The New York Times reports on custody battles involving gay couples.
Pam Belluck and Adam Liptak write (excerpt):
The judge agreed, reluctantly, that although K was the genetic mother, E, the birth mother, was entitled to sole custody.
As tens of thousands of same-sex couples become parents, they are increasingly confronting what heterosexual parents have long dealt with: remaking their lives and those of their children after a breakup.
But for gays and lesbians, the legal landscape surrounding such breakups is often uncertain or uncharted. Laws, ill fitting and varying by state, were not written to anticipate same-sex situations, and judges often take interpretative license as they struggle to navigate a rocky path.
The children are caught in the middle, and for many, the trauma and confusion of conventional divorce can be magnified. Judges have weighed in on issues like whether a former partner should pay child support, and how the children should be told of or shielded from a parent’s homosexuality.
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“You have the egg mom and the womb mom,” said Joan Hollinger, who teaches adoption law at the University of California, Berkeley. “They’re both natural mothers. One’s biological and the other is genetic. Courts are issuing decisions about their dual maternity after ascertaining who intended to be the parent, and that makes me nervous.”