Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Triple Parenting Realities   [Stanley Kurtz]

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter responds to "Ma, Pa, and Ma in PA," my post from yesterday on the extraordinary triple parenting case in Pennsylvania. Carpenter’s claim is that, far from legitimating triple parenting, same-sex marriage will actually help to prevent it. As Carpenter puts it:

If gay couples could marry...they might be more likely to push for exclusive parental rights because of the additional security marriage would give them. Sperm donors and surrogate mothers, for their part, would be more likely to surrender their parental rights to the couple since they would be reassured that the child would live in a family fully protected by the law.

This is utterly unconvincing. Many lesbian couples actively seek donor involvement from birth, and not primarily for legal or financial reasons. Why not look at what has already actually happened in Canada? Consider this report from Equal Marriage, on Canada’s recent decision to award full simultaneous parenting status to a lesbian couple and a male sperm donor. Equal Marriage’s 2003 case in Ontario was a major breakthrough for gay marriage in Canada. So having finally secured national same-sex marriage, is Equal Marriage now (as Carpenter would claim) opposing the idea of triple parenthood? No way. These gay marriage advocates are touting triple parenting the skies, demanding full legislative recognition for yet another family form, and excoriating opponents of still another novel family structure as "faith-based bigots." Compare this stark reality to Carpenter’s rosy fantasy.

In Carpenter’s scenario, once lesbian couples are guaranteed full and exclusive parental rights over donor-descended children, they’ll be eager to cut the donor out. Yet the facts in the Canadian case are very different. Although the non-birth mother could have obtained full parental status through adoption, she specifically rejected this option because it would have forced the sperm donor to surrender his parental status. This couple was friends with the donor (as was the couple from Pennsylvania) and actively wanted him involved as a parent from the start.

So when we look beyond the implausible assurances offered by advocates of the "conservative case" for same-sex marriage, and study actual cases, we find that gay marriage produces demands for still more radical changes (and gets results!).

Carpenter writes as though I put primary "blame" for the family changes flowing from reproductive technology onto same-sex couples. Yet in my post I explicitly note that single heterosexual women who bear children through artificial insemination are having "distinct and dramatic destabilizing effects" on family structure. I also link to an earlier post about a very important new book called, Everything Conceivable. Two of the three chapters I cite focus on same sex couples, but one is about "single mothers by choice." Read these three chapters and you will see that the distinctive roles of heterosexuals and same-sex couples in the assisted reproduction revolution are mutually reinforcing. This notion that the decline of marriage is spurred by the interaction of several mutually reinforcing factors is crucial to both my own work on marriage and to David Blankenhorn’s excellent new book.

I couldn’t tell you the exact percentage of influence that same-sex couples are having on the assisted reproduction revolution. Yet I think it’s fair to say that the influence of same-sex couples substantially outpaces their percentage in the population, chiefly because they cannot have children as couples. Everything Conceivable shows that lesbian couples played a key role in the take-off of assisted reproduction. Lesbian couples are also far more likely to have close relations with a third (donor) party from birth than are heterosexual couples, and this means that lesbian couples are key drivers of the triple parenting phenomenon.

Carpenter glosses too quickly over the significance of triple parenting from birth. This is different in important ways from visitation after heterosexual divorce, and is far more likely to someday lead to a demand for multi-partner unions. In the heterosexual case Carpenter cites, the woman’s husband filed for divorce on the same day she was artificially inseminated by sperm from a former lover. That is hardly triple parenting from birth. True, heterosexual polyamorists engage in triple parenting from birth, but Carpenter (implausibly) denies any carry-over from lesbian-donor triple parenting to its genuine heterosexual analogy: polyamory.

Carpenter argues that the judge in the Pennsylvania case never substantially invokes the Vermont civil union formed by the couple in the Pennsylvania case. But if the Vermont civil union has no legal standing in Pennsylvania, why did the judge mention it at all? This judge was at pains to establish the good will of the non-biological mother–her genuine willingness to contribute financial resources, and not simply give this responsibility entirely to the donor. While the judge couldn’t formally rely on either this couple’s commitment ceremony in Pittsburgh or their civil union in Vermont, I think he noted both as a way of supporting his view that the non-biological mother was genuinely committed to the children who emerged from the union.

More broadly, note that Canada’s triple parenting decision justified itself on the grounds that "present social conditions and attitudes have changed." Canada’s triple parenting decision also invokes "advances in our appreciation of the value of other types of relationships." This is pretty evidently a claim that the advent of Canadian same-sex marriage has opened the way for the recognition of triple parenting. In effect, the court is making my argument.

05/08 10:01 AMShare