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Behave!

I blogged about this at Strollerderby and I mentioned it on Facebook, but I have more to say about it.

These lesbians and lesbian exes and ex-lesbians and what-have-you are getting me down today.  The story is: Once upon a time two women fell in love and got together in Seattle.  There they settled down, feathered a nest and each gave birth to a baby, each of whom was adopted, in turn by the nonbiological second mom.  Happy-happy, joy-joy.

Then the family moved to Florida and all hell broke loose.  Moms split up, agreeing to coparent amicably, until Mom A falls in love with a fundamentalist Christian man, gets engaged, repudiates her lesbo history and refuses to let Mom B have any more visitation with Mom A's bio child.

Mom B sues for custody (of her nonbio, but fully legally adopted child) and the court overturns the adoption (made in another state, mind you) on the grounds that Florida doesn't grant adoption to gay people.  Mom B appeals and the appeals court rules in her favor, saying Florida, whether it grants gay adoptions or not, must recognize adoptions made in other states under the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Now, Mom A has appealed to the Florida Supreme Court (no word on whether they are taking the case yet).

Here are some points:

1.  If Florida upholds its right to willy-nilly reverse adoptions made in other states, um, whoa, Bessie!  What does that mean for any adoptive family, not just queer ones?  You may think that you are safe because Florida doesn't ban you from adopting at the moment, but this kind of precedent sure opens a can of worms to allow Florida to decide it doesn't like you either and will dissolve your relationship to your child while on vacation at Disney.  Florida, by all accounts is Crazy State.  You never know what it's going to do next.

2.  Mom A is a jerk, obviously.  But not just because she is keeping her bio kid from its (don't know the genders here) second mom.  She is, one must assume, also repudiating her own parenthood of Mom B's bio kid, in spite of having adopted the kid legally in Washington.  Now that's major jerkness, right there.

3.  We need federal laws governing this stuff, not state ones.  I know that's a long shot, but if states are going to go ignoring the full faith and credit clause, and if the U.S. Congress is going to support them in that with laws like the DOMA, which allows marriages to be dissolved when crossing state lines (also in glaring contradiction to full faith and credit, among other things), then states need to simmer down and let the feds take over family law in these broad areas of marriage and adoption.  You can't just dissolve legal familial bonds when a family arrives in your state.  That is dangerous on a zillion levels.  Certainly, most clearly in the case of a child whose parent can just renounce her responsibility to provide for and nurture that child as a parent who took on these responsibilities legally--and for life--in another state.

4.  I have been reading all this adoption stuff (new books from conference) about the various ways that a loss as devastating as an entire family will mess with the developmental tasks at every stage of a child's life.  Whether adopted at birth or after five years of foster care, kids still sustain a loss at the outset of adoption that adds challenges to growing up healthy, happy and whole.  It can be done of course, I'm not suggesting otherwise.  I'm simply saying that it adds challenges and makes life more difficult.  Why any parent in her right mind would create this situation for a child by taking that child from a (perfectly healthy, non-abusive) second parent is beyond me.  Why orchestrate a loss for your child when you could have prevented it?

I know, people are nutso when they break up.  Ex-gay fundie converts even more so, I am sure.  Much as I wish it were not true, lesbians are just normal human beings like everyone else and no better behaved in a breakup than straight, legally married people who might just as readily swipe the kids if it were so easily done, given no legal protection for the ex's relationship with them.

And because lesbians (and gay men and you know, everyone) are human, we need laws to protect our children when breakups happen.  I know some people pull off voluntary coparenting with integrity.  But some don't.  And some really, really don't.  So we need a blanket of second-parent adoption that covers all children and protects their connections to their parents.

In fact, I think de facto parents should have legal standing, whether adoptive or not.  They should have automatic rights to visitation unless a court decides it is not in the child's best interest.  Overall, I am tired of this stuff being put under the heading of "gay rights" because it is really about children's rights.  Kids don't get to choose who their parents are.  Like it or not, queers have been having children from time immemorial and will continue to do so.  Protect those kids not by prohibiting them from having legal ties to their parents, but by mandating their parents support them and give them access to all other parents, whether they are born again or not.

Really, what kid would Jesus abandon?

Same-sex marriage would help--if the moms had married in this particular case--by providing same-sex divorce and thus putting the visitation and custody stuff in the hands of a court.  But plenty of straight people don't bother/have their reasons not to marry the second parent of their child (biological and otherwise--look at Brangelina), so marriage really isn't the issue here.  The issue is kids' rights to their parents--as defined by the kids.  Children will develop connections to people whether the adults in their lives necessarily want them to or not.  Step-parents, boyfriends, grandmothers who babysit every day--kids will define their primary caregivers in ways we might not.  Those relationships deserve at least a glance by a court before being severed at the whim of one legal parent.

Meanwhile, this case is simple enough--the adoption was actually legal.  Mom A needs to present her bio kid for visitation with Mom B and cut a check for her share of Mom B's bio kid's support.  Case closed.

In the court of Shannon...

Alarming!

Now that I'm a farmer, I take an interest in something called "hardiness zones" which tell me how cold it can get where I am planting and what will and will not grow there.  I never knew what zone I was in until recently.  It seems I am in zone 6.  But here's the thing: a couple of years ago I would have been in zone 5.  In 2006, they changed the zones, because some places had warmed up so much.  I found a nifty, but worrying animation of the shift in zones from 1990 to 2006 here.  Check it out.  It kinda gives me the willies.

Standpoint

I'm going back to the whole PGD-for-hair-color thing.  Because lots of people raised some very good points and some very good questions and I want to keep talking about it.  If you're bored, feel free to move along (as if you didn't already feel perfectly free to do just that).

Jody pointed out that my position seems pretty freighted with my experience as someone on the margins of mainstream parenting for a number of reasons (like being a lesbian transracial adopter, for instance) and the frustration that brings in terms of people's expectations about what makes for a family and what makes for beauty etc.  Yes indeed.

Sara raised some scenarios of ethical conundrum in which aesthetics overlap with disease (sort of) or in which values conflict--like the value of being a different kind of person versus the value of being free of what mainstream society might consider a defect (Sara used little people versus typically statured people.  Me, I always think of deaf people when this kind of question is raised.)

Anyway, I got to thinking that I should share my personal stakes in this discussion.  So here are the ones that immediately come to mind:

1.  I'm a member of a group that could well be severely reduced in numbers were we to find a gene for it.  I know that you, gentle reader, would never select against a gay embryo, but that doesn't mean most people wouldn't.  Most people probably would, given the choice, right now, today.  (Mind you I'm not so sure I think there's a gay gene out there, but let's just say they were to find one.  God forbid they ever do, and this is why.)

2.  I am someone with very little personal feeling about being pregnant and passing my genes into the future.  I realize either or both of those things are very important to some people.  My interest in it doesn't go much further than idle curiosity.  I am awed by human reproduction, but I don't have a burning desire to participate in it directly.  Which is just to say I do know that the desire to be pregnant and/or pass on ones' (or one's partner's) genes is almost indescribably strong for some people, and I am sympathetic, but I am not empathetic in the sense that I just don't get how that feels.

3.  My two best friends are directly impacted by ART.  One went through IVF twice and she and I even had an egg donor talk once (didn't ever go through with it and she ended up with a surprise bio-baby in the happy end).  My other best friend and her female partner are starting down the path to donor sperm selection, beginning with a friend.  So it is not that I am untouched or unfamiliar with the details of various ART options, beyond just reading infertility blogs (which I've done a lot of too).

4.  My family is composed of entirely un-biologically-related members.  We don't look a thing alike either--no two of us.  And that is a deep, special blessing with gifts that I think most people never consider.  It is most often assumed to be a handicap.  And it is a social oddity, to be sure, but I am not one to assume social oddities are necessarily handicaps.

So that's where I'm coming from.  Now, Jody raised the problem of how you go about actually regulating these things.  I don't know, and that's not my area of expertise.  But here's what I think.  I think people like me and like Jody can certainly sit in meetings with people whose expertise is actual regulation--and actual enforcement of regulation--and air our concerns and help to hammer it all out.  Sara, on the other hand, seems worried in both her comments that the special needs of special cases and the special knowledge of the parents in question would somehow be overridden by regulations.  But "regulation" doesn't mean parents have no voice in decisions.  In fact, it can mean whatever we hammer out in a meeting with the regulation experts.  It doesn't have to be all one way or another.  And as for ethics boards consisting of all tall people (making decisions, in Sara's scenario for little people), why would that necessarily be the case?  Hospitals already have ethics boards for trouble-shooting things that come up (which they do on a regular basis).  I don't know how they get put together.  But I strongly believe that any board overseeing these kinds of decisions should have representation from someone with strong disability rights credentials.  Because the case of the little people forced to have tall children or a deaf parent forced to have a hearing child are good examples of how subjective these kinds of issues can be.

Calling for regulation or ethics boards or whatever is not saying "people should not be allowed to blah blah blah."  It's saying "this needs to be mulled over much more thoughtfully than just to say 'is there a market for it?'"  All the cautionary concerns raised by you all and others should be part of the mulling.  It's all valid fodder.  But I still maintain laissez-faire is not the way to go when it comes to medical ethics, especially medical ethics concerning entirely helpless, dependent beings, from embryos to babies.  And although PGD may be quite rare today, it may be considerably less rare a generation from now, (as is the case with all kinds of ART that was in the wee developmental stages a generation ago and is all but routine today).  That being the case, it is a good idea for us to establish--at the very least--a set of values upon which to base future uses of such technology.  And even if there's loads of gray area (and there is likely to always be), I think the values that technologies like PGD be used for 1) legitimate medical reasons only and 2) without violating the rights of the child in question is a great place to start.  After that, we can sit around tables and argue for and against various cases being legitimate/rights violations or not.  But I think those values would put hair and eye color selection quite obviously beyond the pale.  And I'm good with that.

You?

Bibliography

To be fair, I thought I'd share a few books with you that are in the background of my thinking on this reproductive ethics stuff.  I know there are piles of terrific books about these things, but mostly these three are lurking behind my recent writing on the issue (from my strollerderby Suleman posts to this recent one about PGD):

Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies by Charis Thompson

This one is mostly about assisted reproductive technologies and the problem of not regulating them in the United States.  The author is a mother via IVF.

Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents by Mary Lyndon Shanley

I love this book.  Shanley shifts the bottom line from "best interest of the child" to the rights of the child.  Sound like the same thing?  Not remotely.  Everybody should read this book.  Right now.  Immediately.  Go on, click, buy, read.

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz

This one is a less academic choice than the other two.  It's a highly readable account of the Nobel Sperm Bank written by a Slate contributor.  It gives a great overview of sperm banking (history of to current practices) and will demystify the notions they try to sell you at the big sperm bank websites.

I also read a fascinating, 85-page academic article about Indian surrogacy and its ethical tangles last week.  You can download it too from Ethica.

A Conversation Worth Having

When I was in high school and college I was subject to a gazillion courses in bioethics.  At the time, IVF was newish, egg donation was mostly theoretical, right-to-die folks were just starting to get noisy, the human genome was only just beginning to be mapped, etc.  I spent countless hours in discussions with far more conservative peers, arguing mostly for a great deal of freedom for the uses of new medical technologies and research (including research using human embryos).

So imagine my surprise when my recent post at Strollerderby about a new for-profit offering at a fertility clinic, allowing parents to use PGD to determine a child's hair and eye color, was met with a big shrug.  Most commenters seemed to feel that hey, it's a free market.  And of course, IVF being a massive undertaking--only done by the medically in need, at great pain and suffering and expense--this procedure isn't going to be sought by many and thus will have very little impact on society.

Well of course.  This procedure.  At this moment.  But that doesn't mean we should just accept it and move on.  The fact that huge expense goes into developing something so--frankly--stupid as hair and eye color selection and it is offered in a free market to medical consumers is a travesty in my opinion.  No it won't impact the gene pool (which fact plenty of people don't seem to understand and is another problem with the lack of discussion) and no, banning it won't automatically cause money to spent elsewhere.

But unlike Barack Obama, I'm a socialist--at least about a great many things.  And it seems more than obvious to me that a free market approach to medicine has failed miserably in the United States.  It's time to pull in the reins on the race to the ethical bottom (octuplets, anyone?) and the excessive gap between rich and poor people's access to medicine.  Taking a good look at high-cost fertility treatment that forces people to mortgage their homes for a 5% shot at having a baby seems reasonable to me, when we re-evaluate how our society allocates spending.

And I am not talking about banning fertility treatment.  It seems like in some corners, if you say "regulate" and "fertility treatment" anywhere within 100 words of each other, people jump to assume they will no longer be allowed to do those high-end procedures.  I am hardly suggesting that.  In fact, I think that any public health coverage should include fertility treatment--including IVF, including PGD when medically called for--which is considerably more than most private insurance plans do for us now.  But if we are going to provide fertility coverage to everyone, we are going to need to make the expenses reasonable.  Why not include in any new health plan, caps on pricing for treatments and drugs like many countries have now?  Why not put a maximum on the profit a doctor can make with this stuff?  How could regulating that kind of thing not help infertile people who need the treatment?

Look, I'm not interested in ever getting pregnant myself.  But I'm happy to pony up some percentage of my tax money so that you folks who are interested and need help with it can get that help even if you aren't rich, without going into monumental debt.  But I'm not paying so some fool doctor in LA can line his pockets with cash from people who know no better than to think it's a good idea to custom order a baby by looks.  And I'd like to see the incentives to a doctor to offer that sort of thing drastically reduced--by, for example, making it illegal to charge anything extra for that kind of service.  That would also reduce the R&D incentives to go finding those genes in the first place.  The market is not a force of nature.  Plenty of people outside the United States know this.  It is time U.S. Americans realized it and started taking some responsibility for where the market goes next.

Let's focus on curing cancer, not filling the prep schools of tomorrow with customized kids.

Not Liveblogging Anything

I was at a church meeting last night and missed the address to the joint session.  So I'm watching it at whitehouse.gov and all I can do is sigh dreamily.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg is looking chipper, Michelle looks like the Queen of America in purple, and she looks genuinely proud of Barack, not just like she's putting it on for the cameras.

And she blew him a kiss!

And look at those Black faces in the crowd!  Okay, not a million, but more than in the past.

I feel like there are finally real people on Capitol Hill.

Shannon On Suleman: Round Two

Again, at Strollerderby.

Music to my Ears

I know it's supposed to be a bad thing, but if hearing the president say "I screwed up...I take full responsibility...I made a mistake...we're going to fix it" is the result of all the tax bruhaha with the cabinet appointees, I almost think it's worth it.

I haven't heard a president say that, right out, right away, since...okay, since never in my personal memory.  You?

And now, WHY CAN'T POLITICIANS PAY THEIR TAXES?  What's so hard about that?  Especially since they KNOW this sort of thing has happened before and is bound to happen again.  Seriously!

Inauguration-Bound

We are going to the inauguration.  Leaving Friday, staying in Columbus overnight--where we plan to see A Blogger You Know and Love and her family--arriving in DC on Saturday.

We have no plans to do anything in particular, as far as events go.  But we do have plans to stay with Aunts Nancy and Laurel and just spend some quality time with same, while popping our heads out their Capitol Hill/Eastern Market door now and then to hear the roar of the crowds.

We will wander about on foot as far as they'll let us with a stroller and just take in the vibe.  I do hope we will be near a jumbotron for the swearing in so Nat can see that.  Maybe even squint into the distance and catch a glimpse of the live action, too.  (At the first Clinton inauguration, we watched the thing squinting into the distance.  We stood next to those with tickets, with only a rope between us and them.  They didn't have seats either.  I am betting that this time, too, we will do as well as we might have done with tickets.)

We are not planning to go anywhere that requires a security check (stood in line for two hours to hold a protest sign at the first GWB inauguration parade, can't imagine how long the lines for such things might be this year).

Nevertheless, I imagine the jubilant throngs of humanity will make a lasting impression on Nat and she can remind Selina about it too.  I will take interesting photos and probably post them at Strollerderby, so check us out over there, starting Sunday, okay?

And when we get back, remind me to tell you all about our wonderful new church!