Posted on 05/23/2005 12:21:32 PM PDT by SmithL
Battles between estranged lesbian partners over child custody, visitation and financial support will reach the California Supreme Court on Tuesday in a hearing to determine the ground rules for parental disputes between same-sex couples.
Later this week, the court will hear another lesbian pair's discrimination case with possible implications for the looming legal war over same-sex marriage.
Tuesday's three-hour hearing in San Francisco combines three lawsuits from different counties with one central issue: whether a member of a same-sex couple who helped to plan a childbirth and raise the child should be considered a legal parent, regardless of biological ties or marital status.
A majority of lower courts have said no, limiting parental rights to the birth mother unless her partner has formally adopted the child. The state's high court is due to decide the issue within 90 days.
"What's at stake is whether children of same-sex parents will receive the same protection of their emotional needs as children of heterosexual parents, '' said Jill Hersh, lawyer for a Marin County woman who is seeking to become a legal parent of twin girls she helped raise with her now-estranged partner. "Are we going to treat children differently based upon the status of their parents?''
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
My how decisions made in the privacy of one's own bedroom seem to have lasting effects on everyone else.
..."What's at stake is whether children of same-sex parents will receive the same protection of their emotional needs as children of heterosexual parents, ''...
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If this were true, they wouldn't have allowed the child to be with same-sex parents at all!
There is no such thing as same-sex parents.
There is no such thing as same-sex parents.
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YOU ARE CORRECT.
Of course not.
But we're not going to give anyone access to someone else's children just because they once engaged in deviant practices with one (or both!) of the child's parents.
That's not what's at stake. These children are just the inconsequential victims of homosexuals who want to force the rest of us to grant them all the privileges that are granted to heterosexual couples. Their welfare is secondary to the gay activists' agenda.
The real decision is which one is butch enough to be considered the father.
Someone has to get screwed.
B-b-b-but I thought same-sex marriages were going to improve marriage, not complicate it!
Some of these divorces started as a squabble thusly: "Well, I'll be frank.." "No! No! I'll be Frank!"
Was there a written contract granting the woman is not the genetic or birth mother parental rights? If not, she should be legally outta there, just like any friend, neighbor, or relative who "helped to plan a childbirth and raise the child". We really need to start recognizing and upholding contracts in this country, per the Constitution.
In cases where one woman is the egg donor, and the other carries the baby, then it's pretty clear that the intention was to be co-parents (though they still ought to have a contract). But in this case, it's just after the fact "she said - she said" claims, which no court should be giving legal weight to, whether it's a custody case or a date rape case.
Heterosexual couples have staged plenty of exceptionally vicious child custody battles. I've never seen any evidence that gay couples are worse in that regard. It's rotten for the kids either way.
There are fewer gestational complications when the mother has her own embryos implanted. Thus, in such cases, what you have is proof that both parents care more about "having a baby" than they do about the welfare of the child.
"San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer ruled March 14 that the state law, which defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman, discriminates on the basis of gender and violates the fundamental right to marry a person of one's choice."
To say that marriage law discriminates on the basis of gender is like saying that ships discriminate against roads.
As for choice, same sex marriage seeks to substitute individualism for culture. Culture is developed over millenia by millions of people. If the demand for same sex marriage were coming from heterosexuals of conscience the way the demand for abolition of negro slavery came from white abolitionists, we could conclude that our culture was ready for this change. However, it is not.
This demand to change the fundamental structure of our culture and society comes from a small percentage of activists who are exploiting the confluence of cyber technology and the socialist ideological decay of our educational elites in order to subvert the political will of the people.
While the first waves of same sex couples that marry and "have" children will try harder and remain vigilantly aware of their high visibility, full legalization of same sex marriage would result in a relaxation of standards, so that parenthood would become open to even the most highly unsuitable gays and lesbians -- those with extreme gender maladjustment, extreme sexual maladjustment, extreme social maladjustment.
Legalization cannot make people normal. Every society has people in the middle and people at the extremes. Insisting on declaring people normal who are statistically extreme is a violence against children and an attack on the wisdom of the free market for ideas. If same sex marriage were such a great idea, it would come about from market forces, not from minority agitation.
This is absolutely false -- there's no medical research whatsoever to back that notion, and plenty to refute it. Where did you hear this?
There are many, many infertile women now using donor embryos -- donated by couples who had extra embryos left over after IVF. So there is plenty of data on this and NO evidence of a higher rate of complications.
My wife is a reproductive and endocrinology nurse at Stanford.
LOL! That's exactly what I was thinking.
I'd like to see a citation to some published research on this, or even a link to any such info on an ART clinic's website. I'm quite familiar with the literature in this field, and have never heard anything whatsoever to that effect. I also know that ART clinics bend over backwards to protect themselves from liability by warning patients about even the most remote risks associated with any procedures they are considering, and again, I've never heard of any warnings being given re complications from donor embryos, besides the same warnings that go along with all IVF procedures including transfer of embryos that are genetically the patient's.
She says that the reason the research has not been done is because the two populations of women (using donor eggs v. one's own eggs) undergoing procedures are are quite different in age and the nature of their complications. The women using donor eggs are usually older with other reasons for having difficulty with the pregnancy taking. In those cases where problems are expected (such as with ICSI), immunosuppression drugs are used complicating things yet further.
In other words, the research has not been done, because there is no phenomenon needing an explanation. Older women who use their own eggs also have a higher rate of complications. It has nothing to do with whether the eggs are their own or somebody else's (the only difference is their miscarriage rate is much LOWER with donor eggs/embryos, since their own eggs have a lot of genetic abnormalities that cause embryos not to be viable); it has to do with the higher incidence in older women of high blood pressure, diabetes and other known complicating factors (which likewise complicate pregnancies in younger women who have the same factors).
In addition, there are quite a lot of younger women using both donor eggs and donor embryos -- some due to premature ovarian failure (which is not associated with pregnancy complications, just with trouble getting pregnant), and some because their husbands are infertile (often couples in this situation decide that they'd rather have baby genetically related to neither of them, than a baby genetically related to one parent but not the other). To summarize, there is NO additional risk of pregnancy complications associated with using donor eggs or donor embryos.
As for your comment about "cases where problems are expected, such as ICSI", I don't know what you're referring to. ICSI is used only when problems with initial fertilization are expected, not complications of an established pregnancy. ICSI stands for intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, and is done when there is a problem with the man's sperm morphology, or where the couple has a history of low fertilization rate (and may not be clear whether the cause is male and/or female related), and increasingly, is done routinely in older women, since research has found that the outer layer of older eggs is more difficult for sperm to penetrate. I've never seen a hint of suggestion that ICSI pregnancies, once established, have a higher complication rate than than other pregnancies in which other factors are the same. There is a very slightly elevated incidence of urogenital tract abnormalities in babies born from ICSI procedures, but this is believed to be related to milder, often undetectable genetic problems with the father, which account for the abnormalities with the father's sperm and thus the need for ICSI. The studies that have shown this pre-date the fairly recent trend in routine ICSI for older women.
As for immunosuppressive drugs, those are quite commonly used in women who are using their own eggs, and used in women of all ages. Some women have an immune system problem which causes their bodies to reject the embryo (which is usually from their own egg) as a foreign object. Most of these women have a history of repeated miscarriage of pregnancies using their own eggs, with no other factor to explain it. Again, no difference whatsoever in complication rates for pregnancies using their own eggs or donor eggs/embryos.
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