COURT EXTENDS RIGHTS TO GAY MOM: From the Indianapolis Star

When female partners in Indiana agree to conceive a child through artificial insemination, both partners are the legal parents, according to a groundbreaking decision this week by the Indiana Court of Appeals.

The court also chided state lawmakers for being slow to deal with advances in reproductive technology, urging the legislature to address the "current social reality" of unconventional families.

"No (legitimate) reason exists to provide the children born to lesbian parents through the use of reproductive technology with less security and protection than that given to children born to heterosexual parents through artificial insemination," Judge Ezra H. Friedlander wrote in the ruling issued Wednesday. ...

The appeals court overturned the ruling of Monroe Circuit Judge Kenneth G. Todd, who found Dawn King had no legal standing with the girl born to her former partner, Stephanie Benham, because King was not a biological parent. The child is 5 years old. ...

Previously in Indiana, the only way for same-sex partners to each attain legal parent status was through a "second-parent adoption," a costly undertaking that grants parental rights to a nonbiological parent. However, some judges in Indiana have refused to allow the second-parent adoptions for same-sex partners.

Fishers attorney Sean C. Lemieux, who represented King, said the case is about the rights of parents and children and was based on a state Supreme Court ruling involving a married heterosexual couple who had a child through artificial insemination.

"It is not the courts that have engendered the diverse composition of today's families," Friedlander wrote in the decision. "It is the advancement of reproductive technologies and society's recognition of alternative lifestyles that have produced families in which a biological, and therefore a legal, connection is no longer the sole organizing principle."

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