Because my daughter could have died alone

This post is the one I don't want to spend the weekend writing.  I thought of funnier topics and cuter topics, but this is the post I need to write.  This post is part of Blogging for LGBTQ Families Day sponsored by Mombian, but today I'm not talking to my usual audience of friends, lesbian moms, feminists, and fellow travelers.  Instead my imagined audience for this post is someone like Kendra, who blogs at Catholic All Year.  I hope she won't mind a shout out (and just a note that this post contains no cursing, no explicit content, and a minimum of typos).  I thought of Kendra when I began this post because she is an intelligent and thoughtful blogger who engages with political and social issues, and also finds gay marriage in my words: morally, culturally, and theologically abhorrent, and in her words "immoral" and "sinful."

This is our story:  I married B in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in D.C., attended by our parents, and occurring two days after we found out our first attempt at IUI was unsuccessful.  A month later I was pregnant.  A few months into my pregnancy (2nd clinic IUI, anonymous donor from a bank), we made the obligatory trip to a family lawyer.  In most urban areas you can find a small cadre of lawyers specializing in gay families and you find them by asking around or googling.  I believe we paid $2,500 for a 2nd parent adoption and an additional $1000 for estate planning. In Maryland, our part of the process included a doctor's note, some essay questions, letters of support from friends and family, and pictures including a required picture of our front door.

While we were happy with ourselves for being diligent and starting the process early, the legal reality was that no guardianship or adoption paperwork could be filed before a living baby was born.  I could make my belief that this baby belonged to both B and me and that we would parent the baby together known through unofficial channels, but we could not formalize B's relationship to our baby until after the baby was born.

At the time, that didn't seem like a big deal.  Life continued, lots of sleeping, trips to IKEA, inhaling chicken and bulgogi beef, picking up extra work to earn extra money, procuring my great grandmother's rocking chair.  Throughout I was nervous but healthy, as was B.

Then, an ultrasound showed that baby's previously normal growth had slowed: monitoring.  And long after my nausea had subsided, I had some episodes of violent puking (in the bushes outside my classroom and in a plastic bag in the car and on the sidewalks of my neighborhood where only junkies puke).  Not great, but I knew that puking could be a normal 3rd tri thing.  Then were some headaches so bad that they made me cry, but my screenings and blood work were okay, so I went about my business.

We hit week 27 and I was headed out of town for one final conference.  I went in for my regular checkup: blood pressure pretty high, concerning level of protein in my urine - for the first time, blood work ordered.  The next day I was prepping for class and one of the midwives called to request my presence at L&D - immediately.  The blood work had shown significantly raised liver enzymes.  "But I have a class to teach.  I don't have a bag packed." I negotiated for two hours, hustled over to my classroom to put a sign on the door, burst into staff meeting crying, and called B. to come get me.

At the hospital we went immediately to the MFM practice.  I had previously met the doctor there when he brought some med students in to observe my impressive fibroids.  Extended and anxious scanning, discussion of IUGR, a steroid shot, and the doctor: "You have severe preeclampsia.  We need to prepare for you to have this baby in the next 48 hours," he said pulling a sad face.

On L&D we sat on a bench in the hall.  They brought a woman through as she screamed that she was losing her baby. Our midwife waved from behind the nurses' station, but didn't come out to greet us (still bitter).  My blood pressure was 160/100.

The night in the hospital was long and loud.  The nurse's default was to turn up the baby's monitors as loud as possible so that it sounded like I was in my own womb, women screamed endlessly, my blood pressure monitor alarmed every 15 minutes because my pressure was too high and no one came to turn off the alarm.  But I had B there with me, sleeping fitfully, together.

A second night B went home to stay with our freaked out dogs.  A nurse told me she wouldn't be able to come back until visiting hours started again the next morning.  "We're married, we have a certificate, she's my next of kin."  The nurse said we could get it sorted in the morning.  B remembers that the visitors desk swapped her "visitor" wristband for a "family" wristband that gave her access to L&D 24 hours a day without any hassle.

Despite the frustrations of the hospital, I started to simply exist.  The days blurred quietly together with tests and scans and quiet.  I read steadily through the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.

B and I couldn't discuss the what-ifs, we lay in my little hospital bed and tried to imagine our baby's future.  I had a half-waking dream about a little boy and a little girl on a beach, and I felt a wave of peace.  We had already chosen LB's first and middle names after her great-grandmothers, but I told B that if they baby was a girl and she lived, we should give her a second middle name, Grace, after the Our Lady of Grace statue in the hospital lobby.

Time felt soft, I was floating and waiting.  Baby stayed strong.  And then her heart rate was alarming.  And she went off the monitors and couldn't be found.  The head resident efficiently and calmly, too calmly, pulled the portable ultrasound into the room.  She was so calm that I didn't know when she found the heartbeat, and asked several minutes later "is she there?" I called B and asked her to leave work and come sit with me.

B talked to our lawyer, who said she would drive up to Baltimore after the baby was born with our paperwork.  "What if something happens to me during the birth?" I asked a nurse.  "You'll be okay," she said.  It wasn't a question I asked with fear for my own mortality, it was a technical question.  "What if something happens to me?  They'll put our baby in foster care," I said to B.  "We have a lawyer, if there's a problem your parents will come down and sign over custody, it will be okay." B understood, but we didn't have much of plan, and I couldn't dwell on the future.  When I did, I was forced to consider a future in which our baby did not live.

For the first nine days in the hospital, I felt okay.  On the 10th day, I did not.  I saw floaters before my eyes, that I did not report.  I felt off.  My MFM popped back in with the verdict: rising liver enzymes, stubbornly high BP despite major meds, baby not growing, and now dropping platelets.  "It's time, you'll have this baby tomorrow morning."

B stayed with me that night and we cried and imagined our baby.  Surgery prep started early, but we were already awake.  A nurse came in to start the magnesium sulfate, which I describe here.  Mag acts as a muscle relaxant, and after I stopped sweating and puking bile, I felt very calm.  B put on her gown and held my hand as I was wheeled to the OR.

The anesthesiologist was waiting for us, he asked me to sit on the table and put both my arms around B's shoulders.  "It will feel like bee stings" he said.  I was too relaxed to talk, but I thought, "I've totally got this!" having been stung several times by a wasp in my office with no ill-effects.  I lay on the table, relaxed and unable to see without my glasses.

I'm sure B was trying to crack some jokes, but I don't remember much until there was a flurry of movement and someone said "You have a daughter."  "Is she alive?" I asked.  "Yes, Yes" and a tiny pink bundle was flashed somewhere near my face.  I thought I heard a tiny mew.  "She's breathing on her own."  B ran back and forth between me and LB(G) managing to snap the first baby-in-a-plastic-bag (to conserve body heat) photos.

As the NICU nurses prepped LB, my team got louder and more energetic.  "Blood, I need blood!" became "WHERE'S THE DAMN BLOOD!"  Muttering, orders, cursing.  "Okay, we need to put you under, okay?  B, you'll need to step outside after she goes under." I tried to nod, thinking "yes, I don't really want to be awake for this." I breathed as deeply as I could, trying to make it go as fast as possible.

The next five hours or so are not my story, but what has been told to me.  Medically, my low platelet and fibroids combo had complicated delivery, and led to extensive bleeding requiring extensive surgery.  Thankfully the replacement blood did arrive in time.  Meanwhile, B was sent back to my room to wait with a friend who had just happened to come visit us.  She prayed the rosary with a Quaker, and sweated through a Code Blue not knowing that it wasn't me.  A nurse came in and sent her up to the NICU to see LB.  Born at 29weeks, weighing 2lbs 3oz, LB was holding her own.  B kangarooed her (I would share the lovely pics, but B isn't wearing a shirt), and took more pictures.

LB's first hour in the NICU

I came to around noon, looking and feeling rough.  It was hard to remember what had happened, but I did remember "you have a daughter," and I felt waves of joy and love.  A nurse, one of the ones who was both kind and efficient brought me a gingerale with a straw and it was the best thing I ever drank. B came bouncing into the room flashing pictures and telling me all about the NICU and about how she held LB.

In 1995, Julie and Hillary Goodridge had a daughter:

"When their daughter was born, she breathed in fluid and was sent to neonatal intensive care. Julie had a difficult caesarian and was in recovery for several hours. Even with a health care proxy, Hillary had difficulty gaining access to Julie and their newborn daughter at the hospital."[full text here]

As Julie lay in the OR, Hillary sought to see their daughter in the NICU.  She was turned away because  she had no legal relationship with the baby.  She waited until shift change and lied to a new nurse, saying she was her baby's aunt, and was allowed access. Hillary and Julie became the lead plaintiffs in the case Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health, the case that brought gay marriage to Massachusetts.

If not for Hillary and Julie, what would have happened to our LB?  Would she have laid alone in an isolette while B fought to get to her?  Would she have been denied that time sleeping against her mother's skin?  If things had gone worse, would she have died never being held by someone who loved her?

"We're married" were magic words for us, words that opened doors and produced wristbands.  These are the stories of unfortunate couples who possessed only lowly civil unions: Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, Kathryn Wilderotter and Linda Cole, and Bill Flanigan and Robert Daniel.  This latter case is particularly sad, because Robert died alone after Bill was denied access to his hospital bed.  In each of these cases the couples were in a legal domestic partnership.

The sad fact is that "we're in a domestic partnership" is not a magic phrase.  Say domestic partnership and very few people know exactly what rights you possess. Say marriage and everyone knows you should be at your spouse's bedside.  In 2010, the federal government offered additional guidance to hospitals receiving some types of federal funds, telling hospitals that they must allow patients to designate their own visitors.  That's a step forward, however, at least one of the cases above occurred after 2010.  The workers at the hospital front desk don't necessarily follow changes in federal guidance, but they do know what marriage means.  Marriage means you get the bracelet.

I am not equipped to speak to matters of theology.  I have freely chosen not to know what, if anything, exists after this life.  I am living this life with love: the intense love I feel for my wife and daughter, the joy I feel for my friends and coworkers, for clerks and bus drivers and randos, the perplexity and fascination I feel for those who claim to love me, but would deny my daughter a mother's love.

as a big girl

Thanks to Mombian for hosting the 9th Annual Blogging for LGBTQ Families!

A smartphone App for Queer Families

This piece from the New York Times "The New Old Age" blog caught my eye.  It describes the My Health Care Wishes app developed by the American Bar Association.  It lets you upload your advance directives that can then be accessed through your smartphone.  I'm intrigued.  This solution sounds much better than our current pile-of-papers-buried-in-the-closet system or the carry-your-docs-on-a-flashdrive option recommended by lawyerly types.

Many of us queer families are now of the married/2nd parent adoption/birth certificate level of official recognition.  But history has shown that it just takes that one hater in hospital intake to block access to a sick or dying loved one.  Of course you can demand access to hospital council, lie, or plead your case, but being a hospital patient or loved one of a patient is such a vulnerable position and you may have little time to work through official channels.  And, the comments on the blog post are filled with cases where paperwork was explicitly ignored.  Despite all that, having easy access to the documents we so carefully collected, when we most need them seems like a very good thing.

If I actually get it together to try this, I will report back.

"Dance with the one who brought you"

When I got my hair done today, the salon was abuzz...with discussion of the murder charges against Pats player Aaron Hernandez.

Everyone else in my world was on SCOTUS Watch, and B, LB, and I all went down for the little celebration rally they held in Providence.  Personally, we are among the clear winners in today's decision along with other married gay couples in states that have gay marriage, gay military families, and gay federal workers.  Other gays are wading through the state-specific morass, and the answers to their questions are likely to be negative, or at least unclear, for a long time to come.

And then there are the other decisions.  Not such great times for voting rights, racial diversity on campus, the rights of employees.  Until today, I spent my SCOTUS Watch saying, "it could have been worse?"

The title to this post is a quote from a very smart friend of mine (and Shania Twain), in reference to this video of John Lewis speaking in support of gay marriage in 1996.

One of the surprising victories of the recent gay marriage fights at the state level has been the success of progressive coalition politics.  A wide range of progressive activists came together to fight for gay marriage because that fight is tied to a broader vision of a nation that values equality, toleration, and the protection of minority groups.  If gay issues are going to matter to straight people of diverse races, religions, classes, and regions, then racial equality and workers (just to name a couple) need to matter to gay people.  And since I'm likely preaching to the choir, consider this a note to self to keep me honest.

SCOTUS PSA!

If you're anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court decisions on Prop 8 and DOMA, and you haven't checked out SCOTUS Blog, you should definitely take a look.  You can find SCOTUS Blog here.  They usually start live blogging at 9:00am on decision days, and they will be doing so tomorrow (Tuesday, June 25).  They have a great live blog, which makes a weirdly addictive clicking noise every time that it updates.  They also take reader questions and provide both law-speak and regular-people explanations of the decisions.

And here you can find some analysis from The Onion, and here a for real LGBTQ response to today's voting rights ruling.

Gay Power, Gay Vulnerability: SCOTUS, SCOTUS, SCOTUS Edition

Gay is a place of vulnerability in our society.  Sometimes we can buy our way out of that vulnerability with money and lawyers, or powerful friends.  But paying for the proper paperwork didn't help Janet Langbehn, or Sharon Reed, or Bill Flanigan-all gay spouses kept from the bedsides of their dying partners.  Rights in that moment that you approach the desk in the emergency room aren't about what's written in law, rather they are about what people believe to be true.  That is why minorities need special protections, we need to have the justices of the Supreme Court shout it from the courthouse steps that "The Gays, they are equal!"

Sadly, the justices seem very removed from the workaday world in which most gay people function, a world of paying bills, finding healthcare, and spending hours on the phone explaining to various agencies that yes you are married, but not necessarily according to their definitions. In the SC, our actual experiences as gay people facing a multitude of discriminations and insults large and small got little attention as both sides argued the broad issues.   As the SC deliberates, we remain separate and unequal.  Vulnerable.

In both cases, the arguments made in the amicus brief filed by the Concerned Women of American, which I mocked last week, made an appearance.

In the Prop 8 case:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: — I — it seems to me that your position that you are supporting is somewhat internally inconsistent. We see the argument made that there is no problem with extending marriage to same-sex couples because children raised by same-sex couples are doing just fine and there is no evidence that they are being harmed. And the other argument is Proposition 8 harms children by not allowing same-sex couples to marriage. Which is it?"

In the DOMA case:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case." [In reference to the "sea change" in attitudes toward gay people, and whether that change means that gays are politically powerful.]

So now with gay marriage in 9 states out of fifty and wins at the ballot box in 4 states, we are too powerful to be protected against a federal government that does not recognize our marriages, or protected in the 41 states in which we cannot marry.  As for the child of gasy issue, I think we should avoid the issue of psychological harm to children of gay people who cannot marry.  Gay kids survive and thrive even in families that face discrimination.  Rather, discrimination harms children economically in many of the same ways that unrecognized gay spouses are harmed.  Our children do have a human right to have their parentage recognized, and this right exists even if they do not suffer psychological harm due to a lack of recognition.According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 8, "States Parties undertake to respect the rights of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name, and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference." 

So where do we go from here?  We'll have to wait until June for the decisions.  If they don't go in our favor, we do have the ballot box.  I think we can win in many states, but clearly not all.  Despite the HRCs very successful marketing coup, gaining attention for cases for which they had done little, the future is the Maryland strategy.  In the last election, Maryland activists abandoned the HRC-style strategy of running a slick ad campaign featuring respectable HRC types.  Instead, MD focused on regular people telling their stories, while also building a coalition of people across lines of race, class, religion, and region-a coalition of the willing, if you will.  While we can win at many ballot boxes, at this moment, when we seem poised for so much change, the expense and grind of campaigning just seems like a waste.  Maybe I'm just getting greedy.

One thing is for damn sure, we are out and we're not going back.  If we have to take it back to the streets, in the tradition of our forefathers and foremothers at Stonewall and in ACT UP [watch How to Survive a Plague on streaming netflix], we havenshown that we have the will to make change happen.

Dispatches from A Handmaiden's Tale

Not that anything's really changed in the past week, but lots of news items have had me shaking my head.  Of course there was the "legitimate rape" comment.  The New York Times Lede blog reminds us that this particular pregnancy/rape myth has a long history.  Historian Estelle Freedman published an informative piece about the history of legal definitions of rape in the Washington Post.  That controversy led to the chilling reminder that in 31 states convicted rapists who father children have the right to custody and visitation with those children.  CNN covers the story here.  The blog RH Reality Check has some older, but good, analysis here.  The choice of Paul Ryan reminded some of us about that pesky "Personhood Amendment" issue.  These amendments seek to outlaw abortion for any reason (and perhaps limit fertility treatments, including pretty mainstream stuff like IVF).  Here's a peek at what life under the "Personhood Amendment" might look like.

In keeping with the politics of our time, the radio show On the Media did an interesting piece about what politicians mean when they invoke Ayn Rand.

In less dire, but still distressing, news-this case of a married lesbian couple denied medical decision making rights during serious pregnancy complications.  It appears that this denial violated state law, and as I have said before, laws only matter if the people in charge know them and believe in them.  As frustrating to me as the violation of the law is the fact that filing a medical Power of Attorney in Nevada only requires filling out a simple form, and then getting two witnesses or a notary to sign the document. In my (humble and non-legal) opinion, hospitals should be required to provide the appropriate POA paperwork to any patient who comes through the doors and states that a designated individual should be their medical decision-making surrogate.

In Maryland you can fill out an Advance Directive form found here.  You just need to have two witnesses sign the form.  You don't need a lawyer and it doesn't cost anything.  If you haven't done it already, do it now.

And also, register to vote, but I'm sure you've done that already.

Lesbian Behaving Badly (in a non-sexy way)

So much Lesbians Behaving Badly news.  I believe the term LBB was adopted by LGBT lawyers to describe cases where lesbian moms attempt to use a often homophobic legal system to deny a partner (and mom) custody rights. I've previously complained about this issue here.  This weekend, the NYT had a long investigative article about Lisa Miller's abduction of her own daughter in an attempt to deny the child's other mother, Janet Jenkins, access to the child.  Legally, this case was positive for gay families, with even a Virginia court eventually ruling that Vermont courts jurisdiction to rule in favor of custody rights for Jenkins, however, because of the abduction Jenkins lost everything.

In the Bates v. Bates case out of Georgia, another ruling in a lesbian custody dispute made the future of second parent adoption in that state look very shaky (thanks Nicole Bates).  This editorial in the GA Voice explains why these cases have the potential to hurt all gay parents.  Sigh.

In happier LBB news, in this case from New Mexico, a lesbian mom whose partner sought to deny her custody will be allowed to try and prove that she is legally the child's mother through the doctrine of "holding out" as a parent-similar to the concept of Common Law marriage, by acting publicly as the child's mother, she has legally become the child's mother.  However, this case only allows her to move forward with her claim, so she still has a long road ahead.

Second Parent Adoption in Maryland

I'll preface this post by saying that I am not a lawyer, I don't know how to get a 2nd parent adoption (also known as a gay adoption) in Maryland without a lawyer, and I don't know how to get a lawyer without paying said lawyer.  So with that information, you can decide whether this post is of any use to you.

The system of state law in the US makes it particularly challenging to figure out issues of family law.  Maps like this one from the Family Equality Council can only provide a starting point for understanding 2nd parent adoption in Maryland.  If you go to one of the national gay rights organizations looking for information about 2nd parent adoption in Maryland, you will likely find some version of "maybe it's possible."

The answer on the ground in Maryland is simple.  You hire a lawyer who knows something about 2nd parent adoptions, and regardless of the county in which you live your lawyer will file in the Baltimore City Circuit Court where all the judges have agree to approve 2nd parent adoptions.  This Baltimore Sun article gives more background on second parent adoptions in Baltimore City, as does this editorial in the Sun.  Jennifer Fairfax handled our adoption and we were very happy with her work.  Our portion of the work of adoption involved writing a check and collecting a bunch of documents-doctor's notes, financial statements, photographs (must include photo of your front door?!), and letters of support.  We also had to write some essays, which I seem to remember writing while on hospital bed rest with great resentment.  Getting the materials together took some time, and at times the whole process felt intrusive, but overall it was not hard-no need for a home study or anything like that.  It's not clear to me that anyone actually looked at our carefully compiled materials once they were sent to the court.

Because most of the 2nd parent adoptions in Maryland are filed in Baltimore City, adoption day in family court tends to be dominated by gay families.  In our case, because of LB's NICU stay, our court date was two weeks after LB came home (and her adjusted age was two weeks).  We were otherwise in quarantine, but we took LB to the courthouse in a cab that smelled as smokey as the 1970s and offered a distinct lack of safety features.  We made it through the metal detectors, and proceeded to family court where there were about ten lesbian couples, a few single ladies (sexuality unknown), and one straight couple.  We chatted with the lesbian couple sitting behind us with their gigantor three month old.  I proudly told one of the moms about LB, "she's  a preemie, she just came home!" The woman very kindly said, "Oh she is so cute!" while her eyes said, "yeah, no kidding she's a preemie." Our judge was borrowed from criminal court and seemed to thoroughly enjoy his sojourn in happy court.  Each parent or couple approached the bench individually with child, which took under a minute, and then the whole courtroom clapped for each family.

Understandably, most lesbian moms approach 2nd parent adoption day with a mix of happiness and anger.  It's great to have our relationships recognized by the law, but frustrating to have to pay and jump through hoops for the privilege.  We were the outliers with our entourage of three grandparents and one aunt, and our whole group crying tears of joy because we were so happy to have LB home and whole.

LB's whole first year we kept saying, "oh she used to look like such a preemie, but she doesn't anymore." Clearly she looks like such a preemie.

North Carolina On My Mind

The person keeping me updated on North Carolina's marriage amendment is a friend who is a straight, white man, with no other reason to oppose the amendment than being a decent human being.  And it makes me happy that he cares about us gays, and single ladies, and couples for whom "it's complicated."  Overall the North Carolina situation leaves me with not quite fear or sadness, but a deep feeling of heaviness.  As a historian, I believe in the human capacity for change, love, forgiveness, and transcendence, but I also know that we allow terrible things to happen.  "Never again," is a wish, not a promise, because it always happens again, just not in exactly the same terrible form.  If you were a Jew in Germany in 1932, or a Pole of any sort in 1938, a Sarajevian in 1991, or Rawandan in 1993, you didn't know how bad it would get.  You lived in a modern country, your neighbors were good people,  and then things fell apart.  I don't say this to be overly dramatic and argue that North Carolina's vote on marriage starts us on the march to genocide, but it is smart to consider the ultimate goals of your enemies.  I suspect that the gay haters, like the haters before them, don't know exactly what they want.  They don't want to kill us, but they do want us to disappear, and that is dangerous.  I also believe in the strength of America to hold its self together.  For all the craziness of this nation, maybe because of it, we are resilient.

My NC friend points me toward data showing that most NC voters don't actually know what voting Yes on One means. Is ignorance better than principled homophobia?  I have no idea.

I can't say that becoming a (gay) mom has made me more of an activist, I don't think I have the constitution for activism, sadly.  But, being a mom has raised the stakes of politics for me.  This blog post expresses many of the same feelings I've had as the political and the personal have become hopelessly intertwined.  After I gave birth to Ladybug, I was put under for a multi-hour surgery, followed by the loopiness of a mag sulfate/morphine cocktail.  Badger went to the NICU and held LB, cuddled her, and took pictures.  I'm haunted by the fact that that experience, in many states, is a privilege doled out by the hospital and not a right.  Under NCs Amendment 1, could our LB have spent her first hours alone with no mother's touch or voice.  If she had been sick, would she have died alone?

I tell myself "be the river." The river just flows.  It moves on without anger or bitterness, because it is made to flow.  I hope that queer families are the river washing gently over those who oppose us.

Our Own Worst Enemies

Back before Ladybug, when I thought about lesbian families and custody rights I assumed that the threat to our families came from outside.  When we started doing our wills and guardianship paperwork before LB was born, the lawyer made sure to ask us if our families are hostile about our relationship (thankfully they are supportive).  During the ten days I spent in the hospital before delivering at 29 weeks, I spent some amount of time crying because I was worried that if I died we wouldn't be able to complete LB's second parent adoption and Baltimore City would whisk her off to foster care.  Badger told me that was all crazy talk, and even if the authorities challenged her right to LB, my parents would have supported her fully and they would have worked everything out together.  True enough, but it was one more stressor in an already stressful situation.

Come to find out that the usual lesbian custody battle isn't with DYS or even with homophobic relatives, but between lesbian moms.  If you look at the family law cases on the NCLR website,

http://www.nclrights.org/site/PageServer?pagename=issue_families

they are almost all related to lesbian moms breaking up or divorcing and the gestational mom (GS) seeking to deny the non-gestational mom ) NGS access to their child.  Law scholar Julie Shapiro posted about a case in which a lesbian mom argued that the woman who was in the delivery room when she had a baby and supported and cared for that baby for years was just a babysitter and not a mom

http://julieshapiro.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/babysittermother-ii-full-opinion-here/

The findings in the full opinion are depressing and infuriating (and I love JS's blog, it is so smart).

A few things seem to facilitate this mom denial

1. Homophobia clearly, and desperate GSs seeking to deny custody to a former partner sometimes turn to the worst sort of anti-gay legal organizations for support.

2. The emphasis on community respectability among gay advocates means that they only publicly address this issue in very coded language, presumably because they are concerned about providing fodder for negative stereotypes.

3. Laws and courts that do not allow us to formalize our family relationships (or make the process expensive and time consuming).

4. And personal ties of friendship and community make it very hard to call out individuals when they are behaving badly.

Thankfully, our state allows second parent adoption, so for only $1,750 and countless hours of paperwork, we can be assured that even if I lost my damn mind and try to deny her rights as a parent, the law would acknowledge Badger as the full parent that she is to LB.  I'm normally a pretty "live and let live" kind of person, but I do think that as a gay community we need to have some sort of social sanction among lesbians who deny that a former partner is a child's parent.  What a cruel thing to do, not only to a mother, but to a child.  We need to take a page from our straight sisters and remind each other that "She may be a jerk, but she's still your child's mother."

Queer families, neonatal ethics, and why we don't know anything about our rights

http://ellen.warnerbros.com/2012/03/carrie_and_rebeccas_emotional_story_0309.php

This heartwarming clip has been making the rounds on the internets.  Ellen interviewed this (very sweet) lesbian couple, who are in danger of losing their home to foreclosure for all the reasons that so many families are struggling-job loss, medical expenses, past optimism, etc.

So Ellen gave them one of those oversized checks to help them out their debt hole and it was a feel-good moment.  Except that, as a lesbian mom of a NICU baby, I was struck by their retelling of their daughter's first hours.  Gestational mom had to have an emergency c-section because the baby was in distress.  They moved so fast that they were not able to give her an epidural, spinal, or general (dear God!) and after the baby was out she passed out from the pain.  The baby was thankfully viable, but needed some fairly urgent medical treatment.  And this is where I got interested.  The non-gestational mom (and I'm just going on what she reports on the show) says that the doctor in the NICU told her that he had determined the best course of treatment for the baby, but she could not consent to the treatment since she was not legally the child's parent or guardian.  And so, the doctor would wait for the gestational mom to wake up and give consent.  According to non-gestational mom, "Thank God she woke up in time."

The impression given in this video is that if gestation mom had not been able to consent to treatment, the baby could have been left to die, and that is simply not true.  Neonatal ethics and law in the United States  err on the side of treatment, and if there is no one available to give consent, doctors have both the right and the responsibility to go ahead and treat.  Really the only time doctors can withhold treatment is when a baby is so early or so sick that their condition is judged hopeless.  Even in these cases doctors often follow the wishes of the parents to withhold care or treat aggressively.  So there is no chance in hell that a doctor would refuse to treat an infant with a good prognosis just because her mother was unconscious, unless he/she really wanted to be sued/reviled/and lose his/her medical license.

So why did non-gestational mom think that the baby might be refused treatment?  It's possible that non-gestation mom is a deliberately inaccurate narrator.  Maybe she was just trying to heighten the drama of the situation.  It seems more likely that she simply did not understand the rules of the NICU and the doctor attending the baby did not explain the situation clearly.  It is a terrible thing to let a parent think that her baby might die because of factors outside the parents control.  If the non-gestational mom was given this impression then the NICU doctors failed to do their job.  The doctor should have said, "we make every effort to get consent from a child's legal parent or guardian before beginning treatment, so we are going to wait a little while and see if your partner wakes up, but you should not worry about your daughter.  Your daughter will receive the same standard of care as any other baby here, and if it becomes clear that we need to act before your partner wakes up we will do so."

I had Ladybug at 29 weeks.  Most of the medical professionals Badger and I interacted with were both highly competent and very nice people, who wanted only the best for Ladybug.  However, the present reality for queer parents seems to be that no one knows what the hell the rules are, and NICU's often don't understand what gay parents need in terms of information and support.  Can a gay-married spouse who is also the non-gestational parent make medical decisions for a child-probably not absent a second parent adoption/guardianship agreement.  However, most gay parents seem to think that a marriage certificate solves a lot of these problems.  When do guardianship agreements kick in?  We were never clear on this.  In our case, because LB came so early, we had not signed our guardianship paperwork (or I should say, I had not signed), but I was never clear on whether this paperwork could be completed before the birth of the child.

Here in the United States, all of these issues are made more complicated by the differences of state law.  Fifty sets of state laws makes it very difficult for families like ours to share information and learn from each other on the internets.  Local LBGT lawyers are both the solution and the problem for queer families, and that will be a topic for an upcoming post.