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Similar a Sociology Of The Family, Sexuality, And Race
Sociology Of The Family, Sexuality, And Race
- 1. Sociology of the Family, Sexuality, and Race Beverly Yuen Thompson Ph.D. Sociology, New School for Social Research
- 24. Irish Supreme Court: Gay man who donated sperm to lesbian couple should have access to son DUBLIN (AP) — The Irish Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a gay man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple should be permitted to see his 3-year-old son regularly — in part because Ireland's constitution doesn't recognize the lesbians as a valid family unit. The ruling was a legal first in Ireland, where homosexuality was outlawed until 1993 and gay couples are denied many rights given to married couples. In their unanimous decision, the five judges of Ireland's ultimate constitutional authority said a lower court erred by trying to apply the European Convention on Human Rights in favor of the lesbian couple. The Supreme Court concluded that when the two are in conflict, the Irish constitution is superior to European human rights law.
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- Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York: Basic Books. Pessimists argue that the family is collapsing; optimists counter that it is merely diversifying. Too often, both camps begin with an ahistorical, static notion of what “the” family was like before the contemporary period (1). I hope to expose many of our “memories” of traditional family life as myths. Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about “the way things used to be” (2). Twenty percent of American children live in poverty today: At the turn of the century the same proportion lived in orphanages, not because they actually lacked both parents, but because one or both parents simply could not afford their keep (4). Modern statistics on child-support evasion are appalling, but prior to the 1920s, a divorced father did not even have a legal child-support obligation to evade (4). As for child abuse, it has far too long and brutal a history to be blamed on recent family innovations (4-5). Today’s high school dropout rates are shocking, but as late as the 1940s, less than half the youths entering high school managed to finish, a figure much smaller than today’s (5). … the United States has had the highest homicide rates in the industrial world for almost 150 years (5). However, the historical record is clear on one point: Although there are many things to draw on in our past, there is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world (5). This book examines the myths and half-truths that surround our understanding of American families, both past and present. IN most cases, I organize each chapter around one widespread myth or stereotype about family change rather than giving a more conventional linear account of how families evolved into their present form (6). Many of the myths I treat in this book are white, middle-class myths, both because middle-class individuals are the predominant mythmakers in our society and because the media tends to project fragments of the white, middle-class experience into universal “trends” or “facts” (6). In chapter 1, I discuss a few common myths about family forms and features in past times (6). Chapter 2, for example, argues that the “Leave it to Beaver” ideal was a new invention of the 1950s, not an example of traditional, and that families of the period were both more diverse and less idyllic than we sometimes think (6). In Chapter 3, I discuss the contradictions inherent in this division of labor, which tried to resolve the tensions of liberal individualism by assigning ambition to men and altruism to women, expecting love to bridge the chasm (7). In chapter 4, I argue that even with such a division of labor, families were seldom economically or emotionally self-reliant (7). Not until the late nineteenth century did people elevate the nuclear family to their central source of loyalty, obligation, and personal satisfaction (7). When I begin teaching a course on family history, I often ask my students to write down ideas that spring to mind when they think of the “traditional family” (8). The problem is not only that these visions bear a suspicious resemblance to reruns of old television series, but also that the scripts of different shows have been mixed up (8). It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that ever co-existed in the same time and place (9). Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that the pick a ball park date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model (10). Furthermore, people who lived in these periods were seldom as enamored of their family arrangements as modern nostalgia might suggest (12). Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in American history is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed “traditional” extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization (12). Today, 54 percent of adults see a parent, and 68 percent talk on the phone with a parent, at least once a week (15). Ninety percent of men and women eventually marry, more than 70 percent of divorced men and women remarry, and fewer people remain single for their entire lives today than at the turn of the century (15). Studies of marital satisfaction reveal that more couples reported their marriages to be happy in the late 1970s than did so in 1957, while couples in their second marriages believe them to be much happier than their first ones (16). It is important to remember that the 50 percent divorce rate estimates are calculated in terms of a forty-year period and that many marriages in the past were terminated well before that date by the death of one partner (16). A similar polarization allows some observers to argue that fathers are deserting their children, while others celebrate the new commitment of fathers to childrearing. Both viewpoints are right (16). Lack of perspective on where families have come from and how their evolution connects to other social trends tends to encourage contradictory claims and wild exaggerations about where families are going (18). But, above all, what these polls reveal is women’s growing dissatisfaction with the failure of employers, schools, and government to pioneer arrangements that make it possible to combine work and family life (19). Since everyone admits that nontraditional families are now a majority, why this obsessive concern to establish a higher or a lower figure? (23) In fact, the “traditional” family of the 1950s was a qualitatively new phenomenon (25). The values of 1950s families also were new. The emphasis on producing a whole world of satisfaction, amusement, and inventiveness within the nuclear family had no precedents (27). The amount of time women spent doing housework actually increased during the 1950s, despite the advent of convenience foods and new, labor-saving appliances; child care absorbed more than twice as much time as it had in the 1920s (27). A full 25 percent of Americans, forty to fifty million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, an in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor (29). The happy, homogeneous families that we “remember” from the 1950s were thus partly a result of the media’s denial of diversity (31). Between one-quarter and one-third of the marriages contracted int eh 1950s eventually ended in divorce; during that decade two million legally married people lived apart from each other (35-6). Although Betty Friedan’s bestseller The Feminine Mystique did not appear until 1963, it was a product of the 1950s, originating in the discontented response.. (37). “ Heavy petting” because a norm of dating in this period, while the proportion of white brides who were pregnant at marriage more than doubled. Teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since. In 1957, 97 out of every 1,000 girls aged fifteen to nineteen gave birth, compared to only 52 of every 1,000 in 1983 (39). The incidence of illegitimacy was also disguised by the new emphasis on “rehabilitating” the white mother (although not the black) by putting her baby up for adoption and encouraging her to “start over”; there was an 80 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock babies placed for adoption between 1944 and 1955 (39). … the age of marriage dropped sharply. Young people were not taught how to “say no”—they were simply handed wedding rings (39).
- Lovett, Laura L. 2007. Conceiving the future: pronatalism, reproduction, and the family in the united states, 1890-1938. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Instead, national campaigns for reclamation, conservation, country life, and eugenics became prominent expressions of American pronatalism, Recognizing them as such is not a matter of understanding how reproduction was associated in each campaign with nostalgic ideals of the family, motherhood, or the home. In the United States, reproduction was regulated as much by social pressure and created conventions as by actual legislation (2). Rather than focus on individual decisions to have children or not, in this book, I focus on how ideological and cultural ideals influenced and shaped pronatalist policies and reform efforts in the United States. I claim that from 1890 to the 1930s nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, the family, and home were used to construct and legitimate political agendas and social policies concerning reproduction (3). In this book, I consider the ideologies and practices of American pronatalism by contrasting five significant historical figures and their signature social agendas or policies (3). In her analysis of the development of welfare in the United States, Linda Gordon (5). Whether one emphasizes ideologies of the family wage or ideologies of motherhood, this ideal of the family or “family ethic” is understood to have structured the origins and development of welfare in the United States (6). By 1889, the United States had the highest divorce rate in the world (7). While these pernicious efforts certainly warrant historical investigation, this book also considers what was called “positive” eugenics, which sought to promote reproduction among those considered to be “fit”…In Building a Better Race , Wendy Kline (9). In this book I use nostalgic modernism as an interpretative framework for exploring how idealizations of motherhood, the home, and the family were used to promote and justify a range of pronatalist efforts in the Populist and Progressive Eras (12). In Chapter 2, I argue that Populist arguments concerning overproduction, land ownership, temperance, and suffrage articulated a particular relationship between the family and the state (13). In Chapter 3, I claim that visions of the American landscape advocated by national irrigation and land reclamation activists included who ought to inhabit that landscape. George Maxwell’s National Irrigation Association was instrumental in efforts to gain support for the irrigation and reclamation of land in the West (13). In Chapter 4, I examine how a nostalgic representation of the rural family was constructed as a racialized ideal in response to the perceived problem of race…I consider how the sociologist who coined the term “race suicide,” Edward Ross, constructed a rural ideal as part of a plan of social control (14). In Chapter 5, I return to Roosevelt’s pronatalism. From its roots in his campaign against race suicide, I locate Roosevelt’s campaign for population regulation in his administration’s combined advocacy of the conservation and country life movements (14-15). In Chapter 6, I consider the extension of nostalgia for the rural family to eugenics, a more-traditional arena for pronatalism and population politics. By documenting the development of the American Eugenics Society’s ‘human livestock’ competitions, known as the Fitter Families for Future Firesides contests (15). From the time he introduced the term “race suicide” in 1893, Ross had advocated immigration restriction as a means of solving the problem by preventing competition with more rapidly reproducing races (103). … fitter family contests were developed as part of the popular education campaigns of the American eugenics movement (132). Watts and Sherbon deliberately chose to hold these contests at agricultural fairs. Fitter family contests appealed to a deeply rooted sense of nostalgia for the rural family (134). In 1920 Sherbon and Watts orchestrated the first fitter family contest (140). Eugenics in the United States had been growing in popularity since the turn of the century despite increasing scientific criticism. By 1928, 376 universities and colleges in the United States offered courses in eugenics (140). In 1925 forty families participated in the Fitter Families for Future Firesides contest at the Kansas Free Fair (143). To consciously decide to remain childless meant confronting a pervasive and overwhelming culture that equated bliss, domestic or otherwise, with procreation (170). Understanding the historical circumstances that associated agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism reveals how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive (171).
- Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2005. Eugenic Nation: Faults & frontiers of better breeding in modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press. … Oregon…twenty-six hundred sterilizations performed in that state between 1917 and 1983 (p. 1). In Virginia, for example, two of the approximately eight thousand people sterilized between 1924 and 1970s unveiled a highway marker recognizing the injustice suffered by Carrie Buck…Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v Bell , the infamous 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the justices overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of involuntary sterilization (p. 1). North Carolina’s governor, Mike Easley, approved compensation, in the form of health care and education benefits, to any living resident of the seventy-six hundred sterilized by the state between 1929 and 1974 (p. 2). Indiana stood at the vanguard, ushering in the country’s first sterilization law (p. 5). California performed twenty thousand sterilizations, one-third of the total performed in the country (p. 8). … in the 1930s, more operations began to be performed on women than men. This transition indicates that the forced sterilization of women in the United States was interwoven with the enlargement of the welfare state, the denigration of dependent and single mothers, and the perceived burden of “illegitimate” children (p. 7). Although only about 6 percent (468) of the eight thousand total sterilizations in North Carolina were requested (p. 8). Eugenics achieved its greatest national visibility in the 1920s when it was virtually synonymous with biological racism and modern degenerationism (p. 16). … the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924), which set a quota of 2 percent on all immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe based on the 1890 census and closed the gates to practically all newcomers from Asia (p. 16-7). … sterilizations peaked in the United States from 1935 to 1945 (p. 17). From 1917 until the late 1930s, Mexicans entering the United States along the southern border were subjected to aggressive disinfection rituals that were based on exaggerated, nearly hysterical, perceptions of them as dirty and diseased (p. 21) From the 1890s on, the cities, towns, and inhabitants of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Panama Canal functioned as laboratories for the elaboration of modern modalities of epidemiological surveillance and disease control that in short order were transposed to San Francisco’s Chinatown or El Paso’s Chihuahuita barrio (p. 21). Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, eugenicists strove to manage racial, ethnic, and class interactions and categories through marriage, sterilization, and alien land laws (p. 22). The experience of Oregon and Washington, where substantial numbers of those targeted for sterilization were classified as “sexual deviants”—often men caught in flagrante delicto with other men—demonstrated how eugenic practices often operated as methods of sexual regulation (p. 23). In March 1916, Mexicans living in the twin cities of Laredo-Nuevo Laredo on the Texas-Mexican border…They were outraged that the US Public Health Service had started to brand their arms, in permanent ink, with the work “admitted” upon being bathed and physically examined at Laredo’s international footbridge (p. 57). In tandem, these two trends—medicalization and militarization—worked to create a regime of eugenic gatekeeping on the US—Mexican border that aimed to ensure the putative purity of the “American” family-nation while generating long-lasting stereotypes of Mexicans as filthy, lousy, and prone to irresponsible breeding (p. 59). When the Bracero Program, launched to transport seasonal laborers from Mexico’s interior to American industries and farms during an upsurge of war-driven industrialization, began in 1942, the USPHS returned to more systematic delousing…Mexicans were dusted with DDT as they departed from the Bracero recruitment centers in Mexico (p. 66). Formed in Laredo in 1921, this guard was in charge of monitoring 150 mile-long stretches of the Rio Grande for “illegals,” vaccinating immigrants for smallpox if they lacked signs of scarification, and bringing seemingly dirty and sick Mexican immigrants to quarantine plants for kerosene baths (p. 71). … the Border Patrol was officially established on May 28, 1924 (p. 74). From multiple angles, the Border Patrol can be understood as a facet of a larger eugenic movement rooted in anxieties about biological purity and attendant to contracting and shifting categories of race (p. 81). … the number of sterilizations rose markedly in the state in the mid to late 1930s [California], peaking in 1939 when according to official statistics, 848 men and women at nine institutions underwent reproductive surgery. In absolute terms, California far outpaces the rest of the country, performing approximately 20,000 sterilizations—or one-third of 60,000 total nationwide—from 1909 to the 1960s (p. 84). Additionally, like other Western states, California passed an antimiscegenation statute in 1850 that forbade unions between whites and “negroes and mulattoes,” adding “Mongolians” to the list in 1880 (p. 87). Nevertheless, this verdict prompted Governor Earl Warren to sign legislation overturning segregation in California in 1947 (p. 99). In 1909, two years after Indiana and a few weeks after the state of Washington, California passed the third sterilization bill in the nation (p. 99). The law was expanded in 1913, when it was repealed and replaced, and updated in 1917, when clauses were added to shield physicians against legal retaliation and to foreground a eugenic, rather than penal, rationale for surgery (p. 100). Performed sporadically at the outset, operations began to climb in the late 1910s, and by 1921, 2,248 people—more than 80 percent of all cases nationwide—had been sterilized, mostly at the Sonoma and Stockton hospitals (p. 100). In New Jersey and Iowa, for instance, sterilization laws were declared unconstitutional in the 1910s, judged to be “cruel and unusual punishment” or in violation of equal protection and due process (p. 100). IN 1932, twenty-seven states had laws on the books and the number of operations nationwide peaked at just over thirty-nine hundred (p. 100). Significantly, California’s statute—although reworked over the decades—remained in force without interruption from 1909 until it was repealed by the state legislature in 1979 (p. 100). Whereas fewer than 1,000 operations had been carried out between 1909 and 1920, 6,250 had been performed by 1929 (p. 104). By this point, Popenoe’s vision, and the state’s sterilization program, had inspired Nazi Germany, whose 1933 Law on Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny was partially modeled on California’s statute. During the 1930s, the Third Reich and the Golden State maintained strong ties (p. 108). Against this backdrop, operations in California climbed to between 674 and 848 per year between 1936 and 1941, and by 1942 more than fifteen thousand had been performed, the bulk since 1925 (p. 108). Furthermore, the implementation of IQ testing programs fomented racial segregation and a two-tracked school system, helping to lay the foundation for deep educational inequities that were not overcome by psychologists’ intensifying focus on cultural and linguistic variables in the 1930s and 1940s (p. 113). … national origins quotas were not replaced with the family reunification model until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, and sterilization statutes were not repealed by state legislatures until the 1970s and 1980s (p. 154). … California’s sterilization law. This legislation, initially passed in 1909, affected patients in state institutions, more than twenty thousand of whom were sterilized between 1909 and 1979 (p. 159). Thus, at least one current of postwar eugenics streamed into incipient family values campaigns and can partially account for the echoes of race suicide voiced by the Moral Majority in the 1980s and some evangelical Christians to this day (p. 181). In 1941, Ashley Montagu, then an anatomist at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, asserted that the anthropological concept of race was “meaningless,” a position that became generally accepted by geneticists (p. 188). Heredity, Race, and Society . In this tract, published in 1946, Dunn and Dobzhansky appreciated the biological variation of humankind, stressed the importance of environment in the development of individuals and the species, and disabused their readers of the notion of “pure races,” stating, “mankind has always been, and still is, a mongrel lot” (p. 188). In 1968, Mexicans comprised 40 percent of those tracked into programs for the “mentally handicapped” in California even though they constituted only 14 percent of the state’s elementary and secondary students (p. 191). Health and healing often figured prominently in this politics of corporeal reappropriation. For example, the Black Panthers, the Chicano Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords all opened up community health centers in places such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York City (p. 192). For example, in the early 1970s disabled college students, intent on disentangling themselves from what they perceived as infantilized and constrictive relationships with doctors, psychologists, and other experts, spearheaded the independent living movement, establishing their first center in Berkeley in 1972 (p. 192). … voluntary sterilization rates rose in tandem so that in 1973 sterilization was the most common method of birth control by Americans in the thirty to forty-four age bracket (p. 200-1). Factoring in the operations backed by Medicaid and the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) before the OEO’s decision, between the late 1960s and 1974, when federal guidelines were formally enacted, approximately one hundred thousand sterilizations were carried out annually (p. 201). For example, one study commissioned by the Government Accounting Office found that between 1973 and 1976 the Indian Health Service, usually with HEW backing, sterilized more than thirty-four hundred Native American women in the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Dakota (p. 202). Madrigal v. Quilligan did have major consequences for the elaboration of sterilization stipulations, especially by securing a clause that consent forms by bilingual (p. 208). With the repeal of state sterilizations statutes, the demise of national origins quotas, and the overturning of marriage bans, Americans exited an era of eugenics in wihc the state played a principal role in instituting and upholding hereditarian ideas and practices (p. 209). In March 2003, following a senate hearing in the state capitol in Sacramento, Governor Gray Davis apologized for California’s sterilization program (p. 211). … in California, where more than twenty thousand sterilizations were performed (p. 211).
- Solinger, Rickie. 2007. Pregnancy and power: a short history of reproductive politics in America. New York: NYU Press. (Social Security Act of 1935) For our purposes, the act is important because through what FDR called “this piece of intelligent planning,” the government reached down into the American family and responded to the reproductive activity of some resourceless women (132). Before 1935, many states had funded mothers’ pension programs. These efforts provided meager assistance for poor and “worthy” mothers and their children. Most often the mothers were white widows (132). The Aid to Dependent Children program (ADC) (established by Title IV of the Social Security Act and popularly known as relief or welfare), distributed still-meager sums of money to women of whom social workers approved (132). During this period unwed mothers were denied aid on moral grounds. Mothers of color were found unworthy by definition, or they were defined as more suitable for waged work than for raising their own children (132). Based on her race, officials certified this mother as deserving aid and deserving the right to take care of her children (132-3). In the early 1950s, more than 30 percent of African American married mothers with children under the age of six worked for wages. The figure for all married mothers with children in that age range was approximately 15 percent (134). In Skinner v. Oklahoma , a white man convicted of stealing chickens was sentenced to be sterilized under that state’s Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act of 1935 (140). This first association of “reproduction” and “rights” tied reproductive rights to the person of a man—a white man (140). Skinner represented a milestone. The decision implied that the right to reproduce is a basic civil right (140). White women, especially those who could claim a place in the growing middle class, had their reproductive duty burnished with a notion of the value of their reproductive output. These women were often portrayed in the media as engines of democracy, generating baby-citizens for the free world. They were also pictured as engines of consumerism, reproducing for the economy (140). In 1948, William Voigt, soon to be the national director of Planned Parenthood, wrote an international best seller, Road to Survival , in which he proposed paying poor people modest sums to refrain from reproducing (141). In this way, Planned Parenthood and other organizations contributed to early efforts to define motherhood as a class privilege (141). At the same time, state and local administrators of the Aid to Dependent Children program routinely denied public assistance to mothers of color, and apartheid-like labor practices guaranteed poverty for these women raising children (142). As the federal government began to extend the benefits of economic security programs to poor mothers—including mothers of color in the 1940s—many governors, state legislatures, and state welfare bureaucrats asserted the “states’ rights” argument against welfare for mothers of color and their children (145). But just a few years later, in 1942, the federal Bureau of Public Assistance found that African American, Indian, and Mexican children were all receiving benefits at rates much lower than white children in the same states (145). For the purposes of excluding families of color, 40 percent or more of the states wrote “suitable home” laws that barred aid to “illegitimate children” (146). Second, proponents of school segregation, restrictive public housing, and enforced sterilization—as well as exclusionary welfare policies—all used the issue of relatively high rates of out-of-marriage pregnancies and childbirth among African American women to support their campaigns (148). Not surprisingly in a racially divided country, the postwar experiences of white unwed mothers were quite different (150). The new treatment for these girls and women involved temporarily banishing them from their families and communities and placing them in maternity homes or other remote locations and coercing them to relinquish their babies (150). If no one knew about the illegitimate pregnancy, the event never happened. The girl herself would forget what had happened. Providing a child to a childless couple was the key. According to the adoption experts, with this act, the girl redeemed herself, resolved the psychological disturbances that caused her pregnancy, and in some remarkable way restored her virginal status (151). The white adoption mandate also resolved an additional problem: preserving or restoring the “look” of an unmarried white girl’s chastity (152). The lengths that white families went to in this era to efface their daughters’ sexual misconduct—including giving away a grandchild/child, and in many cases refusing ever to talk about the ordeal as soon as it was “over”—suggest how much white families had to lose when their daughters were publicly associated with unchastity (152). The maternity homes to which so many white parents sent their offending daughters for hiding during the pregnancy served as weird, racialized finishing schools (153). The famous sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues in the 1950s estimated that 75 to 85 percent of septic abortions were self-induced (157). Studies conducted at the time showed that abortion-related sterilization had indeed become a fairly common practice in the early fifties. More than 53 percent of teaching hospitals made simultaneous sterilization a condition of approval for abortion, and in all U.S. hospitals, the rate was 40 percent (160).
- African Americans still rank below whites on nearly every measure of socioeconomic status (86). Dramatic changes in family structure (87). In 1987, only 3 percent of married blacks had a nonblack spouse. IN contrast, about 16 percent of married Asians and Hispanics had a non-Asian or non-Hispanic spouse (89). Just over half (55%) of black children lived in a single-parent household in 1990, 51 % with their mother. In contrast, 19 percent of white children lived in single-parent households in 1989. In 1990, 12 percent of black children lived in households that included their grandparents, compared with only 4 percent of whites and 6 percent of Hispanics. The 3.8 million black children living in two-parent families appear privileged in comparison. In 1988, 64 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock, compared with 18 percent of white babies (91).
- Immigration regulations were racist. Puerto Ricans are US Citizens and qualify for aid; large percentage receive assistance. Chicanos have larger family structures, extensive networks of relatives who are helpful and supportive (106). Cubans have positive immigration status; contrasted against Haitians, “wet foot, dry foot” The wet foot, dry foot policy is the name given to a consequence of the 1995 revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that says, essentially, that anyone who fled Cuba and got into the United States would be allowed to pursue residency a year later. After talks with the Cuban government, the Clinton administration came to an agreement with Cuba that it would stop admitting people found at sea. Since then, in what has become known as the "wet foot, dry foot" policy, a Cuban caught on the waters between the two nations (i.e., with "wet feet") would summarily be sent home or to a third country. One who makes it to shore ("dry feet") gets a chance to remain in the United States, and later would qualify for expedited "legal permanent resident " status and U.S. citizenship .
- Linda Skogrand, “Strong Marriages in Latino Culture.” This study used a qualitative research methodology to understand the cultural values, practices, and strengths of twenty-five Latino couples who had strong marriages. The study was conducted in the context of Latino culture. According to the participants in the study, the components of strong marriages in Latino culture were children, communication, and religion (117). There will be an increasing need to better understand Latino marriage and family life in order to provide culturally appropriate marriage and family education (117-8). “ Why is it important to address the issue of family life from the perspective of the immigrant population’s culture?” …First, if there is a cultural clash between educational information provided and the values of a population, they will usually not attend educational programs…Secondly, there is evidence that relying upon one’s cultural heritage, the way one’s people deal with struggles, is the most effective way for people to be resilient and capable of handling difficulties (118). The purpose of this study was to describe what strong marriages look like from the perspective of Latino couples who identified themselves as having strong marriages and who were willing to tell us about their marriages (118-9). Familism refers to the close relationships that are promoted and exist among Latino family members, which includes interdependence and cooperation among family members with a willingness to sacrifice individual needs for the welfare of the group or family (119). One random sample of Latino immigrants in the United States found that 94 percent of Latinos self-identified as having a religious affiliation, with the majority self-identifying as being Catholic (120). The participants interviewed for this study included twenty-five couples (fifty individuals). Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to identify participants. We asked two leaders of Latino social service organizations that had no religious affiliation and two Catholic priests (121). Of the fifty participants, forty-three were first generation immigrants and even were second-generation immigrants. The primary language spoken in all the homes was Spanish and twenty-three of the twenty-five couples chose to be interviewed in Spanish (121). According to the participants in this study, the components of strong marriages in the Latino culture in order of importance were: children, communication, and religion (122). Children are the “glue” of the marriage. Children were the reason for getting married and the reason for staying married (123). We found that forty-five individuals interviewed volunteered that communication was an essential component of a strong marriage (125). Of the fifty participants, thirty-seven volunteered that religion was a necessary component of a strong marriage (127). Commitment. All of the participants in this study who talked about commitment described it in the context of religion (129). Richard B. Miller, “Migrating Latinas and the Grief Process.” The authors applied a theoretical model of the bereavement grief process to examine grief experienced by immigration and loss of home country…Results indicated that the grieving process from immigration is similar to that experienced upon the loss of a loved one (155). The Hispanic population in the United States is growing rapidly. It has increased 50 percent between 1990 and 2000 and, by 2002, more than one in eight people in the United States was of Hispanic origin (155). The first phase presented was the protest phase, including the components of anxiety, physical stress, anger, preoccupation with the lost country, and idealization. The second phase was disorganization and depression. Most of the immigrants reported varying degrees of depression related to their immigration experience. The final phase in the process, as described by Schneller, was the detachment phase (167).
- 10 % of population are immigrants This chapter focuses on immigrant women and the work/career issues they face in the United States. A majority of immigrant women seek and find employment, even though their occupations will be low prestige and paying occupations (176). Immigrant women may also participate in political and cultural activism, which may help buffer them from the disempowering and stressful events of relocation (179). Domestic violence can be increased by stress of migration. Women face a downward shift in employment to lower status
- Linda Halgunseth, “Language Brokering: Positive Developmental Outcomes,” Language brokering is when a third party (ie a bilingual child) mediates communication between two different linguistic/cultural agents (154). Immigrant proficiency in English is related to the age at which immigrants arrive in the United States, not to the number of years lived in the United States (154). In knowing two languages, CLB perform a unique function for other family members. Their brokering skills provide great utility and may enhance feelings of importance and usefulness in CLBs, as well as feelings of self-confidence and self-worth (155). Susan Santiago, “Language Brokering: A Personal Experience,” Many messages became misconstrued because my parents spoke to us in Spanish, and we responded in English. I was becoming acculturated, and I believe that I chose to speak Spanish less often around age 9. I recall teachers commenting on how well I spoke English, which probably encouraged me to stop speaking Spanish. As a child I really did not understand how ethnocentric those kinds of comments were, and I internalized the notion that in order to be considered a “good” student, I should speak proper English and not Spanglish.…I felt as though I sacrificed mastering my native language in order to be accepted into mainstream culture (161)
- Grounded in the realities of their communities, Latinas insist that broader issues, such as racism and classism, influence their reproductive lives, and that true reproductive freedom necessitates an end to all forms of social inequality (p. 215). As some of the first scholarship attempting to document Latina organizing for reproductive justice, this analysis focuses primarily on the two largest Latino groups in the nation, Puerto Ricans (9.6 percent) and Mexicans (58 percent), about whom the most written material is available (p. 216). In both cases, a Latina is believed incapable of using birth control. These stereotypes serve to justify state, medical, and social intervention in their reproduction (p. 216). The childbearing of Mexican immigrant women in increasingly suspect and often criminalized. For example, Proposition 187 in California targeted poor, pregnant Mexican immigrant women, blaming them for the state’s and the nation’s problems (p. 217). These representations provide the ideological justification for punitive policies that shape Latinas’ reproductive experiences. They also influence how health care professionals treat Latinas (p. 217). Although research on Latinas and their health is sparse, studies report that, overall, they experience poor health, with disproportionately high rates of cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, obesity, diabetes, domestic violence, and unintentional injuries compared to other women. These circumstances are exacerbated by the extremely low rates of health care delivery to Latinas (p. 217). Almost one-third of Latinos report no health insurance coverage and Latinas are the least likely of any group to have access to regular health care or health insurance coverage (p. 217). Almost 17 percent of births to Latinas are to adolescents under the age of 20, with Puerto Ricans having the highest percentage of teen births (21.9 percent) of all racial or ethnic groups (p. 218). Due to their concentration in service and agriculture industries, Latinas have high exposure to toxins…three major labor market categories in which exposure is high: clerical (radiation), service (cleaning chemicals), and operatives and laborers (pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals) (p. 218). Latinas face additional sexual health risks; perhaps the cause for most concern is that Latinas currently represent 20.2 percent of the total AIDS cases among women. AIDS is the third leading cause of death for Latinas between the ages of 15 and 24. Latinas also have among the highest rates of Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and human papilloma virus (HPV). Lack of basic knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), lack of health insurance, and cultural and linguistic barriers to the health care system prevent Latinas from being able to prevent and/or treat STDs (p. 218). … 20.1 percent of all abortions being obtained by Latinas. They are 2.5 times as likely to have an abortion as white women (p. 218). Control of women’s sexuality and reproduction was central to the colonial relationship the island’s residents first experienced with the Spanish, beginning in 1508, and continues to be a key factor in the neocolonial status it maintains with the US (p. 219). Spanish women were encouraged to migrate to the island, and in 1526 a brothel was established to deter Spanish soldiers from having sex with women from the island. When African slaves were brought to the island, it also became a capital crime for Spanish men to have sex with African women (p. 219). In 1898, following the Spanish-American War, the US claimed Puerto Rico as its territory (p. 219). Essentially, Puerto Rico and its people have served as a laboratory for American contraceptive policies and products. For example, the contraceptive foam, the intrauterine device (IUD), and many varieties of the pill were all tested on the bodies of Puerto Rican women before ever making their way to the mainland US market (p. 219-220). Although federal funding of other contraceptives was not widely available in Puerto Rico until 1968, and abortion was illegal until 1973, tubal ligation—the most popularly performed method of sterilization—had been available, for little or not cost, to most women since 1937 (p. 220). By 1965 about 35 percent of the women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized, two-thirds of them in their 20s (p. 221). Mexican-origin women were targeted for sterilization. Hundreds of women were sterilized without their knowledge between the years of 1969 and 1973 at the University of Southern California—Los Angeles County Medical Center (p. 222). Throughout the second half of the 20th century Latinas fought for their right to bear children in addition to struggling around a host of other issues such as labor organizing, welfare rights, education, and childcare (p. 223). … the first National Chicana Conference was held in May 1971 in Houston, Texas. At this meeting, discussions of abortion, birth control, marriage, and other feminist issues were central (p. 224). The Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) was founded in 1974, spearheaded by Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, Dr. Raymond Rakow, and Maritza Arrastia, editor of Claridad . Although CESA was a multi-ethnic coalition, Latinas were crucial to the group’s efforts (p. 226). IN 1979, CESA united with the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and several other organizations, such as the Mexican American Women’s National Association, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Chicana Nurses Association in a coalition to monitor the compliance of New York City hospitals with new city laws. This New York coalition became part of the Reproductive Rights National Network (R2N2) in 1981 (p. 226). The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) Chicana Rights Project worked with this network to file a petition with the State of California Department of Health for the adoption of more strenuous regulation of consent procedures for sterilization operations (p. 227). The Latina Roundtable on Health and Reproductive Rights (LRHRR) was founded in October 1989 by a number of women—mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican—including Jenny Rivera, Diana Correa, Celina Romany, and Elsa Rios (p. 229). In the 1990s, Amigas Latinas en Accion, a Latina feminist collective in Boston, advanced its Latina perspective on reproductive health through Mujeres en Accion Pro Salud Reproductiva: Northeast Project on Latina Women and Reproductive Health (p. 230). The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) established itself in 1994 as the first independent national organization for Latinas on reproductive rights issues (p. 230). On International Women’s Day, March 8, 1986, four Latinas pooled their collective strength to found the National Latina Health Organization (NLHO) (p. 241). The group promotes self-empowerment for Latinas through educational programs, outreach, and research (p. 241). The NLHO then began collaboration with the Chicana/Latina Studies Working Group at the University of California at Berkeley to design a course entitled Redefining Latina Health: Body, Mind, and Spirit (p. 255). COLOR is one of the youngest organizations in this book. It was founded in 1998 by seven deeply committed sexual and reproductive health practitioners and activists who were “troubled by the high teenage birth rate and high HIV rate among Latinas” (p. 266). COLOR is one of those most directly involved with the mainstream reproductive rights movement (p. 268).
- Douglas A. Abbott, “Influence of American Culture on East Indian Immigrants’ Perceptions of Marriage and Family Life.” The purpose of this research was to identify how the marriages and family life of recent Indian immigrants had changed since coming to America… Greater egalitarianism and more personal parent-child interaction…” (93). The number of East Indians emigrating to the United States has increased substantially during the last half century from less than 10,000 in 1947, to 1.7 million in 2002, representing 0.6 percent of the total American population. They are the third largest Asian American community after Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans (94). They have the highest median income (nearly $71,000) of any immigrant group and far above the national average of approximately $46,000. East Indians have been widely recognized as one of the most successful immigrant groups in the US (94). The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of American culture on recent East Indian immigrants’ marriage, parenting, and personal development. The specific issues studied included couples’ attitudes towards marital interaction, women’s work issues, and changes in child rearing (94). When Indian couples emigrate to the United States, it is likely that they undergo integration because of the continuous exposure to the US society, their participation in high status occupations, and their native fluency with the English language (98). The absence of in-laws may bring spouses closer together (110). This egalitarianism was reflected in areas such as treating each other as friends, sharing household chores, respecting one another’s space and increased marital communication.
- Over 60 ethnic and national groups comprise the Asian and Pacific Islander population in the US, with each having different immigration histories, needs, and resources (p. 157). In their analysis of Asian women’s health organizing, Sia Nowrojee and Jael Silliman suggest the simultaneous need for community-specific as well as pan-Asian organizing (p. 158). The experiences of Asians and Pacific islanders in the US have been shaped by a long history of restrictive anti-immigration policies (p. 158). This wave of hostility to Chinese immigrants culminated in the banning of Chinese labor through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law directed at a specific nationality (p. 159). For example, by 1870 there were 56,625 Chinese men in the US, compared with 4,574 Chinese women (p. 159). As racism against the Chinese increased, Chinese women were characterized as prostitutes and singled out for moral condemnation and control by legislators and the police (p. 159). Additionally, coming to the US later than their husbands meant that API women encountered a world that was familiar to their husbands, but not to them. They were severely disadvantaged by language, law, and custom and were economically dependent on their husbands. Entering the US as wives has also meant that their legal status is contingent on their husband’s sponsorship, further increasing their vulnerability in the home as well as in the larger society (p. 160). When the Immigration Act was passed in 1965, it abolished quotas based on national origin and replaced them with ones based on professional status (p. 160). (TANF), a decentralized, state-run, block-grant program…As originally passed, it made most legal immigrants ineligible for all federal means-tested programs during their first five years of residency in the US (p. 162). Under this legislation, states retained the discretionary power to decide whether or not to use state funds to provide certain TANF benefits and Medicaid to immigrants (p. 162). While subsequent federal and state legislation restored some benefits for immigrants who were in the US prior to 1996, the overall framework and exclusions remain substantially the same (p. 162). Many Asian immigrants are concentrated in low-wage jobs that do not provide health insurance, and approximately 36 percent of Asian American women under the age of 65 have no health insurance at all (p. 162). Furthermore, language barriers constitute another impediment to health care. Over 60 percent of the Asian immigrant population is limited English proficient (p. 162). The sexualized stereotypes of API women promulgated over a century ago are reflected in the demographics of the global traffick in women. When promoting international sex tourism to Americans, specialized marketing identifies API women as exptic and willing to please. This translates domestically to API women being viewed and treated as commodities (p. 163-4). At the first national Asian women’s health conference in 1995 (p. 164). In August 1980, more than 500 Asian women met in Washington, DC, for the first National Asian Pacific American Women’s Conference, sponsored by the National Education Association (p. 165). Along with Latinas, API women make up the majority of the sweatshop labor force. They comprise one-third of sweatshop workers in California and about half of the sweatshop labor force in New York (p. 165-6). For example, the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), an Oakland-based organization, worked with Chinese garment workers to improve conditions in their shop. They began a campaign against the designer Jessica McClintock in 1992…In New York, the Chinese Staff and Workers Association led a similar campaign against Donna Daran in 1999 (p. 166). Many of the South Asian activists who cam to reproductive rights organizing in the late 1980s had worked in other progressive social justice movements either in their countries of origin or in the US (p. 167). Until the creation of Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Choice (APIC) in 1989, Asian and Pacific islander (API) women had no organized voice or visibility in the pro-choice movement (p. 175). APIC changed its name to Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health (APIRH) (p. 175). Approximately 20 women, all volunteers, carried out the survey, interviewing 1,215 adults in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco (p. 177). In April 1995, APIRH held a landmark conference, “Opening Doors to Health and Well-Being.” Over 150 API women came to Sacramento to be part of this first statewide gathering on API women’s health (p. 181). From 1999 to 2003, APIRH played a leading role in an environmental justice campaign focused on the largest medical waste incinerator in California, which was located in Oakland (p. 187). An example of the organization’s evolution is the name change that took place in May 2004 when APIRH became Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) (P. 189). In 1993, Mary Chung, a 26 year old Korean immigrant, founded the National Asian Women’s Health Organization (NAWHO) (p. 197). In November 1995, the first national conference ever held on the health of Asian and Pacific Islander women, “Coming Together, Moving Strong: Mobilizing an Asian Women’s Health Movement” (P. 199). In 1997, NAWHO organized a second conference, “The Quality of Our Lives: Empowering Asian American Women for the 21st Century” (P. 201). Using personal narratives based on interviews with 85 women, NAWHO examined South Asian women’s perspectives about their own health needs and problems, the influence of their cultures on their perceptions, and how women, health advocates, and providers can overcome barriers to addressing South Asian women’s specific needs (p. 203). In all, NAWHO has published over 20 research reports (p. 203). In 1997 NAWHO organized “Silent Epidemics: A National Policy Summit on Depression and Asian American Women” (P. 209).
- Thus, for Native American women the issues of cultural survival, land rights, and reproductive rights cannot be separated. The US government justified the conquest of the Native peoples by calling its invasions a “civilizing mission” (p. 105). Native American efforts to reassert sovereignty over their lands are inextricably tied to their efforts to reassert control over their reproduction (p. 105). Native nations hold more than 300 treaties with the United States that define land boundaries, rights to hunt and gather, rights to water and other resources, and the means by which Native people will be remunerated for allowing the US to live on and use their land (p. 105). … to policies which sanctioned the removal of Native children to non-Native schools and families (p. 106). Since the 1600, Native youth have been sent to Western religious institutions where they were forced to worship as Christians and to abandon their traditions (p. 106). This form of schooling for Native children was formalized in 1878, when Congress set aside funds to erect schools that would be fun by churches and missionaries (p. 106). In 1974, the Association of American Indian Affairs estimated that as a result of these policies between 25 and 35 percent of all Native children in certain states were adopted by non-Indian families or placed in non-Indian foster homes or institutional settings, while another 25 percent were “temporarily placed in government or church run boarding schools” (p. 107). It was not until the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 that the federal government finally renounced this century-old policy, and replaced jurisdiction over cases of foster care and adoption of Native children with tribal governments, with disputes to be heard in tribal courts (p. 107). To stop the loss of culture that has ensued over the last two centuries, the establishment of Native schools has been a central concern for many activists (p. 107). This period is commonly referred to as the “Termination Era,” during which more than 100 tribes were cut off from federal funding and social and health services altogether (p. 107). The federal government requires tribal governments to establish and enforce criteria for tribal membership based on a blood quantum (p. 108). Winona LaDuke refers to the current siting of hazardous wastes on Indian lands as “radioactive colonialism”—another mechanism used to weaken and subdue a people (p. 109). … Women of All Red Nations (WARN) (p. 110). WARN, one of the first pan-Indian organizations to address reproductive health issues, was established in Rapid City, South Dakota, in September 1978 (p. 110). An early WARN action was to bring women from over 30 Native nations to a conference in Rapid City to address a range of issues including sterilization abuse, the deteriorating health care system, adoption, the abuse of Native children in boarding schools and in foster care, and the destruction of Native lands (p. 110). The UN Convention on Genocide states that measures to prevent births within a group of people are acts of genocide (p. 111). In 1973, the first legal challenge to sterilization abuse among Native women was brought by Norma Jean Serena, a Native woman of Creek-Shawnee ancestry, whose civil suit addressed sterilization abuse as a civil rights issue (p. 111). In 1987, a Senate subcommittee investigation revealed that doctors from the Phoenix, Navajo Nation, and Oklahoma City—area offices of the HIS admitted to injecting approximately 50 women ranging from ages 15 to 50 with Depo-Provera (p. 112). Most traditional midwives have died or are now in their 80s and 90s. Knowledge of abortion methods and herbs is disappearing. However, there has been a strong effort to reclaim Native midwifery (p. 113). A survey of the HIS conducted by the Native American Women’s Health Education Research Center (NAWHERC) in 2002 found that 85 percent of the HIS units surveyed were noncompliant with the official HIS abortion policy. The survey found that 62 percent of HIS facilities provide neither abortion services nor funding in cases of rape or when a woman’s life was endangered by her pregnancy (p. 114). Health professionals estimate that the prevalence of reproductive tract infections (RTIs) may be as high as 65 percent among Native women. The rates for one STD, Chlamydia, are also 6 times higher among Native women, correlate to high-risk sexual behavior and thus are considered risk factors for RTIs (p. 115). Because there are few HIS facilities and vast geographic distances between them, it is extremely difficult for both rural and urban Indian women to obtain routine and reproductive (prenatal) and postnatal) health care. For example, there are only two INS facilities east of the Mississippi River and they are supposed to serve all the Native Americans from Maine to Florida (p. 116). Whereas the HIS budget for 2002 was $2.8 billion, tribal leadership estimated a needs-based budget for Indian health care to be closer to $18 billion. This underfunding significantly contributes to continuing health disparities in Indian communities (p. 116). As many as 27 percent of American Indian individuals, including Alaska Natives, have reported incomes below the poverty line, but in the 26 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native households where the head of the family is a woman, 50 percent have incomes below the poverty line. It has been estimated that half of all Native children live in poverty (p. 117). Continuing in the healing tradition are the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota, and the Mother’s Milk Project in the Mohawk country of upstate New York (p. 117). The Mother’s Milk Project underlines the centrality of women’s bodies and birthing in Native American culture (p. 123). They asked her to set up a clinic at the Red Schoolhouse in Minnesota to teach midwifery, investigate sterilization practices, and pioneer culturally appropriate health care, so that Native women would not be vulnerable to the abuses of inadequate and manipulative government health programs (p. 128). In 1985, the Mother’s Milk Project (MMP) was created to “understand and characterize how toxic contaminants have moved through the local food chain, including mother’s milk (p. 132). The Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC) demonstrates a whole life approach to reproductive rights; for NAWHERC, reproductive rights are integral to all other Native health and political struggles (p. 143). NAWHERC begins with the story of the dedicated leadership of Charon Asetoyer, a tireless voice for Native women’s health (p. 143). NAWHERC’s…work, which includes providing direct services, conducting research, organizing advocacy programs, and forging coalitions with other Native American women in the framework of cultural renewal and Native sovereignty (p. 145). Due to the rate of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) among babies on the Yankton Sioux reservation and among children born to Native American women in general, the first issue that NAWHERC tackled was FAS. The rate of alcoholism in Native men and women is higher than in any other ethnic group in the US (P. 145). New reproductive technologies such as Depo-Provera and Norplant were also gaining popular support as a solution to FAS by those who did not want to deal with the root causes of high rates of addiction among Native women. Instead of addressing why Native women were delivering babies with FAS, the government’s approach was to control their reproduction (p. 146). The national attitudes toward drug and alcohol addiction have tended to ignore the structural issues fueling it. Furthermore, rather than dealing with addiction as a public health issue, it has been criminalized and characterized as an individual failure (p. 146). Native American women who are substance abusers are rarely hospitalized and rarely receive detoxification or counseling for their addictions. Instead, they are often jailed or deprived of their parental rights (p. 146). 1n 1990, NAWHERC organized “Empowerment Through Dialogue.” This historic three-day gathering brought more than 30 Native women, representing over 10 nations from the Northern Plains to Pierre, South Dakota (p. 146). In the 1990s, the center conducted three Dakota Roundtables on reproductive rights. These meetings brought together Native women from the Aberdeen area to look at specific issues utilizing the roundtable process (p. 149). NAWHERC scrupulously documents and publishes the words of the speakers anonymously (p. 149). The concerns raised by participants in the roundtables determine the center’s research priorities and activities, inform the development of their educational materials, and direct the training of community activists (p. 149). NAWHERC’s research has also been effective in changing the way that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) collects statistics about Native women (p. 151). It conducted studies on fetal alcohol syndrome (1986 to the present), the impact of Norplant in the Native American community (1992), the abuse of Depo-Provera and Norplant by the HIS (1993), and the revictimization of battered women (1994) (p. 151). NAWHERC has about ten full-time staff, four three-quarter-time positions, and four to six volunteers. The staff and volunteers provide a wide range of women’s health and education services in the Yankton Sioux-Aberdeen community that reflect the center’s broad vision of health and the relationship between health rights and cultural integrity (p. 151). NAWHERC’s educational materials contain up-to-date, practical information about how people can improve their health. Pamphlets are written in accessible language and are widely available in the community (p. 153).
- SHAWN POGATCHNIK Associated Press Writer 10:55 a.m. EST, December 10, 2009 DUBLIN (AP) — The Irish Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a gay man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple should be permitted to see his 3-year-old son regularly — in part because Ireland's constitution doesn't recognize the lesbians as a valid family unit. The ruling was a legal first in Ireland, where homosexuality was outlawed until 1993 and gay couples are denied many rights given to married couples. Critics contend the case highlights how Ireland's conservative Catholic 1937 constitution conflicts with contemporary European norms and fails to address the reality that hundreds of gay couples in Ireland have children. In their unanimous decision, the five judges of Ireland's ultimate constitutional authority said a lower court erred by trying to apply the European Convention on Human Rights in favor of the lesbian couple. The Supreme Court concluded that when the two are in conflict, the Irish constitution is superior to European human rights law. In her written judgment, Supreme Court Justice Susan Denham said the lesbian couple provide a loving, stable home for their son — but that the constitution defines parents as a married man and woman, and gays are not permitted to marry in Ireland. She said Irish law does identify the sperm donor as the father, and he therefore had a right to have a relationship with his son. "There is benefit to a child, in general, to have the society of his father," Denham wrote. "I am satisfied that the learned High Court judge gave insufficient weight to this factor." In April 2008, High Court Justice John Hedigan ruled in favor of the lesbian couple and rejected the man's application to have visitation or guardianship rights. The man immediately appealed. In his ruling, Hedigan said Irish law contained nothing explicit to suggest that two women and a child possessed "any lesser right to be recognized as a de-facto family than a family composed of a man and woman unmarried to each other and a child." Hedigan said the European rights charter's Article 8 did not discriminate between heterosexuals and gays in enshrining their right to a private family life. The 42-year-old man, whose identity has been concealed throughout two years of legal wrangling, attended Thursday's judgment and said he was overjoyed with the verdict. The lesbian couple did not attend. The Supreme Court appealed to both sides to negotiate an agreement on when the man could begin visiting his son. It referred the question of granting the man full guardianship rights back to the High Court. The man testified that the lesbian couple had been his good friends, and he agreed to donate sperm to one of them on condition that he would be treated as the family's "favorite uncle." But after the 2006 birth, both sides agreed that their relationship soured — reaching the breaking point when the two women decided to move to Australia with the boy. The man successfully sued to prevent them from leaving Ireland pending a custody ruling. Ireland's parliament has yet to pass laws that effectively regulate fertility clinics or define the clashing parenting rights of gay couples versus sperm donors. Earlier this month, the government opened debate on a Civil Partnership Bill that, if passed, would give gay couples many marriage-style rights, particularly in relation to property, finances and inheritance. It offers no legal recognition of their right to be parents.
- August 30th, 2005 @ 11:45am Kim Johnson Reporting A mother is asking Utah's highest court to take away her former girlfriend's rights to visit her child. The case has the attention of both the ACLU and Utah legislature and could have huge implications for people caring for children who aren't biologically or legally theirs. Keri Jones Cheryl Barlow and Keri Lynn Jones had a three-year lesbian relationship during which Barlow gave birth to a baby girl. Barlow is arguing that she, as the child's biological parent, should be able to decide what's best for her four-year old daughter. Jones, on the other hand, says she acted as a parent to the little girl and that it's in the child's best interest that she be allowed to visit her. Jones won the right last December to visit the little girl. A 3rd district judge agreed there was a parental relationship between the two. Keri Lynn Jones: "We proved that I stood in place as a parent to Gracie before she was born and after she was born." But Barlow says her relationship with Jones ended when Jones had an affair, and says there is no bond between Jones and her child. Cheryl Barlow, Biological Mother: "Appearances are deceiving. Ms. Jones had an affair during the relationship and as much as our appearance of being a happy couple was falsehood, so was this claim that she was bonded to my child." Cheryl Barlow Frank Mylar, Barlow's attorney: "The child is very young and the child didn't even recognize Ms. Jones when visitation was ordered." Jones disagrees and says the child called her Mommy during a recent visit. Keri Lynn Jones: "I planned for her every day before she even got here, that I spent every single day with her as my daughter for two years, and then again for the last nine months for visitation. I love her as much as I could possibly could love her." Barlow, who has left what she calls "the revolving door of the gay lifestyle", says her daughter is being used as a political prop. Cheryl Barlow: "She is the casualty of the selfish cause. The adoption law is next, the marriage amendment will be next. Because if they can force a legal relationship on a gay couple after they've broken up, then they're certainly going to try and establish a legal stronghold for gay and lesbian relationships when they're together." Because the high court's ruling on this matter could test earlier common law rulings, Utah lawmakers are watching closely. One lawmaker says he wants to make sure common law doctrine doesn't evolve to be at odds with the state's constitution, which only recognizes relationships between a man and a woman.