The National Marriage Challenge Facebook page reports that the State of Michigan Vital Stats has decided to allow the spouse of a biological parent to be placed on the child’s birth certificate for married lesbian couples. I spent 45 minutes looking for verification of this news on the Michigan VS page, news, and other sources and can’t find it (not even on the Nessel & Kessel Law page.) I’d be more comfortable with documentation, but this issue has already come up in other states and will continue to do so I want to make a quick response to this before I go about some other work today, so I’m posting NMC’s announcement as a shortcut. I intended originally to post my reply on the NMC’s FB page, but decided to add to it and then post the link over there.
National Marriage Challenge:
Great news! The State of Michigan (Vital Records Department) has decided to allow the spouse of a biological parent to be placed on a child’s birth certificate for female married couples, and will amend birth certificates to reflect the non-biological parent as the second parent for children born prior to our ruling, as long as the parents were legally married in any state or country prior to the child’s birth. If a lesbian couple was unmarried at the time the child was born, a second-parent adoption will still be required (and your friends at Nessel & Kessel Law would be happy to assist you in procuring two legal parents for the children of same-sex couples-313-556-2300-shameless plug). All male couples will still be required to procure second-parent adoptions for their children born or adopted prior to our ruling on 6/26/15. Hooray for the State of Michigan getting this one right!!!
No, they didn’t get it right!
A birth certificate is a state-generated record of birth–a biological, not statutory event.
Six million adoptees in the US today, however, do not have a legal right to access the official record of that event–their original birth certificates (OBC). To supposedly hide the “secret” and “shame” of adoptee biological birth from public and adoptees’ own personal view, the state impounds and seals our birth records replacing them with forged records called amended birth certificates (ABC) that erase our original names and the names of our bio parents The state with its ABC claim that we were actually born to people we weren’t, often in cities, states, and even countries we’ve never been to. Once adopted, we cease to exist legally and socially, and are transformed into a new identity by statute.
Now the LGBT assimilationist/het normative community joins the state (which until very recently repressed them) in repressing the documentary and identity rights of others by demanding it create scientifically and legally spurious documents–similar to ABCs– for themselves and their children: adoptees, adoptee lites, DI’s, and creations of other high tech repro breeding schemes that create the non-traditional traditional family. Closets abhor a vacuum.
This nonsensical demand for a special favor goes even beyond sealed adoption records by demanding a charade of two same sex parents conceiving and birthing a child. It’s another layer of secret bureaucratic fiction to dig through thanks to a need to…
,,.well to do what? Even the gulliable knows that same sex couples cannot immaculately reproduce. Baby Bumble had to come from a male and female source, so it’s not a game of Let’s Pretend as it is with some adoptive families. If it’s to secure some kind of statutory parental rights which do need protected, then find–or create–a way to do that without forcing the state to so blatantly falsify birth records that even a 5-year old would know are fake.
The reported decision in Michigan invalidates biology. It not only turns biology on its head but buries it in the process. Playing with documentary biology corrupts the purpose of birth certificates and degrades Class Bastard, adoptees and others who origins are held captive in the mist and murk of state control and individual parental entitlement..
You certainly have a right to parent, but you do not have a right to deny and take away our right to true birth certificates and identity in order to promote your comfort zone. As Jennfier Lahl, president of the Center for BioEthics and Culture wrote earlier this year about a similar change in California’s birth certificates , “[The birth certificate] is not intended to be a means by which adults decide what they want to be called.”
Stop building your social desires on the backs of bastards and our rights.
Join me on Twitter @DBastardette
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Marley, these fake birth certificates will continue until someone comes to their senses and realizes that some other documentation should replace the bullshit that goes on ‘ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATES.’ Something might be called: Cert. of Legal Parentage that would give the legal parents all the rights and duties of a parent, but to deny the anonymity that is foisted on children today born through reproductive technology is wrong every way you look at it.
But our voices–especially your voice as one of those who birth certificate is a lie–are simply not heard. Michigan is my native state but the situation there regarding adoption law, Michigan is in the dark ages.Bethany is based there and I understand that the agency’s owners give generously to certain legislators. ‘Nuff said?
Reply ↓
This is a good introduction to a larger issue of Michigan’s discriminatory vital records practices (among the most regressive and harmful of all states) and the looming crisis that will face an entire generation of children who will ask, who am I, where did I come from. Creating a birth record document managed by a state public health agency that fails to list a true biological parent and possible ancestry of a parent is a repetition of injustice that few in the vital records community acknowledge as wrong and immoral.
Michigan denies by statue equal treatment for adoptees, particularly adoptees born between 1945 and 1980–they are granted special status to have worse treatment by the state. The vital records team there, and I dealt with many of them and their chief, Glenn Copeland, are not very likely as an agency to really care that much about the next generation of children who are being denied right to their ancestry and medical history. I can say this having had to get a court order for them to release my birth certificate they likely were holding in clear violation of state law for 27 years after I found my birth parents. The state’s vital records people did everything they could to fight me when it served no legal, public health, or other purpose. They don’t care about the well-being of children who are not “legitimate,” despite their tired arguments about the “law is the law.”
Yes, there is a looming issue in the larger issue of rights. Will the larger LGBTQ community support equal rights for adoptees who are in the millions and are denied equal treatment under the law? I hope so. Will they support the rights of all children born in surrogacy to know their true biological past, as a birthright?
But if advocacy for creating a fictitious birth document that, as you correctly state, denies the reality of basic mammalian biology and means stepping over the denied rights of birth mothers and children denied their rights as adoptees, then I do no support these efforts.
I’ve seen groups like Human Rights Watch naively Tweet about the rights of same sex couples to adopt. I say, that’s fine, but didn’t you mean you support their right to adopt AND the right of their adoptees to know BOTH of their family lineages and identities, including whomever the surrogate/sperm donor may be? Just whose rights matter?
Does anyone care about these kids and the moral implications involved in bringing them into this world without them know where they came from? I never get a reply, perhaps because adoptees in the USA are an unknown group to those who are champions of human rights. And as my forthcoming book will argue, this failure to acknowledge their status is still rooted in historic prejudice against “illegitimate children”–you know, bastards.