[Our “She Got Me Pregnant” vlog will be posted tomorrow. Stay tuned. Back to Thursdays next week.]
A few items of note from hither and yon:
- Thomas Beatie, the transgender man whose pregnancy made headlines, is expecting a second child, ABC News reveals. Beatie will be talking with Barbara Walters on 20/20 tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. ET.
- Billie Stanton of the Tucson Citizen speaks out as a straight ally and single parent about the same-sex parents she knows. “Marriage is a national value,” she says. “Americans value it so much, they usually try it two or three times. Sometimes more.” She then observes about her friends, “The children they’re raising were discarded, abandoned, thrown away by their biological parents – those heterosexuals we so sanctimoniously enshrine in our laws. The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so damned tragic.” Word.
- Florida resident Bianca Sutherland wrote a letter to the Lake Wales News about why she thinks her state is “regressive, intolerant and ignorant” by banning adoption by lesbian and gay parents. It’s unclear if she’s LGBT or an ally, but she quotes demographic and economic figures from UCLA’s Williams Institute and is obviously quite familiar with the issue. Nice to see this sort of thing popping up in local papers as well as national coverage.
- The Columbia Spectator, the newspaper of Columbia University, reports on a panel of lesbian and gay parents. Nothing new for most readers here, but I like the closing comment by one of the moms, that her son is “being exposed to the notion of spectrums as opposed to dichotomies.”
- A parliamentary inquiry in New South Wales, Australia, heard arguments that gay men who become parents through surrogacy should be recognised as co-fathers on the birth certificate. Currently, gay men who seek a surrogate overseas have the status of sperm donor, with the birth mother as the legal mother of the child. If they have gone through the process in California or another state that severs a surrogate’s parental status, the child then is parentless and stateless under the law.
- A new survey in the U.K. found that “More than a third of people think gay couples and single people should not be allowed to adopt children. . . . More than three-quarters (87%) of those who object said they think children need a male and a female role model; and 76% said it would lead to the breakdown of the traditional family.” The charity Action For Children commissioned the survey in order to encourage adoption and “dispel myths about who can apply.” They said they were “shocked” to find such prejudice. Put the results another way, though, and two-thirds of the population thinks that adoption by same-sex couples and single people would be just fine. There’s still a long way to go, but that’s progress from the repressive days of Section 28, isn’t it?