Donna McDonagh’s daughter was born in the autumn of 2006 – an exciting time in the province of Ontario for lesbian couples. A law was about to change, allowing two moms to put their names directly onto a child’s birth certificate. Their baby was the first in Ottawa to have a birth certificate listing two women as parents.
Both McDonagh and her partner, K., were in their 40s when they decided to start a family, but K. had embryos that she’d created some years earlier, using her own eggs and donor sperm. McDonagh was there when the embryo was transferred into her partner’s uterus, there for the doctors’ appointments, the prenatal classes and the birth. Because K. was self-employed, and McDonagh was a federal government employee, McDonagh took parental leave and was the primary caregiver for most of the first 11 months of their baby’s life.
McDonagh had every reason to be confident that she was a full parent before the law. Not only was her name on the birth certificate and their child’s last name a hyphenated hybrid of the two moms’ surnames, but the two women had signed an order of joint custody, declaring that their intention was to be co-parents with equal say in the child’s life. She was granted paid – and topped-up – parental leave. She’d successfully applied for the baby’s health card and social insurance number and was named as “parent” on the application for a passport. Wills, powers of attorneys, codicils – everything signalled the same intent, that McDonagh and K. would play equal roles as parents. (K. denies this was ever their intention.)
“I really felt that we were good,” McDonagh recalls. McDonagh was aware that birth certificates were just the beginning, that there were other laws that were still awaiting revision, but she was confident that it would just be a matter of time before everything was updated as Justice Paul Rivard had said it should be in the 2006 landmark case that made the birth-certificate changes they had taken advantage of. “I trusted in that process.”
But in August, 2009, the relationship ended. At the time of the breakup, K. agreed that there would be joint custody. But there was a loophole in one of the laws governing parentage, which could be used to cut McDonagh out.
Read More Here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/lgbtq-families-anxiously-await-ontarios-proposed-parenting-law-changes/article32000251/#DVP
