The Rhode Island Senate voted unanimously yesterday to pass a bill that would streamline the process of confirmatory adoptions, ensuring that more LGBTQ families have access to this unfortunately necessary tool for securing our legal ties to our children.
“As LGBTQ+ families are under attack around the country today the Rhode Island Senate affirmed once again that love makes a family,” said lead sponsor Senator Dawn Euer.
Polly Crozier, director of family advocacy at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), said in a press release, “With extremists escalating their attacks on LGBTQ+ people across the country, parents are more worried than ever about the safety of their children. An adoption decree provides additional security for children, particularly if families travel or move outside Rhode Island. S 0121 will remove needless barriers to adoption for LGBTQ+ people who seek to confirm their parentage.”
Rhode Island’s current adoption process, however, “was written for the purpose of establishing parentage, not confirming it,” as Jordan Budd, executive director of COLAGE and Rhode Island resident, testified to the Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee in March. He explained, “For many people with LGBTQ+ parents who are donor-conceived, the legal relationship that is guaranteed for the birthing parent does not automatically exist for the non-gestational parent.”
An adoption decree, unlike a birth certificate, is a court judgment that ensures recognition of parentage in all states. Getting one has come with high hurdles, however. As parent Sabra L. Katz-Wise testified about the home study her family went through:
Even though we believed we were good parents and knew we were privileged as well-educated financially stable white professors, we were still a same-sex couple and wondered if there was a chance that the social worker might decide we weren’t suitable parents. We felt incredibly vulnerable during that visit.
The home visit was just one part of the lengthy expensive second-parent adoption process, which not only felt unnecessary since we were both on our child’s birth certificate, but also violated our privacy—especially when my wife was asked to answer personal questions about her childhood, have a physical exam, get finger printed, and submit letters of reference attesting to her parenting ability. Other steps also felt unnecessary, even ridiculous, like putting an ad in the paper for our anonymous donor, who didn’t know about our existence because he was anonymous.
The Rhode Island bill would waive these requirements for both married and unmarried couples using assisted reproduction. (For unmarried couples, both parents must have consented to the assisted reproduction.) This would make it easier and faster for parents to secure confirmatory adoptions.
Rhode Island has already taken other important steps to protect children in the wide variety of families today. In 2020, it passed the Rhode Island Uniform Parentage Act (RIUPA), which updated the state’s parenting statutes to provide better protections and more accessible paths to parentage for children born via assisted reproduction to parents of any sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status.
Confirmatory adoption, GLAD said in a press release, is an important next step. Even though LGBTQ parents, gestational or not, are already legal parents under Rhode Island law, confirmatory adoption will mean that they “can easily access an adoption decree to provide that additional security for their children to protect them from bias and discrimination across the country.”
A companion bill, H 5226, is under consideration in the House. If the bills become law, they would be effective immediately. Visit GLAD’s website to learn more.