Let’s end this week on a good note! The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a nonbiological mother has the same rights as a biological one, overturning a lower court ruling that had given parental rights to her child’s anonymous sperm donor instead.
The case, Strickland v. Day (which I wrote about at more length here), involves former spouses Chris Strickland and Kimberly Day, who married in Massachusetts in 2009. They had two children, an adopted son, referred to in court documents as E.J., who was adopted solely by Day (because state law forbid same-sex couples from jointly adopting at the time) and a second son, Z.S., whom Day gave birth to, with help from an anonymous sperm donor. When their relationship ended in 2013, Strickland continued to visit and provide support until Day cut off all contact in 2015, when Day remarried and she and Strickland divorced.
Because she married her second spouse before divorcing Strickland, a lower court ruled Day’s second marriage void in May 2016. That September, the women filed an agreement with the court saying they would jointly pay all school expenses for Z.S., and that Day would retain physical and legal custody of E.J. They then jointly asked the court to determine custody, visitation and child support of Z.S., child support and visitation of E.J., and Strickland’s parentage of Z.S.
In the final judgment of divorce in 2016, the court blocked Kim’s husband from adopting the children, but also said Strickland was not a parent to either child. In particular, she was not a parent to Z.S. because the sperm donor, even though anonymous, constituted “an absent father” and even though he “may never be known, and probably won’t be … he is still a father.” That meant that Strickland could not be named as a legal parent. The court nonetheless ordered her to pay child support for both children and granted her visitation, finding she was a person acting “in loco parentis.”
Cue the Lambda Legal team, whom I imagine rappelling in off ropes dangling from helicopters, pinstriped suits flapping and briefcases in hand. (That’s not what really happened? Don’t dispel my illusion.) They filed an appeal in the Mississippi Supreme Court arguing that the lower court “did not rule in the best interests of the child and violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution by ignoring the bond between Chris and her son and dismissing the needs of married couples who use assisted reproductive technology to create families.”
Writing for the Supreme Court, Justice David Ishee said in the final ruling:
We find that the chancery court erred in finding that an anonymous sperm donor was Z.S.’s parent whose parental rights had to be terminated. Indeed, we find that there is no legal or policy basis to find that an anonymous sperm donor is a parent in this specific context…. Christina took on all the responsibilities and rewards that accompany parenthood. To now deprive Christina of these responsibilities and rewards, and diminish her parent-child relationship with Z.S., is certainly a detriment to Christina, to say nothing of the detriment to Z.S. himself.
And in words that should be heartening to anyone in the state using anonymous donor sperm to start their families, he affirmed, “We hold that under Mississippi law, an anonymous sperm donor does not possess any parental rights in a child conceived through the use of his sperm.”
Congratulations to Strickland, her children, and to all who will benefit from this ruling.