A couple of months ago, I mentioned the case of Gena Edvalson and Jana Dickson, a former couple now involved in a custody and visitation dispute over the three-year-old son they created together through assisted insemination and raised together until their breakup in 2007. Dickson, the bio mom, is now married to a man and is represented by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund. While living together in Utah, she and Dickson had both signed a co-parenting agreement. At the time of my first post, it was unclear if the courts would uphold that as evidence of Edvalson’s parental status.
They didn’t.
The Utah Third Judicial District Court just ruled that Edvalson has no rights to the child and must lose even the weekly visitation that the judge had granted until the ruling. The court also stated that the contract “directly offends the state’s public policy that parents retain the fundamental right to exercise the primary control over the care and supervision of their children.”
It all boils down to how one answers the question: “Who is a parent?”
At her personal site, The Lost Mom, Edvalson wrote yesterday:
Last week the judge ruled in her favor. . . . I lost my son. He lost another adult (nay, a mom) who loves him. They lost their souls.
In an earlier post, she said:
I never want him to think I gave him up voluntarily. I never abandoned him. I loved him and I love him still.
But still we, he and I, wait. We wait to see what our citizenship in this great country means. We wait to see if laws can expand fast enough to prevent real suffering. We wait.
It’s strange to live in both the present and the future. I know that one day this will be a non-issue. People will wonder how we could be cruel, so barbaric to rip a child from their mama. We will look at the reasons that the people doing it gave and see them as archaic and tragic. That will happen, for that I am sure. 20 years, 30 years, maybe 50 years. Yet right now, I’m not sure that our societies expanding values and notions of decency will happen fast enough to help me. My future is still within the scope of the narrow views that embody public policy and cultural warfare.
My heart goes out to her and her son. There are no words to convey the loss.
This is a tragedy for Utah families who used this contract as a last resort. What will it take – how long will it take? I’m proud of Gena for fighting for her son. One day that will be explained to him.
So much for the “family values State” – blech!
This case represents another sorry chapter in Utah law. I sympathize with the mother who has lost access to her child. I also feel badly for the courageous attorney who handled her case. As an attorney, I know how difficult it is to see your client robbed of her rights because of bigotry and a failure to recognize the validity of same-sex relationships.
True. Words fail. So, clearly, did the Utah judiciary. I can’t even imagine the pain.
OK,
Maybe, just maybe, there is another side? Apparently Dickson and Gena did not get along quite early in this drama. From the SL tribune (not repeated here) it appears Gena walked out on Dickson and was extremely hostile…
I don’t know what happened in that home or in that court room–nor do you–but many hetero couples get divorced and the men don’t retain their visitation “RIGHTS” either.
Is it possible by politicizing this or other undisclosed information Gena it was very easy for the court to determine the outcome?
Think of all the men who want to be dads and are similarly dismissed by the courts before you fall over yourself with sorrow for a person who has no problem airing her side of a story for public opinion…
Behavior has consequence
s my friends.
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