A lesbian mother has asked the Georgia Supreme Court to rule that second-parent adoptions are illegal. Sara Wheeler and her partner had started a family together, with Sara carrying the child and her partner Missy Wheeler adopting him. The two later split, and Sara would not let Missy see their son. Sara asked the county court to throw out the adoption they had previously legalized, claiming it contradicted state law. The case was rejected, and then thrown out by the appeals court and state Supreme Court as well. Sara Wheeler is now asking the Supreme Court to reconsider.
The LGBT community in Atlanta is reportedly up in arms about the case, and Lambda Legal has filed a brief in support of Missy Wheeler. I feel a similar sense of disgust and outrage, but also a sense of “here we go again.” I wrote at the end of January about two similar cases, one in Ohio and one debated between Vermont and Virginia, in which the bio mothers used anti-LGBT laws to try and deny custody to their former partners.
One of the bio moms in these cases is claiming she is no longer lesbian, and Sara Wheeler says she is questioning her own sexuality. Regardless, these cases are betrayals of the LGBT community they once claimed as their own. Even leaving that aside for a moment, though, what kind of a message are these women sending to their children? How will the bio moms explain that they wanted to cut their children off completely from their non-bio moms? Will they fill them with tales of evil former partners? Will they lie? Given the long memory of the Internet, it’s reasonable to assume the children will stumble across, if not search for, information about their moms’ court cases. Will that shatter their sense of their bio moms’ integrity?
Sara Wheeler told the Associated Press the case is “about motherly rights.” She asserts “Before I’m anything gay or lesbian I’m a mother, and the most important thing is to make sure my son has a relationship with his biological mother.”
Missy Wheeler is a mother, too, and a joint custody agreement would not deny her son a relationship with his bio mom. Biology is one way to measure motherhood, but so is adoption, and time spent parenting, and love. A child with two loving, responsible parents deserves to retain a relationship with both of them even if they part ways. Above all, I wish these cases are settled in the best interests of the children involved. At the same time, I have to hope they do not set precedents that would continue to deny non-bio moms any rights in the case of a breakup. That would be tragic not only for these three children, but for the many other children of same-sex couples in those states as well.
Lest you think Georgia, with its conservative reputation, doesn’t have that many LGBT families, note that the 2000 U.S. Census indicates that southern and rural states have the highest prevalence of parenting among same-sex couple households, and Georgia has a higher percentage of lesbian couples raising children than California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, or Vermont. (See Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families, Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias, pp. 16-17.) If Sara Wheeler is really a champion of “motherly rights,” she would be wise to consider the ramifications of her case on all of the other lesbian mothers around her.
This entire case has been just devastating here in Georgia.
The attorney who represented Missy in the adoption — really the entire family, since in a second parent adoption, the bio-mom is deeply involved — does something like 80% of the same sex family adoptions. She did ours, which was going on during the same general time period as the original trial and appeal.
I hope that something happens to these “lesbians behaving badly” in the future that makes them understand how much their selfish anger with their exes has done to harm our entire community.