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My son, E, was born in the spring of 2014. He was six weeks early and appeared after an agonizing three days of labour, and I held him seconds after he emerged, wailing, in the delivery room. I had conceived him, planned for him, helped weather a difficult pregnancy, and rejoiced when, despite his premature arrival, he was healthy and thriving. And yet, at the moment of birth – and for several months after that – I had no legal rights as a parent.
My partner, who carried and gave birth to E, had our son with the help of a known sperm donor, a friend of a friend with no interest in raising kids of his own, who volunteered to assist us. We drew up our own contracts (vetted by family members with legal expertise); we talked through our plans in depth. Our donor willingly – eagerly, even – signed away his parental rights in an informal capacity well before E showed up. And even so, due to our province's outdated legislation, I was prevented from legally including my name on E's birth certificate and being officially recognized as his parent. Like many other same-sex parents in Ontario, I was compelled to go through a confounding and expensive process to adopt my own child. How confounding? Our legal fees totalled several thousands of dollars (my partner, our donor and I were each compelled to retain our own lawyer); our paperwork was returned to us midway through the process because a judge mistook an original document for a faded photocopy. E was born in April. I wasn't legally considered his mother until late October.
Thanks to old-fashioned wording (which only dates back to 1990), Ontario's current birth-registration legislation presumes a baby is only ever born to two parents – a man and a woman. If you fall outside that paradigm, you must fight to be legally considered your own child's parent. (When a heterosexual man's wife or common-law spouse gives birth to a baby, whether or not his sperm was used to conceive that baby, he is presumed to be the child's father. And couples, lesbian or otherwise, who use an anonymous donor are able to register as their child's parents at birth.) This bureaucratic snag affects countless families: The 2011 census estimated that 10,000 children in Canada were living with same-sex parents, a number that's increased in the intervening half-decade and doesn't account for people who identify outside of a discrete gender.
In October, MPP Cheri DiNovo introduced a private-member's bill to the Ontario legislature, Cy and Ruby's Law, that seeks to overturn the existing legislation. If it passes, her bill will make it possible for families that exist in myriad permutations – multiparent arrangements, parents whose gender doesn't neatly conform to male or female – to be recognized, legally and substantively, from the moment their child is born. DiNovo's bill receives a second reading at Queen's Park today. This should be a no-brainer. And yet countless MPPs (my own included) are dragging their heels, a response that I find both baffling and offensive. When I wrote to my rep, Cristina Martins, I received an infuriating, non-committal letter informing me that "it can be complicated to define parentage," and that the bill (which had been introduced two months earlier) needed to be "reviewed"– along with the unhelpful information that "courts do…grant declarations of parentage." (Gee, thanks, I'm so glad that there's a possibility that I might be named my own kid's parent.)
What's truly perplexing is that Cy and Ruby's Law wouldn't even be setting a precedent: Four other provinces (Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia) have already revised their birth-registration legislation. An Ontario court ruled in 2006 that the existing law is discriminatory and unconstitutional. And yet, nearly a decade later, the provincial government has failed to take action.
It may seem petty to wring my hands over not being included on my child's original birth certificate. But there are more urgent matters at stake for those of us who must wait to be recognized as parents. If E had required emergency medical interventions while in my care, I legally would not have had the right to make those decisions. We would have faced major hurdles if I'd been travelling solo with him. And if we'd experienced the nightmare scenario wherein my partner had died in childbirth, the prospect that I would not have been able to keep my own child was very real. Those clinging to the existing framework seem concerned about some lesbian boogeymen out to steal unsuspecting men's sperm and deny them parental rights – a scenario that is as unlikely as it is bizarre. Why not streamline the process for the majority of families involved, and leave the courts to handle the rare instances of dispute? The status quo is a resource-draining, unnecessary, discriminatory bureaucratic ordeal, and it has to stop.