Love Story from Florida
By Maggie Davenport and Megan MacDonald
This is love story from Florida.
My partner and I are a typical young couple in love who are ready to start a family. The catch is that we are lesbians. Luckily, we have been given the gift of being able to carry and birth children. So, in the usual course of events, we have started some big discussions.
Who will carry the child? Will the donor be known or unknown? Do we have proper health coverage? Can we find a competent and open-minded lawyer? And on and on and on. All of these decisions have been made together.
We have decided to parent a child together. We have worked hard to create a loving home in which to raise a child together. We will go through conception, pregnancy and birth together. However, we cannot legally parent the child who we have brought into this world together. And the reason is that second-parent adoption is not legal in Florida.
The really hard part to understand is that this child is coming into the world regardless of the law. The state is not allowing us to protect our child simply because only one of us is the biological parent. I do not understand the logic at all. I sincerely hope that the lawmakers realize that they are doing anything but protecting children.
They are putting children of same-sex couples at risk. Our whole family is based on love. We love each other and want to love a child and bring it up in a caring, stable and openhearted world. We hope that this story makes a difference, if only to one person. We all deserve the right to love who we chose and to bring up our children in a fair and non-discriminating world.
Sept. 17, 2002