Stories Covering The DC Metro Area

A New Year's Baby With an Additional Difference: 2 Moms
By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 2, 2003; Page A01

The 5-pound 2-ounce girl emerged into this world one minute after midnight, and by yesterday afternoon, all the usual "First Baby of the Year" celebratory trappings had been assembled in the hospital lobby.

The reporters and microphones and cameras and tripods. The proud hospital staff. And at the center of all the attention, amid family members, the snoozing, swaddled being who knows little of the world beyond the new year.

There were the usual words, too.

"She's adorable. She's perfect. She's brilliant. All those good things."

Yet for all the ways in which the scene at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital was a familiar one, neither the media crowd that had gathered nor the legal system in Virginia was fully ready for this baby and its family.

The infant girl, conceived through artificial insemination, will have two mommies: Helen Rubin, 33, who gave birth, and Joanna Bare, 35, her partner.

"Can we get a picture of the baby with its mother?" someone from the media pack asked.

"Sure -- which mother would you like?" Bare responded.

Photos were taken both ways.

But while the media barrage provided a few awkward moments yesterday afternoon -- the biological father is a family friend whom the couple declined to identify -- Virginia's legal system has proved less hospitable.

Just last week, the couple moved from Vienna to Bethesda because in Virginia, they said, it would be impossible for the couple to share full parental rights. Bare is seeking to adopt the child, giving her parental rights along with Rubin, the birth mother.

"Virginia does not permit second-parent adoption," said the couple's attorney, Mina Ketchie of Arlington, whose practice focuses on alternative family law. "Quite frankly, in these matters of law, Virginia is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century -- and we're in the 21st century. It is not a very gay-friendly state."

Census figures and other studies show that a significant number of lesbian couples have children living with them. The fact that a baby touted as the year's first in the Washington area was born into an "alternative family" reflects the growing trend, some said.

Ketchie recommends that clients in similar situations with similar aspirations for sharing parental duties move from Virginia to Maryland, the District or Pennsylvania.

Because of the legal barriers in Virginia, Bare, a management consultant who works in Vienna, said she now chooses to commute.

"We're not interested in any legal battles -- that's why we moved," she said. "I really like living in Virginia. But it's more important to be a parent."

Rubin and Bare have been together for 12 years.

"We eventually decided it was time to have kids, like anyone else would," Rubin said. "Hopefully, we'll be like any family."

Asked what they will tell their child, who is not yet named, about the birth, Bare said: "We'll answer her questions when she starts asking them. What else can we do?"

The couple arrived at the hospital Monday night with no intentions of having the first baby born in the Washington area in 2003 -- nor, for that matter, of becoming a symbol of alternative families.

"She has a traditional family," said Howard Rubin, proud grandfather. "There are grandparents on both sides. . . . Their decision to have a child was a great boost for us. We just consider ourselves to be grandparents just as much as our friends who have grandchildren."

For medical reasons, labor was induced Tuesday morning. There were 15 hours of labor, and as the new year approached, some in the hospital room began to talk about the prospect of having one of the first babies of 2003.

Rubin said she had other priorities.

"When it was getting close to midnight, people were talking about it," Rubin said. "But I really hoped it wouldn't take that long. It just so happened that it did."

Printed without permission from the Washington Post website. Read the story at the Washington Post website

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Editorial To Above Story

Not Welcome in Virginia
Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A18

WHETHER BY LUCK or misfortune, Helen Rubin's baby became this region's "First Baby of the Year" and so, at the age of one minute, the accidental poster girl for an important political point: Virginia is persistently retrograde in how it treats the inescapable modern reality of gay families. This baby, to recap, has two mommies, and both of them last week moved from Vienna to Bethesda because in Virginia the non-biological mother would not have been able to adopt the baby and thus take on full parental responsibilities.

In its adoption laws Virginia is lagging behind not just the usual suspects (Vermont, California, New York), but also many other southern states, such as Georgia and Alabama. Virginia law does not explicitly bar gay adoptions; it only specifies that "a married couple or an unmarried individual" can be eligible to adopt. The problem is more in the habits of courts and social service agencies. There is no known case of Virginia courts allowing a "second-parent" adoption, meaning adoption by someone who lives with a biological parent but is not married to him or her. This practice puts Virginia in a distinct minority among states. So far, eight states and the District of Columbia explicitly bar discrimination against a second parent of the same sex. Nineteen other states, including Maryland, have no explicit laws, but courts have allowed second-parent adoptions for gay couples.

The closest Virginia courts came to a gay-friendly ruling was last year when an Episcopal priest won the right to bring home a child she had adopted in the District. As part of the compromise, the Virginia Department of Social Services sent out a statewide directive saying that sexual orientation could no longer serve as a barrier to single-parent adoptions. But this is more than balanced by the state's abysmal record in custody cases: A year earlier, Sharon Bottoms's own mother was granted custody of her grandchild when she objected that her daughter's lesbian relationship made her an unfit mother.

States that allow gay adoptions do not do so always because they approve of them. Many people in those states feel deeply, sometimes religiously, that children should be raised by a mother and a father. But many also feel, just as deeply, that a child should be loved and looked after, period, and they know that gay couples can furnish that love. Adoption cases are not like custody cases. There is almost never a competing parental interest. Typical is a recent case in Florida, one of three states worse than Virginia, because laws there explicitly forbid gay adoptions (the others are Utah and Mississippi). Last year gay rights advocates there found a heartbreaking plaintiff: Steven Lofton, a pediatric nurse, took in three foster children, all infants infected with HIV. No one else had applied to be their parent. Yet he was automatically turned down, because he is gay.

"Family values," in the term's strictest interpretation, is a fantasy. About half of American children don't grow up with their mother and father anyway. Lesbians will have children, as long as there is a live maternal instinct and a nearby fertility clinic. Gay men will adopt. All that the Virginia courts can achieve by standing firm is to drive them out of the state.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Printed without permission from the Washington Post website. Read the story at the Washington Post website

 

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