A two-year-old boy with “three parents” – his lesbian mother, her partner and a gay father – is at the centre of an Appeal Court test case on the status of “alternative” families.
The mother says she made a pact with the father during a restaurant meeting before the boy was conceived that she and her lover would fill the role of “primary parents” within a “nuclear family” and that he would not stand on his paternal rights.
But now she and her partner say they feel “bitter and betrayed” after the father – a former close friend who attended the birth and held the new-born baby in his arms – demanded overnight and holiday contact with his biological son.
Two things strike me about thsi story. The first is that the father’s attorney warned the court against adopting traditional or sterotypical views of teh family. Got it. Two lesbians raising a child is now traditional. Second, as to the dad’s supposed agreement–an oral contract ain’t worth the paper its written on.
One of the real tragedies of our society today is the obvious belief that it is acceptible to (ab)use children as social experiments. I note this also in light of the recent story about the 5-year old boy whose parents have been raising him as a girl. IMO it is an obvious extension of test tube fertilization and on-demand abortion. My wife has been a kindergarten teacher and her parental stories would curl your hair (or straighten it as the case my be).
Following on David Keller’s comment, an oral contract doesn’t mean squat in situations like this … of course, an oral contract was the only recourse for the father to lay some claim to the son, or for the mothers to protect their children, given the situation. Which leads me to two possible policy remedies: (1) ban such “situations” entirely, by force of law (to protect the children), or (2) codify legal means of protecting both parents and children, even in “blurry” situations. Since (1) is entirely impractical (i.e., “it’s gonna happen anyway”), time to look to (2). Am I missing a (3)?
Nobody seems to be thinking about the kid in all this – it’s all just about ownership and ‘rights’ it seems.
What a mess. It looks to me like there’s some restaurant conversation re: parenthood(not recorded/no “minutes” or anything like that) and no written agreement amongst the parties where the father/donor relinquishes paternal rights.
This is rich:
“He added: “Notwithstanding their sexuality and that they acknowledge to that extent that they are an ‘alternative family’, the mother and her partner hold very traditional views of family life and would not have chosen to bring a child into anything other than an intact, two-parent, family.
Except that the traditional view of “intact, two-parent families” is that of a mother and father, not two mothers and a father. Oops…
Seems to me this all hinges on the rights of biological fathers in Britain.
And I hope they all find a peaceful way of co-parenting the little boy. If not, they will do him a serious disservice. Grow up, everybody.
I actually know of a situation like this one. Given statistics showing that lesbian relationships break up at a higher rate than heterosexual marriages, I await with trepidation the word from our friends that their daughter, the biological mother of their grandchild, is being sued for custody or visitation by her partner or by her friend who contributed the sperm to make the baby.