Lesbian mothers should be on birth certificates

[SapphosRock]

Great article from Kathleen Stock.

unherd.com/2023/07/lesbian-mothers-should-be-on-birth-certificates/

It is surprising to me that anyone who supports women's rights would oppose lesbian parents having equal rights to straight parents.

From the article:

Naming a second lesbian parent on a child’s birth certificate is a family-friendly move. Arguably, if you squint a bit, it’s even a socially conservative move — though agreeing probably depends on whether you take, as your baseline, a society where lesbians will have children anyway; or whether you think of it as a cultural aberration that could, with discouragement, be stopped. Either way, putting a second lesbian partner on a birth certificate officially defines and legitimises her parenting relation within the family, allowing the burdens and joys to be shared between two adults, and adding a second layer of protection for the child. Family stability is important for good childhood outcomes, and this measure seems to provide some.

I disagree with you - the extreme case of a child taken into care at birth or a child adopted at birth shows this, the biological mother is still named on the certificate.

Only the biological parents should be on the birth certificate. I say this as a lesbian, before anyone screams 'homophobia'. A birth certificate is a biological document not a validating exercise

Can the donor have any rights despite not being on the Bc and a woman is there?

And the man gets rights when he's on it. Hence why my baby daddy isnt going on it.... not that he's been responding to my
Messages lol.
Still doesn't change the fact that he fathered the baby growing in my womb.

I am fed up with this sleight of hand and attempts to position lesbians using donors as being somehow superior parents to couples conceiving their children naturally.

Take this for example:

society needs to trust parents to give the information to their own children (which again, lesbians already pretty much universally do)

This is evidently untrue. A previously prominent GC lesbian who shared an almost blow by blow account of her donor conception on social media (and she was explicit about how she promised the donor/father that she would never reveal who he was to their child - that was his condition otherwise he would not do it), clearly not thinking for a second about any of it from the child’s perspective, turned around and went almost full-on TRA. She was insistent that lesbians have the right to withhold paternity from their children in order to persuade men to enable them to become mothers, whilst relinquishing all their own paternal rights.

This area is where ‘LG rights’ intersect with ‘T rights’ and it sets lesbians in opposition with the so-called ‘gender critical’ movement.

If anyone sides with the children in all this, all the arse-backwards arguments and insults get rolled out to say that it can only be based in ‘lesbophobia’. Just like criticism of genderism is always supposedly down to ‘transphobia’.

egg donation can be used in different ways, so you'd need to specify whether they were providing chromosomal or mitochondrial DNA.

I can’t believe you are trying to normalise these unethical experiments on human beings.

Why are we, as a society, allowing these scientists to experiment on human beings who cannot possibly consent to having their own DNA interfered with before they are born, so that unscrupulous adults can have their little ‘designer’ human?

Its not normal and it never should be.

All in all, I find it both distasteful and dangerous for society, that activists are trying to divorce the idea of ‘parent’ or ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from its meaningful biological definition. Going straight for the birth certificate.

As for this new term ‘social parent’, what’s that? Who does that apply to?
We used to have: parent, adoptive parent and step parent.
All of those have a legal meaning.
Maybe we should define ‘social parent’, what exactly it means in law and so on before we start sticking unrelated people who claim to be one on a child’s birth certificate for the rest of it’s life.

Social parent is one of the preferred terms of adult donor conceived people to describe their non-biological parents.

you know, the people you claim to be so concerned about.

It’s not slight of hand to acknowledge that children born to lesbian parents are much more likely to know their conceived status, just a biological fact. Like the ones you are so fond of.

I am not familiar with the case you are talking about, and I freely admitted there will always be bad actors. However, « full on TRA » seems to « any argument about LGBT I disagree with » as even in your account, there was no advocating for trans rights.

Please clarify how exactly this is an intention of rights?

Mothers are women
Fathers are men

sometimes children do not have a social father (even if they do have a sperm donor)

Nowhere does gender identity come into this

Sorry *intersection of rights

if anyone sides with the children in all this, all the arse-backwards arguments and insults get rolled out to say that it can only be based in ‘lesbophobia’.

No, this is a disingenuous ad hominem. You don’t reply to the majority of the actual arguments, and no one from the “biology only” crowd have clarified how it’s in the child’s best interest to not give the women caring for the baby from the first day of its life parental responsibility, and to give it to a random man instead. You’ll say that you don’t intend to give parental responsibility to a random man, but that’s what putting him on the certificate does right now. Then you consistently fail to outline a feasible way to overhaul the current regulations.

It's neither.

It's a document showing a child's legal parentage. In terms of lesbian couples, the mother from a legal perpsective is not the same thing as a legal parent. A legal parent and a biological parent is not the same. Likewise, a gamete donor is not a parent.

In law, as it should be, the rights of the child are paramount. This does, however, mean that donors' own anonymity is an issue, which in the past this has led to a shortage of donors as it's put some of them off.

I would not want the child of someone else's family contacting me as a donor, if by any chance my name had enabled them to trace me.

It's clear that a knowledge of the biological family's medical history - specifically any genetic or hereditary conditions - would be beneficial to the child. But medical records are, and should be, entirely confidential. There are issues here with GPDR breach, and raises questions surrounding how much power the biological tie should confer on one person over another's private information, simply because they've committed the altruistic deed of helping their parents to have a family they wouldn't otherwise have had?

Donors do a wonderful, selfless thing. A child does have a right to know their origins: they now have that. IMO donors should not be penalized for their altruism.

There is no place for this level of detail on a birth certificate. It's also a public document. Information about gamete donors is a separate matter which should be - as now - recorded elsewhere.

There's nothing wrong with the current system.

I agree. I also think that the male of a couple using AID should not be listed as the father either, because he is not the biological parent - he can be listed as parent, so that he has parental rights, but not as the biological father.

“preferred terms” have no legal standing. Who should qualify as being a ‘social parent’ otherwise? Mates? Boyfriends? Girlfriends? Neighbours who regularly babysit? It’s like in cultures where everyone is ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’.

‘Parent’ has a clear meaning = biological mother or father.
’Step parent’ = married/civil partner to biological mother or father.
‘Adoptive parent’ = non-biological relation but with legal parental responsibility.

Trying to add this vague term ‘social parent’ to the mix, is the beginnings of divorcing the word parent from its biological meaning. It might suit lesbians to do this, but who else will it open this up to, who might want to be put on a child’s birth certificate instead of their biological parent?

Please clarify how exactly this is an intersection of rights?

For both it is saying that ‘feelings trump biology’ [I feel like a parent and I feel like a woman, therefore I am a parent/woman and society must validate this] and ‘we want to change what is documented on birth certificates to reflect our feelings’.

Seriously this falsehood needs to stop.

”It's a document showing a child's legal parentage.”

It is not true. Babies are people, citizens, human beings.

A birth certificate is not like a car registration certificate to prove ownership of the thing.

A birth certificate is an identity document, a proof that a person, a unique individual, has their name, place and date of birth, along with the woman whose womb they came from, registered. This proves this is a unique individual, a citizen of a particular nation, and they cannot be confused with any other person.

Most children also have their father documented too.

This document lasts for a person’s whole life.

An adoption certificate, however, is a proof of adopted legal parenthood, which supersedes the biological birth certificate. And this is needed because legal parental responsibility automatically goes to the biological mother and father who created the child and brought them into the world. It needs proper due process to transfer this responsibility to a biologically unrelated person.

Nope, I just used it in this thread for clarity, I don’t think it needs to be a legal term. Mother and parent work just fine.

For both it is saying that ‘feelings trump biology’ [I feel like a parent and I feel like a woman, therefore I am a parent/woman and society must validate this] and ‘we want to change what is documented on birth certificates to reflect our feelings’.

FFS. Are you seriously making that comparison?

Adopting a child into a loving home benefits the child: Having two mums instead of one benefits the child. Having the man who raised you as your legal parent benefits the child. As all these examples show, feeling like a parent benefits the child, even if there is no biological link.

A man feeling like a woman benefits nobody.

Not equivalent at all.

A mother is a woman in relation to her children.

This can be biological or not. This certainly has been true for all human history. A woman actively raising her children, whether biological or not, is a mother. She doesn’t just “feel like” a mother.

You’ve taken the idea that men can’t become women (true) and superimposed on it the idea that women can only become mothers by giving birth.

Women are mothers, sometimes through childbirth, sometimes through child rearing. Sometimes through both. The thing that all mothers have in common is being women, not childbirth. I am saying this as someone who has given birth three times and found my pregnancies and births some of the most powerful experiences of my life. That doesn’t mean I begrudge non-birth mothers. They are, after all, fellow women.

Donors do a wonderful, selfless thing.

This is a matter of opinion. I personally believe that we have a responsibility, a duty to look after and then look out for our biological children for as long as we live. I believe it is negligent and irresponsible to have no thought or care about what happens to them. At least if a desperate mother relinquishes her child for adoption, there is some process where new adoptive parents will be rigorously screened. If you donate gametes anonymously, they could end up in a surrogate, commissioned by child abusers or any other such horror - they could end up in the hands of people you wouldn’t trust to look after your baby for two minutes.

Your refutation is unsuccessful. You’ve had to change the definition and meaning of the word ‘mother’ to support your argument.

TRAs change the meanings and definitions of words to support their arguments too.

It’s the dictionary definition.

and not one that has changed recently, it’s been a woman in relation to her children and a female parent (in addition to other definitions) for a few hundred years now.

You are the one trying to change and narrow the long established meaning of a word.

We both agree that a woman is a female parent, and I agree that a mother is relational to her children owing to the fact that they grew inside her and she gave birth to them, but you have changed the meaning of the word ‘parent’ and ‘relation’ to be divorced from biology, which is actually implicit to those long established meanings and definitions you cite.

You are doing that TRA thing “the word woman only ever meant someone who looks like a woman”. Er no, it is a very recent thing to divorce words from their biological meanings. It is politically necessary for people who wish to push through ‘progressive’ agendas, without thinking about the unintended consequences to do it though.

No, even in the 1500 it’s easy to find examples of the word already having the established meaning that could include the non-biological, and it was often used as an honorific for all elderly women. In addition to the standard English definition (which includes non-biological mothering) anthropological evidence is strong all over the world that mother means both “female parent” and “one who gives birth”.

It seems that “TRAs” have become such big bogey men in your mind that any comparison to that is an automatic shut down. Comparing to TRAs is a distraction and character assassination technique that derails real discussion and lacks intellectual rigour. Please keep to the actual discussion.

All legal debate will eventually get down to the nitty gritty of defining the parties. It’s why definitions are so exact and lengthy in laws. No one is changing the meaning of the word mother. I don’t think you’ll even find a historical legal definition that only includes biological mothers, even if you look long long before assisted reproduction. It has been accepted for all of human history that a woman becomes a mother by either giving birth or mothering a child. No one on this thread is implying that a man, or a group of people, or a corporation, or anything else can be a mother.

You are clutching at straws now.

The word ‘mater’ comes from the word ‘matrix’ = womb.
From the word ‘mater’ comes, ‘matter’ and ‘material’.

Mother can be used as a metaphor and analogy. “Mother ship”. Or a ‘Mother Superior’ nun.

The word ‘mother’, when speaking about parenthood, is inextricably linked to the biology of a person growing in the womb of a woman and being born to her and to define their ongoing relationship.