Caroline Krauss-Browne and Margaret Canby
Category Archives: Parentage by Estoppel
Blank Rome Encourages New York Court of Appeals to Safeguard Legal Bond Between Child and Non-Biological Mother
Caroline Krauss-Browne and Margaret Canby
Today, Blank Rome LLP and co-counsel argued before the New York State Court of Appeals on behalf of a non-biological lesbian mother, Brooke Barone, who is seeking shared parenting time and financial responsibility for a child she and her former same-sex partner, Elizabeth Cleland, planned for and raised together. The couple planned to marry but separated before the marriage equality law passed.
Partners Margaret Canby and Caroline Krauss-Browne lead the Blank Rome team representing Ms. Barone.
“Today, we aim to correct a terrible injustice. Our client, Brooke, must be equally recognized under law as a legal guardian to her son in the same manner as his biological mother,” said Ms. Canby. “This appeal was brought by the attorney appointed for the child based on his steadfast belief that the child longs for a reunion with his mother, Brooke. He argues, and we join him, that the failure to reunite this child with Brooke, based upon a 1991 judicial ruling – not a statute – that defines parenthood in an overly restrictive, outmoded, and discriminatory fashion, is against the child’s best interest and will do him substantial harm.”
Together with Lambda Legal and the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York, Blank Rome represents Ms. Barone in her effort to continue to parent the six-year-old son she and Ms. Cleland planned to have together. The couple met in 2006, made a home together and became engaged in hopes that they would marry as soon as it became legal for them to do so in their home state of New York. Though not legally allowed to marry, the couple wanted to start their family immediately. They agreed that Ms. Cleland would carry the child, and she became pregnant in 2008 using an anonymous donor.
When their son was born, Ms. Barone was in the delivery room and even cut the newborn’s umbilical cord. They used Ms. Barone’s last name on birth certificate. Birth announcements were placed in the local newspaper listing both parties as the parents of the child. And, the women were held out as the parents of the child at his baptism. From the start, Ms. Barone fed their son, changed him, rocked him, bathed him, and took care of all the responsibilities a mother has to a baby. To his doctor, his day care, the pastor who baptized him, Ms. Barone is one of his mothers. When the couple’s relationship ended in 2010, Ms. Barone continued to parent their son and provided for him financially for the following three years.
In 2013, Ms. Cleland abruptly cut off contact between Ms. Barone and their son, requiring Ms. Barone to file for custody and visitation. The family court determined its hands were tied based on the high court’s decisions in 1991 in Alison D. and in a subsequent parenting case in 2010, Debra H. v. Janice R. The court dismissed Ms. Barone’s petition. The appellate court affirmed the lower court decision. After the attorney for the child asked the Court of Appeals to hear the case, New York’s high court accepted review.
Today, Blank Rome joined in arguing that the prevailing New York legal precedents do not account for the myriad ways that people make families, including same-sex couples, and that to consider non-biological parents “legal strangers” to the children they have cared for since birth is not in the best interest of these children. New York’s passage of the Marriage Equality Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges call for greater respect for the families formed by same-sex couples and their recognition as full-fledged parents of their children.
Many prominent legal and child welfare experts have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on the side of Ms. Barone and her son, including the New York State Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and 45 family law academics on the faculty of every law school in New York State.
In addition to Ms. Canby and Ms. Krauss-Browne of Blank Rome, who represent Ms. Barone on a pro bono basis, the legal team includes Susan Sommer of Lambda Legal and Brett Figlewski of the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York. The child is represented by R. Thomas Rankin of Goodell & Rankin and Eric I. Wrubel, Linda Genero Sklaren and Alex R. Goldberg of Warshaw Burstein, LLP, who, along with Ms. Barone, also seek reversal of the decisions of the lower courts.
The case is Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth C.C.
The Many (and Expanding) Ways of Becoming A Legal Parent: Chapter Two
Caroline Krauss-Browne and Margaret Canby
The Many (and Expanding) Ways of Becoming a Legal Parent: Chapter One
Reply
Caroline Krauss-Browne and Margaret Canby
We have entered a new age in which medical technology and expansive adoption rules have broadened the avenues in New York to becoming a parent beyond the traditional two: the biological “old fashioned” way by two opposite-sex parties who are married to each other or not, and the cumbersome, expensive, and deliberate adoption process by two opposite-sex married persons. In what is certainly a surprise to many people, listing a person’s name on a birth certificate as a parent does not, in and of itself, confer parental status. Problems and inconsistencies arise, especially when applying the existing rules, developed over years by fits and starts, to the new factual and legal landscape related to same-sex couples and their families.
When a child is born to a heterosexual couple as a result of sexual relations, if the heterosexual couple is married, the presumption of legitimacy applies to such child, and no further legal action needs to be taken for both parties to be presumed to have a biological relationship to the child and have equal parental status. If the adults are not married, a paternity case can be filed to establish that the male is the biological father of the child in question and parental rights and obligations, whether voluntarily assumed or not, ensue. Interesting wrinkles and variations upon this rule will be addressed in detail in a future post.
As ART evolved, providing couples the opportunity to have children when one or both of them suffer a biological impediment to doing so the “old fashioned” way, the assumptions about biological parentage conferred by marriage became more complicated. These complexities grew as we entered the age of recognizing the equal rights of same-sex couples to marry and raise families.
In some ways, the New York laws and the cases that interpret them that recognized legal parental status in a changing factual landscape, have been progressive in conferring a status with many rights and obligations and, in other ways, New York has lagged behind the changing times.
For example, New York’s adoption rules now allow for single individuals to adopt, for non-married couples to adopt (both opposite-sex and same-sex), for people who are not in a romantic relationship or shared household to adopt, and for a second person to adopt the biological or previously adopted child of the first person. When the adults seeking to establish a parenting relationship are aligned in their mutual interest to undertake the parenting relationship together, the courts have been liberal in granting the formation of that status, reflecting the public policy that creating more opportunities for legal parent-child relationships to form rather than less generates significantly better outcomes for children.
New York statutes specifically addressing the issue of ART in the conception of a child recognize that it is unfair to children conceived by ART within a marriage to require that the non-biological parent surmount extra legal hurdles for parental status to be created, such as requiring a second parent adoption before the obviously non-biological parent can assert parental status or have such status imposed upon him. The rule now provides for a document to be executed at the initiation of ART procedures, which provides that children born by ART into marriages are the legitimate “birth child” of the “husband” and “wife” for all purposes. But what happens when you have a situation with two “wives” or two “husbands”?
This rule was upheld by a Kings County (Brooklyn) Surrogates Court when a same-sex couple sought a second parent adoption for a child born to one of them during their marriage. The court found a second adoption unnecessary given New York’s new marriage equality statute, because the presumption of legitimacy applied despite the fact that the statutory language refers to the child as the “legitimate child of both birth parents.” But the presumption of legitimacy has not been consistently applied to same-sex couples. For example, inexplicably and without a full recitation of the relevant facts, a New York appellate court recently held that the presumption of legitimacy did not apply to a same-sex couple for a child born during the marriage, stating that the presumption of legitimacy is only a rebuttable biological presumption of parenthood in the parent who did not give birth—which cannot be the case in a same-sex relationship—and not a legal presumption of parenthood. In seemingly cutting out all same-sex marriages from the presumption of legitimacy that has always attached to children born into marriages, this ruling begs the question of whether or not the old concern about the stigma of “illegitimacy” has been held to be less traumatic for a child, by at least some courts, than the “stigma” of having same-sex parents.
So what happens when the ART form isn’t properly signed or is somehow overlooked? What if the use of donor genetic material to conceive is informal (via at home artificial insemination) or, as in the case of same sex-couples, a direct biological relationship to both parents, even when married, cannot (it seems) ever be assumed? What if the couple, heterosexual or otherwise, is not married? Can a different standard be applied to opposite-sex parties than to same-sex parties? Can such a different standard possibly pass constitutional muster? Stay tuned as these questions, which are at the very forefront of the emerging law on de facto parenting presently being litigated in New York’s top court, will be discussed in our next chapter.