[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
h
-
1
1
.
i
n
d
d
4
8
3
7
/
8
/
2
8
1
2
:
3
5
:
3
6
P
M
484 Part IV " Families in Society
California Sperm Bank opened in Oakland expressly to serve the needs of unmarried,
disabled, or nonheterosexual women who want to become pregnant. The clinic ships
frozen semen throughout North America, and more than two-thirds of the clinic s clients
are not married.11
The absence of a national health system in the United States commercializes access
to sperm and fertility services. This introduces an obvious class bias into the practice
of alternative insemination. Far more high-tech, innovative, expensive, and, therefore,
uncommon is a procreative strategy some lesbian couples now are adopting in which an
ovum from one woman is fertilized with donor sperm and then extracted and implanted
in her lover s uterus. In June 2000, one such couple in San Francisco became the first to
receive joint recognition as the biological and legal co-mothers of their infant. The irony
of deploying technology to assert a biological, and thereby a legal, social, and emotional
claim to maternal and family status throws the contemporary instability of all the relevant
categories biology, technology, nature, culture, maternity, family into bold relief.
While the advent of AIDS inhibited joint procreative ventures between lesbians
and gay men, the epidemic also fostered stronger social and political solidarity between
the two populations and stimulated gay men to keener interest in forming families. Their
ranks are smaller and newer than those of lesbian mothers, but by the late eighties gay
men were also visibly engaged in efforts to become parents, despite far more limited
opportunities to do so. Not only do men still lack the biological capacity to derive per-
sonal benefits from most alternative reproductive technologies, but social prejudice also
severely restricts gay male access to children placed for adoption, or even into foster care.
Ever since Anita Bryant s Save the Children campaign against gay rights in 1977, right-
wing mobilizations in diverse states, including Florida, Utah, New Hampshire, and Mas-
sachusetts, have successfully cast gay men, in particular, as threats to children and families
and denied them the right to adopt or foster the young. In response, some wishful gay
fathers have resorted to private adoption and surrogacy arrangements, accepting the most
difficult-to-place adoptees and foster children, or entering into shared social parent-
ing arrangements with lesbian couples or single women. During the 1990s, Growing
Generations, the world s first gay and lesbian-owned surrogacy agency, opened in Los
Angeles to serve an international constituency of prospective gay parents.
Compelled to proceed outside conventional channels, lesbian and gay male planned
parenthood has become an increasingly complex, creative, and politicized, self-help en-
terprise. Because gays forge kin ties without established legal protections or norms,
relationships between gay parents and their children suffer heightened risks. By the
mideighties many lesbians and gays found themselves battling each other, as custody
conflicts between lesbian coparents or between lesbian parents and sperm donors and/or
other relatives began to reach the dockets and to profoundly challenge family courts.12
Despite a putative best interests of the child standard, a bias favoring the heterosexual
family guided virtually all the judges who heard these early cases. Biological claims of kin-
ship nearly always trumped those of social parenting, even in heartrending circumstances
of custody challenges to bereaved lesbian widows who, with their deceased lovers, had
jointly planned for, reared, loved, and supported children since their birth.13 Likewise,
judges routinely honored fathers rights arguments by favoring parental claims of donors
who had contributed nothing more than sperm to their offspring over those of lesbians
C
Ch-11.indd 484 7/8/2008 12:35:37 PM
h
-
1
1
.
i
n
d
d
4
8
4
7
/
8
/
2
8
1
2
:
3
5
:
3
7
P
M
Chapter 11 " Dimensions of Diversity 485
who had coparented from the outset, even when these men had expressly agreed to abdicate
paternal rights or responsibilities. The first, and still rare, exception to this rule involved
a donor who did not bring his paternity suit until the child was ten years old.14 While
numerous sperm donors have reneged on their prenatal custody agreements with lesbian
parents, thus far no lesbian mother has sued a donor to attain parental terms different
from those to which he first agreed. On the other hand, in the first case in which a lesbian
biological mother sought financial support from her former lesbian partner, a New York
court found the nonbiological coparent to be a parent. Here, the state s fiduciary interest
rather than gay rights governed the decision.15
Perhaps the most poignant paradox in gay and lesbian family history concerns how
fervently many lesbians and gay men have had to struggle for family status precisely when
forces mobilized in the name of The Family conspire to deny this to them. The widely
publicized saga of the Sharon Kowalski case, in which the natal family of a lesbian who
had been severely disabled in a car crash successfully opposed her guardianship by her
chosen life-companion, proved particularly galvanizing in this cause, perhaps because all
of the contestants were adults. After eight years of legal and political struggle, Sharon s
lover, Karen Thompson, finally won a reversal, in a belated, but highly visible, landmark
victory for gay family rights.16
Gay family struggles rapidly achieved other significant victories, like the 1989
Braschi decision by New York State s top court, which granted protection against eviction
to a gay man by explicitly defining family in inclusive, social terms, to rest upon
the exclusivity and longevity of the relationship, the level of emotional and financial com-
mitment, the manner in which the parties have conducted their everyday lives and held
themselves out to society, and the reliance placed upon one another for daily family ser-
vices . . . it is the totality of the relationship as evidenced by the dedication, caring and
self-sacrifice of the parties which should, in the final analysis, control.17
More recently, in 2000, Vermont became the first state in the United States to
grant same-sex couples the right to enter a civil union, a status that confers all of the
legal benefits of marriage except those denied by federal law, and numerous state legis-
latures will be considering similar proposals. The struggle for second-parent adoption
rights, which enable a lesbian or gay man to adopt a lover s children without removing
the lover s custody rights, represents one of the most active, turbulent fronts in the
struggle for gay family rights. In more than half of the 50 states, individual lesbian
and gay male couples have won petitions for second-parent adoptions at the trial court
level. However, many trial judges deny such petitions, and only a handful of states have
granted this right at the appeals court level. In 2000, a Pennsylvania appeals court de-
cision denied such an appeal, thereby setting back the drive for gay parental rights in
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]