“What Makes a Parent? A brutal custody battle between two women raises questions about who has a right to rear a child—and could redefine the legal meaning of family.” (New Yorker, May 22, 2017) is a good companion to today’s post about children in Spain.
A child and two adult women, none of whom have any genetic relationship to each other, serve as the raw material for a “family” court battle that will consume probably over $1 million in legal fees (“for eight days Hamilton’s witnesses came to court”). Some cheerful excerpts for those planning a career in divorce litigation: “This wasn’t a final ruling in the case” and “The next day, [one woman’s lawyer] secured an interim stay on [the judge’s] decision. … The appeal would take months, and would be preceded by a decision about whether Abush would be expected to remain in New York during that time.”
What an appalling story: the lesbian couple, one of whom is a “photographer,” probably a trust fund baby where after generations of doing nothing the trust has worn a bit thin, the other someone who seems to have made a bundle helping Apple design their stores. These two women cohabit and decide that their lives would be way more fun if they had a little one running around their NYC apartment. So they decide to buy a little Ethiopian boy because he looks sooo cute in the photos (kind of like buying a dog out of a catalog– ohhh that poodle is sooo cute, I must have it), one of the women adopts the little Ethiopian boy, the couple break up, the one who didn’t adopt the kid tries to assert “parental” rights, the scuzzy lawyers, the ding dong judge who all allows the case to go on forever and ever as the disappointed “parent” tries to paint the other one as uncaring because she hasn’t gotten him braces yet, etc, etc. All these shenanigans are supposedly to try to figure out what is “in the best interests of the child” — the preposterous “legal standard” that makes any legal dispute involving a child into a circus. You really have to wonder: what is any of this doing in a court?
Please send that boy back to Ethiopia, before these lesbians completely ruin his life.
This story illustrates several faults in our family law system.