The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday that Alabama has to recognize the second-parent adoptions done in Georgia by a nonbiological mom.
The federal decision overturned an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that had refused to recognize the adoptions by a woman of the children she and her then-partner planned for and were raising together.
The women, identified as E.L. and V.L. in court documents, began a relationship in 1995, and decided to start a family. E.L. gave birth to three children through assisted insemination between 2002 and 2004. They lived in Hoover, Alabama, but leased a house in Georgia in 2006 after hearing that Fulton County, Georgia, was more amenable to second-parent adoptions. E.L. consented to V.L.’s adoption of the children in Georgia in 2007. The women broke up at the end of 2011, and V.L. filed a petition at the end of 2013, saying that E.L. was preventing her from seeing the children. E.L. countered that the Georgia adoption was invalid in Alabama.
Two lower courts ruled in V.L.’s favor. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed that ruling, however, and said the adoptions were invalid. Now, however, the nation’s highest court has said Alabama erred:
The Georgia judgment appears on its face to have been issued by a court with jurisdiction, and there is no established Georgia law to the contrary. It follows that the Alabama Supreme Court erred in refusing to grant that judgment full faith and credit.
V.L. explained in a statement the very personal impact this has, saying, “I have been my children’s mother in every way for their whole lives. I thought that adopting them meant that we would be able to be together always. When the Alabama court said my adoption was invalid and I wasn’t their mother, I didn’t think I could go on. The Supreme Court has done what’s right for my family.”
And V.L.’s lawyer, National Center for Lesbian Rights Family Law Director Cathy Sakimura, spoke of the wider impact, calling the decision “a victory not only for our client but for thousands of adopted families.” She added, “No adoptive parent or child should have to face the uncertainty and loss of being separated years after their adoption just because another state’s court disagrees with the law that was applied in their adoption.”
Tobias Barrington Wolff, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who wrote an amicus brief for the case, told Slate, “This ruling marks a major turning point. . . . the obligation to treat same-sex couples equally in our legal system cannot be avoided, whether through clever tactics or outright hostility.”
This is nevertheless one of the far too many cases we’ve seen in which a biological mom tries to prevent a nonbiological mom from seeing their children after separation or divorce. At least this one has a happy ending.