Children’s rights activist blasts judge’s decision allowing gay throuple to be named as legal parents of 2 kids
A Children's rights activist decried a California judge's ruling allowing three men to be listed as the legal parents of two children born to surrogate mothers using donor eggs as being the consequence of laws that sacrifice the wellbeing of children to benefit the desires of adults.
The homosexual male “throuple” includes Ian Jenkins, Alan Mayfield and Jeremy Allen Hodges. The three-way relationship happened after Jenkins and Mayfield, who met nine years ago, invited Hodges to join the couple eight years ago.
The two children who belong to the trio of men are half-siblings. Jenkins wrote a memoir about the throuple's unorthodox relationship in the book, Three Dads and a Baby.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Last week, the three men, who are now the legal parents of two children — a 3-year-old and a 14-month old — appeared on "The Morning Show" in Australia to speak about this unusual arrangement and how they received a favorable result in court.
"We weren't sure that we could have all three of us on the birth certificate so it became a court process," Mayfield said during the interview.
"It was a pretty interesting, tense courtroom scene where at first it seemed we were not going to be granted that and we asked to speak in court and plead our viewpoint and the judge ultimately changed her mind and granted us legal parentage for our child before she was born."
For all three men to be placed on the birth records serves legal purposes.
Hodges added: “If our child, God forbid, was to end up in the hospital, one of the parents might not be able to go visit them.”
“It was really important to be recognized as the family that we are, and thankfully we live in California, which is a state that, after some teeth pulling and fighting, actually did then allow us to do that, so that was amazing."
Katy Faust, founder of children's rights organization Them Before Us, and the author of a recent book of the same name, noted in a Monday interview with The Christian Post that much of the media is framing their coverage of these adult men as being victims of a system that did not make it effortless to acquire someone else's children.
"Of course the real victims are the two motherless children who were intentionally separated from the woman who provided half of their genetic identity, the woman to whom they bonded during their first 9 1/2 months of life, and who will be starved of the daily maternal love that all children crave," Faust said.
But people should not be surprised by the newest manifestation of "modern family," she asserted, as it was "the inevitable result of centering all legal and cultural conversations about family around the desires of adults.
"That slippery slope of 'if the adults are happy the children will be happy' which began with no-fault divorce, normalized single mothers by choice, insisted gender is irrelevant to parenting during the gay marriage debate, is now championing male throuples raising motherless children," she added.
"Until we recognize that children have a natural and fundamental right to be known and loved by both their mother and father, you can expect more wild variations of the modern family, as children become the acceptable sacrifice on the pyre of adult desires."
