With 2021 drawing to a close, I asked experts at some of the leading organizations fighting for LGBTQ families what they thought were the key legal and political wins—and losses—for LGBTQ parents and our children over the past year. Here’s what they told me.
November 18th marks three very queer events: the ruling that made Massachusetts the first U.S. state to have marriage equality; the repeal of the anti-LGBTQ Section 28 law in England and Wales; and (of less broad significance) the “Massaversary” of when my spouse and I legally wed after 13 years together.
Queer parents, their children, LGBTQ and children’s rights advocates, and others told Massachusetts legislators Tuesday about the negative impact that the state’s outdated parentage laws have on people’s lives, and called for the state to update its statutes so that all children, including those born to LGBTQ parents, have equal access to legal parentage.
Spain’s health minister has extended the country’s free fertility treatments to single women, lesbian and bisexual women, and transgender people who can become pregnant.
(Content warning for extreme violence.) A woman and her partner were killed in Norfolk, Virginia, last week, as they sought to defend one woman’s 19-year-old daughter from her boyfriend. One other woman was killed and two others, including the pregnant daughter, were injured.
A Massachusetts bill that would better protect children born through assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and to unmarried same-sex parents 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!
Two recent state supreme court rulings, in Alaska and Idaho, underline the wildly different requirements same-sex parents may face to prove their parenthood.
A lesbian who wants to become a foster parent for a child in a taxpayer-funded program for unaccompanied refugee children was unable to do so because the government is working through an agency that discriminates against LGBTQ people. Now she’s suing.
Two women ex-partners are cooperatively suing the state of Nebraska for full, equal parentage rights over the children they had together. The case could mean the further expansion of voluntary acknowledgments of parentage—simple, free forms to establish legal parentage—to parents of all genders.
It is many a queer parent’s nightmare: your child’s sperm donor sues for paternity. When it happened to Robin Young and Sandy Russo in 1991, it precipitated a landmark four-year court battle that indelibly marked 9-year-old Ry Russo-Young and her 11-year-old sister Cade. Yet Ry, now an award-winning filmmaker, had never really been able to process her feelings about what happened. Her attempt to do so, and to understand the other side of the story, led her to create Nuclear Family, a three-part documentary that premieres this Sunday on HBO.
