LESBIAN COUPLE ADOPTS CHILD, SPLITS UP, THEN ONE ADOPTIVE MO

[Daanyeer]

Source: mensdaily
DE SC Case: Lesbian Couple Adopts Kazak Child, Splits Up, then One Adoptive Mom…
Posted on Mar 23, 2009
..."cuts off" the child's contact with the other adoptive mom.

I've often discussed the issue of the rights of lesbian “social mothers”–women who agreed to employ a sperm donor so that they could have children with their lesbian partners, who are the biological mothers. I do believe that children fare best when they have both a mom and a dad, and that fathers offer much to children that mothers don’t provide. However, this is not possible in lesbian couples.

When two lesbians agree to have a child together via sperm donation or adoption, and when the child has bonded with both his or her biological mother and his or her social mother, I believe that the relationship between the child and the social mother should be protected. I also believe that the biological mother has a responsibility to her children and to her former partner to hold up her end of the deal with the partner with whom she created the child, and that courts should hold her to her commitment.

These cases are now becoming routine. When the relationship goes sour, the lesbian biological mom does to her ex exactly what heterosexual mothers so often do to their ex-husbands--drive her out of her child’s life. To learn more, see my column Protect Gay & Lesbian Custody Rights in Divorce (Huffington Post (9/9/08).

Here we go again--in Delaware Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Lesbian Co-Parent Custody Claim, New York Law School Professor Arthur S. Leonard reports:

The five-member Delaware Supreme Court unanimously ruled on February 3 in Smith v. Gordon, 2009 Westlaw 243030, that the unmarried co-parent of a child adopted by her partner did not have standing to seek custody or visitation when she and her partner ended their relationship thirteen months after her partner adopted their child. Reversing a 2007 ruling by the New Castle County Family Court, the Supreme Court declared that it was up to the legislature, not the courts, to determine whether a de facto parent should be allowed to seek custody or visitation, but left open the possibility that the Delaware Uniform Parentage Act (DUPA) might be construed to recognize a co-parent’s legal rights if the co-parent had lived with the child for the first two years of its life.

The court invented pseudonyms for the parties in the case, calling them Lacey Smith and Charlene Gordon. According to the opinion by Justice Randy J. Holland, Gordon and Smith became involved in a romantic relationship during the summer of 1994. Gordon moved into Smith’s house in February 1995. They eventually established a joint bank account to pay their joint bills, and met with a financial advisor and an attorney to discuss their relationship, but they never held any sort of formal commitment ceremony.

The court found that the evidence showed that they "were recognized by friends and family as a long-term committed couple." Early in the relationship they discussed having children, but they didn’t get really serious about it until they had been together for five years. They decided that Smith would become pregnant, but attempts at donor insemination and in vitro fertilization were unsuccessful.

Then they decided to adopt and for reasons not explained in the court’s opinion, selected Kazakhstan as the country from which they would adopt a child. Because Kazakh authorities would not allow unmarried same-sex couples to jointly adopt a child, Smith was to be the adoptive parent. They traveled together to Kazakhstan, where Smith adopted their child, called A.N.S. by the court, in March 2003, and returned home to live together as a family. Gordon took paid adoption leave from her job and stayed home with A.N.S. for nearly two months. After she returned to work, Smith began to work from home. Gordon enrolled A.N.S. has her dependent on her employee benefit plan.

Shortly after returning home to Delaware, they met with an attorney to discuss having Gordon adopt A.N.S. in a second-parent adoption proceeding. The attorney purportedly told them that such a proceeding could not begin until Gordon had been serving as a parent of A.N.S. for at least a year. By the time a year had passed, it appears that the relationship of the two women had deteriorated, because Gordon moved out of the house at Smith’s request on May 2, 2004.

Smith allowed Gordon to visit with the child a few times, but then cut off contact early in June. A few weeks later, Gordon filed her lawsuit, seeking joint custody and visitation rights as a de facto parent. She later amended her complaint to claim that she was a legal parent of the child under DUPA...