Friday, August 19, 2011

British article on co-parenting by friends (or by people who meet on websites designed to match co-parents) ignores legal issues

The British newspaper, The Telegraph, recently ran a story about people not in intimate relationships choosing to parent together. The lead family started as a single lesbian and a gay man chatting on an online fertility forum and is now a lesbian couple and a gay man. The coparents are not all gay. The article links to three different websites where people looking for such a co-parenting relationship can meet.

Britain regulates sperm banks, but there is no law governing how people meet who might decide to have a biological child together. The man and woman can do self-insemination or what the article calls "natural insemination (NI) – a euphemism in fertility forums for full sex."

Although I have written several posts about lesbians conceiving through sexual intercourse, I had never seen an actual term for the pratice, nor did I know that people discuss the practice explicitly in online chat rooms. The article does not discuss the legal consequences of picking one form of conception over another. The few US cases in which a man and a woman have sex explicitly so the woman can have a child alone have all had those agreements thrown out in a court case about the child's parentage. All the parents in the article are happy...for now. And since they are intending to coparent, maybe they expect to face a court if they have unresolvable conflicts later on.

But I have to wonder about the partner of the bio mom in the lead family in the story. She and the bio mom are the child's primary parents. But to be a legal parent she would have to complete a second parent adoption. A lesbian couple in Britain who conceive through the services of a medical facility can be parents without an adoption. So I am guessing she has no legal rights. There have been a couple of cases here recently of a bio mom teaming up with an uninvolved semen donor to try to get rid of a nonbio mom.

Like I said, all the parents in the article are happy...for now.

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