of the anonymous donor myth hit me hard, and in a completely unexpected way.   I was at work one afternoon when the phone rang.  It was a former client of mine with whom I had done estate and probate work.  Her voice was shaking when she called and I could tell that something was very wrong.  She told me that a relative of hers was contacted by a woman who explained that she was adopted at birth and that she had done an ancestry.com DNA test.  The test revealed that her birth mother was related to the relative of my former client.  She then related to me the story of how when she was younger she had been molested, and that molestation resulted in a pregnancy.  She gave the child up for adoption and had told no one in her family about it.  She was reliving that trauma knowing that her secret would most likely be revealed due to an inadvertent action by a relative of hers who had also had the DNA test performed and who had consented to its results being added to a national database.

anonymous donor myth 1One of the most sacred areas of law for expectant mothers who, for many important reasons, cannot keep their children is called “infant safe haven” law.  This type of law decriminalizes the abandonment of unharmed infants in specified locations, such as hospitals, police stations or fire houses.  Mothers need to know that if their personal circumstance requires them to seek the protection of an infant safe haven law; they must be able to rely on the confidentiality that these laws were designed to provide them.  If mothers fear that their identity will be revealed through DNA or Facebook searches, they are less likely to place the child in a safe space.

The reality is that a medical professional or facility can do their best to shield the identity of a donor, but they have no control over the actions of others down the road, like the donor herself, the intended parents or even the child who is the result of ART.  One positive reaction I see in the ART community is the encouragement, with thorough explanation, of known gamete donation.  Known gamete donation can be helpful in many ways.  If a child has a medical issue that may be genetic, with a known donor, parents may access that information more easily.  Studies have also shown that the earlier a child is told about his or her origin story, the better adapted they are.  Having a known gamete donor may make the difference to a child questioning their genetic heritage. 

The anonymous donor myth does not have to be a devastating blow to a family.  With proper professional, both legal and psychological, intended parents considering gamete donation will be able to make informed and beneficial decisions.  These decisions will have long lasting effects on the mental and physical well-being of their children.  As professionals, it is our duty to explore all possibilities with our clients and to ensure that they understand the implications of the anonymous donation myth.

By Anthony M. Brown, Esq. – August 6, 2019

Contact Time For Families


Contact Form
* indicates required field