Shannon LC Cate

But the subtext of this “debate” that jumps out for me is adoption. After all, people have been having sex -- shame or no shame, birth control or no birth control, ever since God said, (in renaissance English) “be fruitful, and multiply.” They’ll go on having sex, whether women can enjoy it safely or not, and when they do, sometimes, unplanned babies will be born. And in a world where single parenting (read “single mothering”) is being pathologized by law as leading to child abuse, those unplanned babies will have to go somewhere.  Read more >

Today holds particular importance to families like mine. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled today that Proposition 8 -- a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in California -- is not valid under the U.S. Constitution, a step that could lead to the right to marry nationwide.  Read more >

I had two small Black daughters and was torn between how to represent the police to them. Should I tell them that Officer Friendly was there to help them? Or teach them to avoid uniforms whenever possible? It was still a theoretical question until yesterday. Yesterday, my six year-old got a personalized lesson about who the police are when she met her very first police officer, face-to-face.  Read more >

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is reporting a surge in petitions for adoption by gay and lesbian foster parents in the past year. There is nothing surprising about this. For many years, the Florida foster system has been happy to place children in gay and lesbian homes while denying permanency to the children placed there, by banning gay adoption. Advocates for children in the public system have long bemoaned the ban, which has kept children in the state’s care when the expense and burden of this might have been passed onto enthusiastic, loving parents.  Read more >

Theresa Erikson hired gestational surrogates abroad (to avoid certain surrogacy laws in California), transferred embryos to their bodies, and when they passed the second trimester of their pregnancies, she found prospective adoptive parents for the to-be-born babies, telling them the babies were planned for intended parents (that is, the people who hire surrogates to bear their children) who had since backed out of the surrogacy arrangement. (Just to clarify, there were no original intended parents. The gestational surrogates were literally bred to provide healthy infants to a hungry adoption market.) When the babies were born, they went to these “new” parents to the tune of 100 to 150 thousand dollars.  Read more >