No Ukrainian Adoption For Elton John

KIEV, UKRAINE - Elton John won't be able to adopt a 14-month-old HIV-positive child from Ukraine because the pop star is too old and isn't married, the government said Monday.
Adoption and gay rights advocates expressed regret about the determination by Family, Youth and Sports Minister Yuriy Pavlenko, while a children's charity had reservations about John's weekend announcement that he and his male partner, David Furnish, wanted to adopt the boy.
John announced his desire after meeting the boy, named Lev, while touring an orphanage Saturday as part of an anti-AIDS charity project.
"I don't know how we do that, but he has stolen my heart. And he has stolen David's heart and it would be wonderful if we can have a home," John said.
But Pavlenko told The Associated Press that the adoption will not happen because adoptive parents must be married and because the pop star is too old.
The singer is 62 and Ukrainian law requires a parent to be no more than 45 years older than an adopted child.
John and Furnish tied the knot in 2005 in one of the first legalized civil unions in Britain, but Pavlenko said Ukraine does not recognize gays unions as marriage.
"Elton John will not be able to adopt a Ukrainian child and if he files that request we will unfortunately deny it," Pavlenko said. "The law is the same for everybody: for a president, for a minister, for Elton John."
John spokesman Gary Farrow declined to comment.
Pavlenko said Ukraine was grateful for the singer's charity work and expressed hope that his desire to adopt Lev would spur the domestic adoption of more children with health problems, which is still rare in Ukraine.
Pavlenko said domestic adoptions have increased significantly thanks to government childcare supplements and maternity leave for adoptive families. In 2004, Ukrainian families adopted about 1,500 children compared with 2,500 adoptions by foreigners. This year, 2,500 orphans were adopted locally while 1,000 found homes abroad.
However, Ukrainians are still reluctant to adopt ill, psychologically challenged children or those older than 10. Pavlenko said that only about 30 HIV-positive children have been adopted since 2007. About 32,000 Ukrainian orphans are waiting to be adopted this year, but only 2,000 Ukrainian families are lined to adopt them.
Albert Pavlov, head of the Happy Child foundation for orphaned and sick children in Zaporizhia, said he opposed adoption by gays, but called for removing age and marriage restrictions for adopters.
"I don't understand why a middle-aged single woman, if she is in good health, cannot raise a child," Pavlov said.
Svyatoslav Sheremet, head of Ukraine's Gay Forum, a leading gay rights organization in Ukraine, said the regulations were depriving the boy of a chance to find a family and love.
"If I were that child, I would feel very bitter and sad," Sheremet said.
Yukie Mokuo, UNICEF representative in Ukraine, said that foreign adoptions should be encouraged when no local families can be found.
But charity Save the Children UK, which also expressed misgivings over Madonna's adoption of a girl from Malawi, said celebrity adoptions risked sending the wrong message about how best to help foreign children.
"International adoption can actually exacerbate the problem it hopes to solve" by encouraging parents to abandon children in the hope of giving them a better life, spokesman Adrian Lovett said.
"Most orphans in institutions, including in Ukraine, have one or both parents still living, or have an extended family that could care for them with the right support," Lovett said in a statement.
from The Associated Press

Gay Mom And Kids Kept From Dying Partner

When a loved one is in the hospital, you naturally want to be at the bedside. But what if the staff won’t allow it?
That’s what Janice Langbehn, a social worker in Lacey, Wash., says she experienced when her partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond, collapsed with an aneurysm during a Florida vacation and was taken to a Miami trauma center. She died there, at age 39, as Ms. Langbehn tried in vain to persuade hospital officials to let her visit, along with the couple’s adopted children.
“I have this deep sense of failure for not being at Lisa’s bedside when she died,” Ms. Langbehn said. “How I get over that I don’t know, or if I ever do.”
The case, now the subject of a federal lawsuit in Florida, is being watched by gay rights groups, which say same-sex partners often report being excluded from a patient’s room because they aren’t “real” family members.
And lawyers say the case could affect the way hospitals treat all patients with nonmarital relationships, including older people who choose not to marry, unmarried heterosexual couples and single people who rely on the support of close friends rather than relatives.
One point of contention in the lawsuit is whether a hospital has a legal duty to its patients to always give visiting rights to their designated family members and surrogates.
Robert Alonso, a spokesman for the public trust that runs the Miami hospital, Jackson Memorial, said it typically did not comment on pending litigation, but added that the hospital grants visitation if it doesn’t interfere with other emergency care. “The primary legal point is that the amount of visitation allowed in a trauma emergency room should be decided by the surgeons and nurses treating the patients,” he said.
A similar lawsuit is under way in Washington State, where Sharon Reed says she was denied access to her partner of 17 years, Jo Ann Ritchie, who was dying of liver failure. Although the hospital had liberal visitation policies, a night nurse from an employment agency insisted that Ms. Reed leave her partner’s room, the lawsuit says.
“One of the things her partner said to her was, ‘I’m afraid of dying. Don’t leave me alone,’ ” said Judith A. Lonnquist, a lawyer for Ms. Reed. “That’s why the suffering was so enormous — she felt as if her partner was thinking she had betrayed her trust.”
In both cases, the couples had prepared for a medical emergency, creating living wills, advanced directives and power-of-attorney documents.
As recounted by Ms. Langbehn, the details of the Miami episode are harrowing. It began in February 2007, when the family — including three children, then ages 9, 11 and 13 — traveled there for a cruise. After boarding the ship, Ms. Pond collapsed while taking pictures of the children playing basketball.
The children managed to help her back to the family’s room. Fortunately, the ship was still docked, and an ambulance took Ms. Pond to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial. Ms. Langbehn and the children followed in a taxi, arriving around 3:30 p.m.
Ms. Langbehn says that a hospital social worker informed her that she was in an “antigay city and state” and that she would need a health care proxy to get information. (The worker denies having made the statement, Mr. Alonso said.) As the social worker turned to leave, Ms. Langbehn stopped him. “I said: ‘Wait a minute. I have those health care proxies,’ ” she said. She called a friend to fax the papers.
The medical chart shows that the documents arrived around 4:15 p.m., but nobody immediately spoke to Ms. Langbehn about Ms. Pond’s condition. During her eight-hour stay in the trauma unit waiting room, Ms. Langbehn says, she had two brief encounters with doctors. Around 5:20 a doctor sought her consent for a “brain monitor” but offered no update about the patient’s condition. Around 6:20, two doctors told her there was no hope for a recovery.
Despite repeated requests to see her partner, Ms. Langbehn says she was given just one five-minute visit, when a priest administered last rites. She says she continued to plead with a hospital worker that the children be allowed to see their mother, even showing the children’s birth certificates.
“I said to the receptionist, ‘Look, they’re her kids,’ ” Ms. Langbehn said. (Mr. Alonso, the hospital spokesman, says that except in special circumstances, children under 14 are not allowed to visit in the trauma unit.)
Ms. Langbehn says she was repeatedly told to keep waiting. Then, at 11:30 p.m., Ms. Pond’s sister arrived at the unit. According to the lawsuit, the hospital workers immediately told her that Ms. Pond had been moved an hour earlier to the intensive care unit and provided her room number.
At midnight, Ms. Langbehn says, her exhausted children were finally able to visit their unconscious mother. Ms. Pond was declared brain-dead at 10:45 that morning, and her heart, kidneys and liver were donated to four patients.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Langbehn is being represented by Lambda Legal, a gay rights group. “We want to send a message to hospitals,” said Beth Littrell, a lawyer for the group. “If they don’t treat families as such, if they don’t let patients define their own circle of intimacy and give them the dignity and care to be with their loved ones in this sort of crisis, then they will be held accountable.”
from The New York Times

Gay Couple Settle Adoption Lawsuit

A gay couple from San Jose have settled their lawsuit against an out-of-state Internet adoption service that they accused of violating California discrimination laws by refusing to post the men's profiles on a Web site where prospective birth mothers could see them.
Michael and Rich Butler, domestic partners since 2000, filed a federal civil rights suit against Adoption.com of Arizona in 2004 after the company told the men it posted profiles only of married, opposite-sex couples.
The adoption company had argued that it was governed by Arizona law, which does not prohibit discrimination against people on the basis of marital status or sexual orientation. It said requiring it to post profiles of same-sex couples would violate its freedom of speech.
But in a March ruling, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in San Francisco said California law applies to the defendants and allowed the suit to go forward.
Under the terms of a settlement announced today, ParentProfiles.com, a sister company to Adoption.com, cannot post profiles of California residents "unless the service is made equally available to all California residents qualified to adopt in California."
That means the defendants have a choice: to either "treat everyone in California equally or don't benefit from the state's economy," said Neel Chatterjee, an attorney for the Butlers.
Glen Lavy, an Alliance Defense Fund lawyer representing the company, said today that ParentProfiles.com will no longer accept profiles from California and will phase out all profiles from California within six months.
"The managers of the adoption profiles believe that it's in the best interests of children to be placed with a married mom and dad," Lavy said. "They believe that when there's an option, children are better off having a married mom and dad than any other circumstance."
There is no monetary payout as part of the settlement, as the Butlers were never after money, Chatterjee said.
The couple sued under California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating against their customers on a variety of grounds. For at least 20 years, state courts have interpreted the law to require equal treatment of lesbians and gays. Bias based on marital status was the subject of conflicting rulings until the Legislature outlawed such discrimination, effective in 2006.
The Butlers adopted a baby girl in 2004 through a California adoption agency.
"We think it's a great agreement for us because it really ends the discriminatory practice of Adoption.com in the state of California," Rich Butler, 35, said today. "We hope that they continue doing business in the state, but if they can't comply with the nondiscriminatory policy and they stop doing business in the state, it's still a victory for Californians. We're not allowing them to profit on the back of Californians."
The Butlers were among the same-sex couples who were married at San Francisco City Hall early in 2004. Their marriage was one of 4,000 later annulled by the state Supreme Court when it ruled Mayor Gavin Newsom had overstepped his authority in allowing marriage licenses to be granted to same-sex couples.
from The San Francisco Chronicle

Gay Couple Awaits Adoption Ruling From U.S. Court

DENVER - It was a note from the Oklahoma Health Department that started the chain of events that would propel Ed Swaya and Gregory Hampel into a federal court here.
The two men, partners for 13 years, had arranged through courts in their home state of Washington to adopt their daughter, Vivian, whose Oklahoma mother had agreed to give the baby to the two men when she was born in 2002.
When the couple asked Oklahoma to issue her birth certificate, the state sent a form with spaces for the names of the mother and father. Swaya and Hampel crossed out the categories and marked themselves as "parent #1" and "parent #2."
The state didn't accept it, and sent back the form. The couple then listed Hampel as the father and Swaya as the mother. Oklahoma rejected it, writing: "We could not establish maternity for Mr. Swaya."
Nonetheless, Oklahoma's attorney general warned that the state would have to honor the legal adoption order from Washington state.
The Legislature stepped in, passing a bill prohibiting the state from acknowledging adoptions by same-sex couples from other jurisdictions, setting the stage for a legal battle that some gay rights activists fear could become increasingly common as states seek to curtail the abilities of same-sex couples to adopt children.
Battles over such adoptions date back almost 30 years, to the Florida campaign led by singer Anita Bryant that sought and achieved that state's ban on adoption by gays in 1977. But, as with same-sex marriage, the legal situation involving adoption by gays remains fragmented across the country.
A handful of states, including Utah and Mississippi, have banned such adoptions over the years, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Other states, including California, permit such adoptions.
Courts have dealt with these bans in conflicting ways. In December 2004, a federal judge in Little Rock, Ark., struck down the state's ban on gay foster parenting and adoptions. Weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a ruling upholding Florida's ban.
Same-sex adoptions became an issue in the governor's race in Arkansas this year, where both candidates called for reinstating the state's ban. The American Academy of Pediatrics says 16 other states discussed constitutional amendments to ban gay adoption this year.
Chris Stovall, senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative public interest legal group, said legal issues surrounding adoption by same-sex couples were similar to those surrounding same-sex marriage. "These things are connected," he said. "Men and women do have different roles and contribute in different ways to the upbringing of a child."
Ken Upton, the attorney who sued Oklahoma for Swaya, Hampel and two other same-sex couples, also sees a similarity to the issue of same-sex marriage. "Foster care and adoption are what we see as battlegrounds in the conservative states," said Upton, a senior staff attorney for Lambda Legal, a gay rights group. "That's the next frontier for people trying to attack gay people."
Each side cites studies to bolster its stand. Opponents of gay adoption say research has shown that children thrive when they have parents of each gender. Gay rights groups say the same is true of children raised by same-sex couples, and they note that many of the largest family medicine groups, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Assn., say homosexual parenting does not have harmful effects on children.
Oklahoma already prohibited same-sex couples from adopting children when Swaya and Hampel learned through an adoption agency of a pregnant 19-year-old woman in Oklahoma City who planned to put her baby up for adoption. The couple wanted an open adoption, in which the birth mother would remain a part of their child's life. The two men flew to Oklahoma for the birth, met her family and returned to Seattle with their new daughter.
But because of the law passed in response to their quest for Vivian's birth certificate, Swaya and Hampel say, they cannot return to Oklahoma for their daughter to get to know her grandfather or other birth relatives. (They have in the past flown the birth mother to Seattle.)
"This is hurting my daughter and keeping families apart," Swaya, 37, a marriage and family counselor, said.
Swaya and Hampel sued Oklahoma, joined by two lesbian couples who adopted children in other states and then moved to Oklahoma to find those adoptions unrecognized. One couple, Lucy and Jennifer Doel, adopted their 6-year-old daughter in California in 2002. In the court case, the two cited an incident in which their daughter had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and medical personnel said only the birth mother could accompany her.
Oklahoma officials could not be reached for comment last week, but in court papers they argued that their state had the right to set its own policy on adoptions by same-sex couples. They argued that the purpose of the law was "to halt the erosion of the mainstream definition of the family unit and provide the possibility for the optimal environment for the child's development in a home with a male parent and a female parent."
In May, a federal judge in Oklahoma found that the law did "little if anything to promote the traditional family unit" and attempted "to penalize the plaintiff children for the acts of their parents."
The law "in essence tells one of the adult plaintiffs, 'You are no longer the parent of your child,' " added U.S. District Court Judge Robin J. Cauthron.
On Nov. 17, the state argued before the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver that Cauthron's decision should be overturned. It could be several months before a ruling is issued.
from The Los Angeles Times