It's a trifecta! Massachusetts find nonbio mom to be full legal parent

After wins in New York and Maryland, Massachusetts becomes the third state in three months to recognize the reality of life for children planned for and then raised by same-sex couples.  Today's win in Partanen v. Gallagher is the most satisfying of the three, finding that Karen Partanen is the full legal parent of the two children born to her partner.  The couple planned for those children together, participated in the IVF process that resulted in Gallagher's pregnancy, and raised the children as two parents until they separated when the first child was 5 years old and the second about 21 months old.

The opinion approves several critical legal principles:  Parentage statutes must be read in a gender-neutral manner.  Therefore, Massachusetts statutes concerning parentage of a child born to "a man and woman" not married to each other apply equally to the two unmarried women in this case (and, as a footnote makes clear, to two unmarried men); the two children in this case were therefore born to both Gallagher and Partanen.  The children would have two legal parents if their parents had been married, and the court will not read other statutes in a way that keeps children with unmarried parents from having two parents. Partenan's claim does not infringe upon Gallagher's right to form a family as a single parent because the children were not born to her as a single parent; they had two parents from the very beginning. Also, statutes presuming parentage based on living with a child's mother and jointly holding the child out as the child of both parents are not defeated by the lack of a biological connection between the "holding out" parent and the child.

Kudos to GLAD attorney Mary Bonauto, who also gets a huge amount of credit for the passage of pathbreaking parentage legislation in Maine that took effect July 1, 2016.  That legislation should be a model for other states looking to reform their parentage laws for all children.  Under the Maine statute, the nonbio parents in the New York and Maryland cases, as well as Karen Partanen in this case, would all be the legal parents of their children.

Alison D. overruled! Children of same-sex couples in New York now have TWO parents

When I wrote about the New York Court of Appeals 2010 ruling in Debra H., I observed that the Court had breathed new life into the long-discredited legal status of illegitimacy.  A child born to a married (or civilly united) lesbian couple in New York had two parents; a child born to an unmarried couple had one parent.  That ends today.  The New York Court of Appeals overruled its 25-year-old opinion in Alison D. v. Virginia M. (and the portion of Debra H. that relied on it) and established the rule that the definition of "parent" for purposes of seeking custody of a child includes someone who enters into a pre-conception agreement to conceive and raise a child as co-parents.

That rule settled the cases before the court, In re Brooke S.B. and In re Estrellita A., because such pre-conception agreements existed in both those cases. But fortunately the Court did not stop there. Instead, it said that it was leaving for another day the test that might be appropriate when a biological or adoptive parent facilitates the creation of a parent-child relationship with her partner after the child's conception.

The best thing about the opinion is its definitive inclusion of unmarried couples.  The worst thing about it is a footnote that says the statute would not allow a child to have more than two parents.

My biggest regret:  That Paula Ettelbrick did not live to see this today.