Followup to earlier posts:
May 21, 2004 and
May 13, 2004,
The New York Times shares the “Other Mother’s” story.
Peggy Orenstein writes (excerpt):
It is, of course, the children’s voices that are missing from this debate. What are their wishes, their feelings, their needs? As with heterosexual couples, gay partners in a hostile split will say and do hurtful things. They will use children as weapons. With no legal recognition of their families, however, without the possibility of marriage or, in some states, second-parent adoption, doing so is just that much easier. Ultimately, it is the children who suffer.
”In any divorce where there’s parental alienation,” says Diane Ehrensaft, a clinical psychologist writing a book on the children of assisted-reproductive technology, ”the children end up with a shattered sense of their own histories. And the sleeper effect comes in their teen and adult years. Their own relationships will be colored by that attachment breach.”