CAN HEATHER HAVE TWO MOMMIES IN CHARLOTTE? From The Charlotte World

[Eve: I couldn't find this article online, but here are excerpts from a North Carolina Christian newspaper.]

...And closer to home, Mecklenburg County officials will be pressing the state for answers on whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to adopt children in North Carolina.

That question was the subject of a recent closed session meeting of the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners. The meeting was prompted by a letter to Commissioner Bill James from an Asheville woman protesting the adoption of two Charlotte children by a homosexual couple. ...

Susan Esbenshade and her husband became parents several years ago when they adopted a little girl. The Esbenshades had hopes of enlarging their family again two-and-a-half years ago when they learned that the birth mother of their adopted daughter had given birth to twins at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte. The twins' aunt, Rebecca Lawrence, called the Esbenshades to tell them about the birth because she says the babies' mother wanted the couple to adopt the children.

The twins, a boy and a girl, were born prematurely in 2001 to a mother who had used crack cocaine during her pregnancy. The babies weighed less than three pounds at birth and had serious medical needs. Esbenshade, a nurse, says she and her husband were up to the challenge. They pursued adopting the twins through the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services (DSS).

What happened next is still unclear. Esbenshade says that she spoke numerous times to a DSS case worker who said she and her husband could not adopt the children because the Esbenshades were not Mecklenburg County residents.

The Esbenshades stopped pursuing the adoption in February 2002 when they were told the twins had been placed in a good home. "We were advised by another case worker," Esbenshade says, "that the children were in a wonderful foster home with great parents who not only wanted to adopt the twins but who were eager to establish a relationship with our daughter and were open to visitation." Esbenshade also says DSS told her that the foster parents had a medical background and "in fact the wife was a doctor."

Six months later, the Esbenshades learned news that stunned them. The twins' foster parents were in fact two homosexual men. There was no "wife" as they had been told by DSS.

Within the month, the Esbenshades hired an attorney to intervene for custody of the children. But despite being the adoptive parents of the twins' sister, and despite the birth mother's wishes that the babies be placed with the Esbenshades, their request was denied. Since then, one of the foster parents, a pharmacist who lives in Raleigh, has legally adopted the children. His homosexual partner is a stay-at-home caregiver to the twins.

The two men say that they were told by DSS that the Esbenshades didn't want the children because of their health problems. The Esbenshades say they never made such statements to case workers.

What really happened may never be known. The case file is closed to the public.

But the Esbenshades' call for an investigation has accomplished at least one thing: The ambiguity surrounding their case has drawn attention to the ambiguity surrounding North Carolina's state policy on homosexual adoption.

According to Suzanne Jeffries, a spokeswoman for the Mecklenburg County Department of Health and Human Services, the county allows only single-parent adoptions and adoptions by married couples. That means only one person in a homosexual couple can legally adopt a child.

But state policy is less clear on whether case workers could or should consider a person's sexual orientation when determining his suitability to be an adoptive parent. And state policy is also unclear on whether county agencies could or should be allowed to establish their own standards apart from the state for evaluating potential adoptive parents. ...
posted by Eve at 7:06 PM | Link |

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home