CALIF. JUSTICES HEAR GAY PARENT RIGHTS CASES: From the Los Angelese Times

Several members of the California Supreme Court appeared sympathetic Tuesday to arguments that gay men and lesbians who rear their partners' children as their own without adopting them should have parental rights and obligations.

In a crowded, televised hearing, the court considered three cases involving disputes between estranged lesbian mates over children. The cases are likely to set the rules on child support, custody and visitation rights for thousands of gay couples who split up after having children.

A new state domestic partnership law that took effect this year gave parental rights to both partners in same-sex couples who are registered with the state.

But that law does not cover the children of couples who split up before this year. Neither does it cover the children of couples who fail to register. Only a third of the roughly 100,000 gay and lesbian couples in California are registered with the state, according to the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Without clearly indicating how they would vote on the cases, the justices observed repeatedly that official state policy favored two-parent families.

Justice Ming W. Chin, one of the more conservative members of the court, said the lesbians who were seeking parental rights in two cases, and the woman who had refused to pay child support in the other, were parents in almost every way before the couples broke up.

In the child support case, Chin said, both women breast-fed each other's babies, and one declared her partner's twins as well as her own birth child as dependents on tax forms and beneficiaries of her life insurance. ...

After listening to K.M.'s case, the justices considered a dispute in Los Angeles County between two lesbians who went to court before their daughter was born to declare the non-biological mother the other parent. The women split up when the child was 2, and the birth mother successfully challenged the pre-birth agreement in court.

Honey Kessler Amado, the lawyer for the birth mother, said such agreements should not take the place of adoptions. She said the agreement legally would not have prevented the semen donor from claiming paternity, because he did not donate his semen in a clinical setting where a formal waiver was required.

"It's beyond debate that his rights could not have been cut off by this agreement," Amado said.

Baxter, who has long expressed concern about arrangements that allow for multiple legal parents, wanted to know what would happen if the court determined that both women were the parents and the sperm donor later claimed paternity.

"There is a biological male involved in this case," he said.

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