Massachusetts Bill to Better Protect Children in All Families Gets Hearing Next Week

A Massachusetts bill that would better protect children born through assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and to unmarried same-sex parents, among other provisions, will get a hearing next Tuesday, November 9. Learn more and find out how you can help all children have equal access to legal parentage!

Despite having led the nation in marriage equality, Massachusetts is now the only New England state that has not comprehensively reformed its parentage laws to protect children regardless of the circumstances of their birth or the gender or marital status of their parents. The state’s parentage statutes are outdated—using gendered language, focusing on biological connections, and offering no statutory protections for children born through assisted reproduction to unmarried parents or through surrogacy. While the rights of children with LGBTQ parents have been recognized by courts, this has been on an ad hoc basis, and not through proactive, comprehensive statutory reforms.

The Massachusetts Parentage Act (MPA; S.1133 / H.1714) would change this, clarifying who can be a parent and the ways to establish parentage; confirming that de facto parents (those who act as a parent for a substantial time in the eyes of the law) have equal rights and responsibilities; removing gendered language from parentage statutes; and adding protections for children born through assisted reproduction, including surrogacy. The bill also expands access to Voluntary Acknowledgments of Parentage (VAPs), simple, free forms that can be completed immediately after a child’s birth to establish parentage and that unlike birth certificates, are equivalent to a court decree, getting “full faith and credit” recognition in other states. As the result of a Supreme Judicial Court ruling, Massachusetts currently allows unmarried couples to complete VAPs; the MPA would extend this to married couples and enshrine VAPs in statute.

As Polly Crozier, senior staff attorney at GLAD (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders), told me about the MPA in July, “At the heart of this is making sure that every child has an equal path to the security of legal parentage.”

The MPA will have a hearing in front of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary on Tuesday, November 9, from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. ET. The hearing will be virtual and livestreamed on the Legislature’s website.

For more about the MPA, please see the piece I wrote on it back in July and visit the Massachusetts Parentage Act website. If you live in Massachusetts, here’s what more you can do:

• Please submit written testimony now in support of this bill. There’s a template at the link if you want help getting started. If you would like more assistance, please reach out to Polly Crozier of GLAD or Kate Weldon LeBlanc, executive director of Resolve New England. When you are done, e-mail your testimony to Crozier and LeBlanc by Monday, November 8, at noon.
• If you would like to speak during the hearing and/or have a story to tell, please contact Crozier and LeBlanc as soon as possible. They will sign people up to testify, so please do not sign yourself up.
• Ask your state senator and representative to co-sponsor the MPA (or thank them if they have). Send them a copy of the MPA Fact Sheet (PDF).
• Follow “massparentage” on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and help spread the word on social media.

I live in Massachusetts myself, so this bill is personal to me. It’s even more personal for the parents and children who have experienced discrimination under the current laws. Let’s change things so that children of all parents are equally protected.