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发帖数: 19713 | 1 LOS ANGELES — Bill Delaney’s two little girls spend three nights a week
with their fathers, at the home Mr. Delaney shares with his husband in San
Francisco. The other nights, they stay with their mothers, a lesbian couple
who live nearby.
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Sean Kane of Portland, Ore., adopted his wife’s children from her first
marriage but did not want their biological father’s legal relationship to
be severed. So he pursued a third-parent adoption.
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The girls have four parents — a result of a kind of nontraditional family
arrangement that has become increasingly common. But officially, California,
like most other states, recognizes no more than two legal parents.
That limit could soon be lifted.
A bill moving through the California Legislature would allow judges to
recognize more than two legal parents for a given child, opening the door
for alternative families to seek legal recognition of their relationships.
“There are literally scores of different families and circumstances,” Mark
Leno, the state senator who sponsored the bill, said.
“This is about putting the welfare of the child above all else,” he said.
As fewer children are raised in traditional two-parent households, Mr. Leno
’s bill has moved California to the center of a growing debate over how —
and whether — such alternative family arrangements should be legally
recognized.
In just the last few years, Delaware and the District of Columbia have
passed laws that allow for third “de facto parents,” who have the same
rights and responsibilities toward their children as adoptive parents.
Meanwhile, courts in at least a half-dozen states, stretching from Oregon to
Massachusetts, have also recognized three legal parents in a handful of
cases over the last decade. Courts in Canada and New Zealand have as well.
Nancy Polikoff, a professor at the American University Washington College of
Law, said those cases merely allowed the law to reflect the many different
kinds of families that already exist in the 21st century.
“This is about looking at the reality of children’s lives, which are
heterogeneous, as opposed to maintaining a fiction of homogeneity,”
Professor Polikoff said. “Families are different from one another. If the
law will not acknowledge that, then it’s not responding to the needs of
children who do not fit into the one-size-fits-all box.”
Conservative groups, however, have called the California bill an attempt to
redefine the family radically, opening the door for children to have six,
eight, even a dozen parents.
“This bill is a Trojan horse for the same-sex-marriage agenda,” Peter
Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, said.
“Advocates for same-sex marriage are very interested in separating
parentage and marriage from biological parentage, because that’s the one
thing same-sex couples can never achieve,” he added.
The bill passed the California Senate on a party-line vote, with Democrats
supporting it and Republicans opposed, and could reach the Assembly floor by
next month.
Mr. Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, insists that fears of children with
dozens of parents are unrealistic. Third parents would still have to meet
the same legal standards currently in place. A judge would also have to rule
that it was in the child’s best interest to recognize a third parent.
Instead, Mr. Leno said he hoped that allowing the court to recognize a third
or fourth parent could help keep children out of foster care in a small
number of cases.
Mr. Leno’s bill follows a court case here last year in which a young girl
being raised by two lesbian mothers was sent to foster care after a fight
landed one mother in the hospital and the other in jail. The girl’s father,
who had maintained a relationship with his daughter, asked the court to
release her to his custody.
The trial court ruled that both mothers and the father were all parents. But
a California appeals court reversed the decision, ruling that the child
could have only two parents.
Still, parents hoping to keep their children out of foster care are hardly
the only ones who hope to benefit if the bill becomes law.
In San Francisco, Mr. Delaney said, the two sets of parents go on vacations
together with the children, have family dinners together and have signed
agreements about how to handle situations like a falling-out.
But Mr. Delaney, who is the biological father of his two girls, is not
currently one of their legal parents. He said his becoming a legal parent
would give the whole family a greater feeling of security.
“This would be the final piece, so we don’t have to worry if something
happens to the legal parents or if I am out with the kids and something
happens,” he said. “Legally, they could just take my kids and I couldn’t
do anything about it.”
And while many of the third-parent adoption cases have involved same-sex
couples, heterosexual couples have also sought legal recognition for third
parents.
In Portland, Ore., Sean Kane adopted his wife’s two children from her first
marriage. But because they maintained close ties with their biological
father, who now lives in California, Mr. Kane did not want the court to
sever that legal relationship. Instead he pursued a third-parent adoption,
which was finalized last year.
“I wanted to send the message to the children that they were my children,
as far as I was concerned,” he said.
Mr. Kane’s adopted daughter, Sara Miner, 20, said: “If it were a choice
between dropping my dad to be replaced by my stepdad, I would not have been
open to it, but with a joint adoption you don’t have to battle about who is
going to be Mom and who is going to be Dad. You can have a situation where
everyone is happy and part of the family.”
Like other parents in nontraditional families, Mr. Kane also cited some
practical concerns in his decision to become a legal parent: he wanted to be
able to pick his children up from school without hassle and make sure they
would be provided for if he died. Access to health insurance, tax deductions
and potentially even citizenship can also hinge on these legal
relationships.
Some critics of the California bill point out that the addition of another
parent could open the door for particularly messy battles over custody or
child support.
“If we are creating multiple parents for a child, we know that in
approximately 50 percent of cases, parents are going to separate and
possibly dispute what to do with that child,” said Diane Wasznicky,
president of the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists.
“If divorce is difficult for children who have two parents, imagine it with
three or four,” she added.
But Beth Allen, the lawyer who handled Mr. Kane’s adoption, said the
possibility of divorce should not prevent judges from offering legal rights
and protections to multiple people who were acting as parents.
“So often, we are struggling with parents who don’t want the
responsibilities and obligations of parenting,” she said. “So when you
have another parent willing to step up and take on those responsibilities,
aren’t we so lucky?” |
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