Court tried to erase lesbian mom from her own children's birth certificates

[DonViejo]

She carried her twin daughters, but that wasn’t good enough for the court.

By Juwan J. Holmes Tuesday, April 13, 2021

The Michigan Court of Appeals just overturned a lower court ruling that threatened to remove a mother from the birth certificates of the children that she physically gave birth to, partly because she wasn’t able to marry her partner before marriage equality was legalized in her state.

The case involved the Michigan couple Lanesha Matthews and Kyresha LeFever, who were together from 2011 to 2014. While they were together, they decided to start a family using LeFever’s eggs and donor sperm. Matthews carried and delivered their twins, and both women were named on their birth certificates.

But after they split up, the women were involved in a years-long custody battle that resulted in family court Judge Melissa Cox ruling that they were in a “surrogacy agreement” and that Matthews wasn’t actually the parent of the children she carried, citing the fact that she didn’t provide DNA for the children and she wasn’t married to the woman who did.

Cox ruled that Matthews was a “third party” to her own children and wasn’t a “natural parent” but granted her visitation rights. She didn’t get custodial rights, and Cox even ordered that Matthews be removed from the twins’ birth certificates.

“The result was outrageous,” Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan’s LGBT Project, told PrideSource. “You have a mom who’s been co-parenting her children, has a relationship with her children for seven years, and the court’s saying, ‘Oh, no, sorry, you’re not a parent because you’re not biologically related to the child and, therefore, I’m going to strip you of your legal status as a parent.’ And the analysis of how she arrived at that result was pretty tortured.”

more
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/04/court-tried-erase-lesbian-mom-childrens-birth-certificates/

[efhmc]

1. Very weird.

[Demovictory9]

2. Lefever is awful person for trying to strip mattews of parental status

[stopdiggin]

3. yeah. that's pretty strained -- by either legal or logical standards

(one has to wonder if there was a particular animus against the plaintiff -- or surrogacy as practice?) Because somebody reached really hard to get here.