Stories about LGBTQ parents and our children that I haven’t covered elsewhere!
Family Profiles
- Lindsay King-Miller at BuzzFeed writes that babymaking while queer was “Expensive, Exhausting, And Deeply Unsexy.” (I see her point—here was my experience, which was clinical rather than romantic—but I’ve heard from straight friends who don’t conceive easily that even procreation through intercourse can be “deeply unsexy.” The trick for many couples of all types, I think, is to maintain the sexy at other times, separate from the work of conception.)
- The Georgia Voice profiled Linda Ellis and Lesley Brogan, who are raising two teens with two dads, John Blevins, the biological father, and his partner, Rande.
- The Jewish Journal reports on a documentary by filmmaker Amy Geller about Rachel Segall of Newton, Massachusetts who became a surrogate to gay dads Sandro Sechi and Erik Mercer.
- Model and LGBT activist Josephine Skriver, who has a lesbian mom and a gay dad, adds her voice to those speaking out against Italian designers Stefanno Gabbana and Domenico Dolce’s comments that children created through IVF were “synthetic.”
Politics and Law
- Texas State Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas) has filed a bill that would allow both same-sex parents to be on their adopted children’s supplemental birth certificates. The Dallas Morning News reports on the bill and on the testimony of teen Zoë Touchet, who has two moms and faced hurdles because only one was on her birth certificate.
- Matthew and Michael Burrus-Pearce, two gay dads in Texas, write in the Houston Chronicle about what it would mean to them if the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to require states to recognize their marriage.
- The Detroit Free Press covers the case of a lesbian mom who says she was fired from her teaching job at an all-girls private Catholic high school when she informed administrators she was going to start a family. (Here’s my earlier post on her case.)
- The Irish legislature has voted to extend adoption rights to civil partners and cohabiting couples, including same-sex couples, who have lived together for more than three years. Previously, only married couples and single people could adopt a child. A parent’s spouse or cohabiting partner will be able to apply for guardianship after co-parenting for two years or more.
- The Constitutional Tribunal and Court of Appeals of ValparaÃÂso in Chile ruled that the children’s book Nicolás tiene dos papás (Nicolás Has Two Dads), the first Chilean children’s book about to feature same-sex parents, “does not constitute a mandatory imposition of a moral stance that would usurp parents’ authority” and is allowed in preschools, reports the PanAm Post.
- The Labour Court in Durban, South Africa ruled that a gay man was entitled to paid maternity leave after becoming a parent through surrogacy.
- A lesbian couple in Taiwan have filed the first known case in their country for a second-parent adoption.