A single woman’s decision to conceive a child with the help of an ex-boyfriend has led to a chaotic court battle over who possesses parental rights over the child, after the mother died from cancer.

The unmarried Montreal woman, 36, whose identity is subject to a publication ban by court order, desired to raise offspring a few years ago, reported the National Post. The woman reportedly explored the option of using the services of a fertility clinic that would artificially inseminate her with sperm from an anonymous donor. But when the expensive procedure proved beyond the woman’s budget, she turned to her ex-boyfriend and employed his services to help make a baby.

The woman reportedly paid the ex-boyfriend $1400 for what she considered to be a sperm donation, a service that he rendered to her through sexual intercourse. The woman considered herself a single mom, but allowed the father of the child to visit his daughter occasionally.

Three years after the child’s birth, the mother succumbed to cancer and left her young daughter in the legal care of grandparents.

The ex-boyfriend of the deceased single mother then entered the scene to make a parental claim for the young girl, arguing that he was her legal father. The case appeared before a Quebec court. The ex-boyfriend won a paternity ruling from the Quebec Court of Appeal last year, and that ruling was upheld last month when the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal of the case.

Labels: biological parenthood, Canada, children, donor conception, Fathers, parenting, sex

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It has triggered a boom in risky multiple births, created a generation of children with anonymous sperm-donor parents and spawned an underground trade in semen, eggs and surrogates.

Canada’s thriving fertility industry, however, will soon be left with virtually no official oversight, after the federal government decided this week to close down the oft-criticized regulatory agency for the field.

The government indicated in Thursday’s budget there is no point keeping Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC) open after a 2010 Supreme Court of Canada decision struck down much of the law it was supposed to enforce. The agency is slated to be shuttered by next March, its remaining functions taken over by Health Canada.

And though the court said large parts of the federal legislation fell under provincial jurisdiction, the provinces have shown little inclination to step into the breach.

Meanwhile, the issues that a Royal Commission argued almost 20 years ago urgently required regulation continue to percolate: the commercial trade in sperm, eggs and surrogates; the multiple births generated by in-vitro fertilization; the effect on children of having unidentified donor parents; and the long-term health impacts of fertility treatment on women and their offspring. ...

On top of all that, the RCMP now appears interested for the first time in investigating violations of the still-active sections of the law – a criminal ban on the purchase of eggs, sperm and surrogate-mother services – despite confusion about what the sections mean.

“It’s a mess,” said Sherry Levitan, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in the area. “The industry is just tied up in knots. Everybody is worried abut the next phone call. People are very nervous because nobody knows where the line is.”

Labels: Canada, donor conception, fertility treatment, IVF, surrogate motherhood

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As a Catholic, a mom and a lesbian, Ann Tesluk has a personal interest in how Catholic schools handle homophobia.

The mother of two children at St. Joseph’s Catholic Elementary School was delighted when the school board sent out a 20-page equity blueprint last month to help teachers tackle all kinds of discrimination, from race, religion to disability and sexual orientation.

Then she read the fine print.

It felt like “stepping back into the Dark Ages.”

In an otherwise upbeat chapter “Rainbow is for Sexual Orientation,” which urges teachers to treat homophobic language as harshly as racial slurs and encourages the use of gay guest speakers and the reading of gay-positive texts, sat an excerpt from the Catholic Church’s catechism #2358.

It explained that while discrimination is wrong, homosexuals are “objectively disordered,” an archaic way of saying they don’t follow the “natural order” of pursuing procreation.

Labels: Canada, Catholic Church, gay parenting, homosexuality, parenting, religion, schools

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Robin: The news that the majority of mothers under 30 are now unmarried — the subject of KJ’s blog post from earlier this week — didn’t really surprise my daughter Samantha and me. For the past year, we’ve been working on a book together called “Twentysomething,” steeping ourselves in social science research to write about what it’s like to be young, both in Sam’s day (she’s 27, part of the millennial generation) and in mine (I’m 58, born smack in the middle of the baby boom). So we kind of saw this one coming.

What leaps out at us about this study from Child Trends [pdf], a think tank in Washington, is what it reflects about the class divide. The proportion of births to unmarried mothers has been steadily increasing for years, but the increase has been especially rapid in one subset: young white women without a college education. The percentage of births occurring outside of marriage among white 20-something women in 2009 was 51 percent for those with no college and 34 percent for those with some college. Among those with a college degree, the percentage was just 8 percent. Having babies with or without a husband is apparently a significant point of departure between well-off millennials and their less privileged peers.

It’s not just behavior that’s splitting along class lines; it’s the very concept of how adulthood is supposed to unfold. Working-class women and middle-class women have different views about which comes when along the road to adulthood. Is it babies first, or is it everything else?

In the 1990s, Martha McMahon, a sociologist at the University of Victoria, interviewed 59 Canadian mothers of preschoolers and found that the sequence they considered ideal depended on their socioeconomic background. “Whereas middle-class women indicated they felt they had to achieve maturity before having a child,” Dr. McMahon wrote, “working-class women’s accounts suggest that many of them saw themselves as achieving maturity through having a child.”

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, Canada, children, class, culture, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting, unmarried parents, women

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"Confessions of a 29-year old virgin."

That’s the title of the emotionally revealing blog of four Fraser Valley virgins who are looking for some good men for marriage and “holy” sex.

The Abbotsford women’s online “virgin diaries” have suddenly made them media stars. Their quest for guys led to a video about them appearing Wednesday on the popular show of Ellen DeGeneres, who proceeded to get in some virgin jokes.

The virginal British Columbians, all of whom are 29 or 30 and evangelical Christians, were also to be videotaped Wednesday night for an upcoming appearance on HLN’s Dr. Drew Show.

And this Sunday evening three of the four young B.C. women will be starring on a pilot program called The Virgin Diaries on the TLC network. The program includes video of the young women dating eligible men, all of whom also happen to be virgins.

The extroverted B.C. females, all members of a small church in Abbotsford called The River, began their blog four months ago because they were tired of being stereotyped as defective for being virgins (actually, one confesses to being a “born-again” virgin who wants to start over). They are fighting back against a sex-saturated culture, and looking for guys, in the name of spiritual “purity.” ...

The four young women’s crusade for virginity before marriage goes against the grain of North American culture, where a poll released this week by online polling system Soda-Head suggested 70 per cent of North Americans think cohabitation before marriage is a good thing.

Labels: Canada, Christianity, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, virginity

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Social conservatives - the people who want to protect the institution of marriage - should be enraged about last week's court decision on polygamy. They've been focusing on the fact that the B.C. Supreme Court judge said the law against polygamy is constitutional. They haven't noticed the judge also decided there's nothing special about state-sanctioned marriage. ...

Canada's Criminal Code makes it illegal for anyone to be in "any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time, whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage."

But Judge Robert Bauman found himself confronted with non-fundamentalist polygamists and polyamorists who didn't fit into his theory that all polygamy is harmful. He needed to reclassify those people as non-polygamists. He did that by classifying them as common-law, and interpreting the Criminal Code section to apply only to people who are married.

But for that law to then be applicable to anyone, he needed a new, broader definition of marriage. Clearly the everyday working definition most Canadians use - based on the licences and vows that so many Canadians, religious or not, hold sacred - wasn't going to work, because polygamists do not have access to the official versions. And if he made the law apply only to people who did X or Y - held a ceremony, drew up a contract, used the word "wife" - he'd be telling lawbreakers where to find the loophole.

So Bauman created a third category of relationship: not common-law, not officially married, but married if a court says you are, based on undefined "circumstances." He referred to a famous 19th-century definition: "the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others." ...

What Bauman did say unequivocally - and the irony is that he did this in an attempt to protect the "critical institution" of "monogamous marriage" - is that people can be married without licences, without banns, without solemnizers, without rites, without vows, without any recognition by the state. Not "as good as" married. Not "might as well be" married. Married.

Labels: Canada, common-law, Marriage, polygamy

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Polygamy and gay marriage are importantly different, the B.C. Supreme Court has said.

“The alarmist view expressed by some that the recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage will lead to the legitimization of polygamy misses the whole point,” B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman wrote in upholding the polygamy ban last week. Plural marriage is full of “harm,” he says, but gay marriage is not.

The judge is very right. Polygamy has many victims. It often imprisons people in marriages based on sexist rules. It reinforces religious fundamentalism in many cases. Same-sex marriage, by contrast, gives freedom to gays, and arguably to straights as well. It is fundamentalists’ worst nightmare.

But the judge’s ruling does not go far enough in countering the homophobic myth, still prevalent, that a road to tolerance for polygamy has been paved by good gay intentions. When Canada debated same-sex marriage, we heard regularly that gay unions would lead to legalized plural marriage. ...

From a moral and historical perspective, gay marriage is the opposite of polygamy. Straight marriage is somewhere in between. Whereas gay marriage has redefined love and family in a positive way, for gays and straights alike, polygamy buries its head in smothering sand. ...

But the judge also leaves something else a bit unclear: exactly why free choice is inviolable (and constitutionally protected) for gay and straight monogamists, but not for polygamists, too. This is where my own claim – as a gay man who thinks polygamy is retrograde – runs into trouble.

Labels: Canada, feminism, gay marriage, Marriage, polygamy, religion, religious liberty

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A judge in Canada has upheld the country’s ban on polygamous marriages, but the case is likely to be appealed.

Canada legalised same-sex marriage in 2005 and polygamist supporters say it is therefore unfair to ban polygamy.

Miriam Chatwin, a fundamentalist Mormon, said: “We’re in the 21st century, you know, we have marriages of every kind”.

Ruling

“To say that I can choose to be gay, I can choose to be a swinger, I can choose to be whatever I want to be but I can’t choose to be in a relationship with more women and one man, I think it’s unrealistic.”

A decision on whether the ruling will be appealed is expected to be made in December.

Labels: Canada, gay marriage, polygamy

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The number of Americans getting married is at an all-time low, in line with other countries, and are also waiting longer to marry for the first time. ...

International figures indicate a distinct trend in waiting longer to legally become man and wife.

According to Statistics Canada, for instance, in 2003, when Ontario and British Columbia became the first two provinces to legalize same-sex marriage, the average age of marriage to someone of the opposite sex was 30.6 years for men and 28.5 years for women — an increase of about five years for both sexes since 1973.

In 2002, the average age of marriage in Canada was 30.4 years for men and 28.3 years for women, according to the data released in 2007.

In countries including the United Kingdom, Austria, Norway, Hong Kong and China, first-time marriages are now in the late 20s for women and early 30s for men. ...

Analysts also say younger people, in particular, may be increasingly choosing to delay marriage as they struggle to find work and resist making long-term commitments in the recent recession.

"People are no longer following some lockstep script about when it is time to get married," said Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan.

As a whole, U.S. marriages are now at a record low, with just 52 per cent of adults 18 and over saying they were joined in wedlock, compared to 57 per cent in 2000, according to the U.S. census data. The never-married included 46.3 per cent of young adults 25-34 — the first time the share of never-married young adults exceeded those who were married, 44.9 per cent, with the rest being divorced or widowed.

Labels: age at first marriage, Canada, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage

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Statistics Canada will no longer collect and crunch numbers on the country’s annual marriage and divorce rates, a sign both of cost cuts at the agency and the changing nature of relationships, as definitions get fuzzier and harder to track.

The national statistical agency published its last national figures on marriage and divorce rates last week. It has been collecting divorce data since 1972 and marriage data since 1921. It pegs the cost of reinstating the collection at $250,000. ...

It will also be trickier to assess what is going well. This week, Ontario said it would require every couple in the province hoping to split to attend an information session on alternatives to going to court before getting a divorce. Evaluating whether measures like that work, five years later, has become much more difficult, Mr. Benmor said.

Statscan says it will still examine trends in family composition through its census, conducted every five years, and general social surveys. But annual data on marriage and divorce rates won’t be replaced.

Labels: Canada, committed relationships, common-law, divorce, divorce reform, economics, family policy, family structure, Marriage

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Are they 'Generation Y Bother' — or are they smarter than their parents?

Members of Generation Y are living with their folks longer and delaying such rites of adulthood as marriage and children, new data show.

One prominent economist said that, far from describing a generation of slackers, the data actually signify how "frighteningly calculating" this current cohort of young adults is.

In a study released Tuesday, Statistics Canada compared this age group with Generation Xers and younger baby boomers when they were in their 20s. A survey done last year looked at Generation Y members born between 1981 and 1990. Generation Xers born between 1969 and 1978 were assessed in 1998, and the data on boomers born between 1957 and 1966 were gathered in 1986.

The study found that 51 per cent of Generation Ys between the ages of 20 and 29 lived with their parents last year. Just 31 per cent of Generation Xers and 28 per cent of late boomers lived at home during that same age period. ...

When it comes to marriage or common-law relationships, 33 per cent of the Generation Ys asked said they were in such a relationship in 2010. Generation X's marriage and common-law union rate was 37 per cent in 1998 and boomers in their 20s in 1986 had a 48 per cent chance of being in a long-term pairing.

Nineteen per cent of Generation Y members also reported having children last year. That compared to 22 per cent of Generation Xers when they were the same age and 29 per cent of late boomers, according to Statistics Canada's data.

Tal said the figures on marriage and children also reflect how savvy Generation Y members are — biding their time until they are financially secure enough to support spouses and children.

Labels: Canada, children, demographics, economics, Marriage, parenting

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...In 1971, 68% of college graduates were men between the ages of 25 and 29, but by 1981 that number had dropped to just 54%. Thirty years later, the number of graduates who were male was 42%. A Youth In Transition survey in 2003 discovered that while 38% of nineteen-year-old women were attending university, only 25.7% of their male peers had done the same.

Societal Consequences

This higher education gap coupled with young women delaying childbearing so they can establish careers has resulted in a plummeting marriage rate. Because people tend to marry peers, men without higher educations are not considered prospects by women with degrees. The pool of available partners is reduced for both men and women. Who would have thought that forty years ago?

Labels: Canada, class, economics, Marriage, men, women

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A B.C.-born woman has won a landmark court battle to give children of gamete donors the same rights as adopted children to learn about their biological parents, after a judge struck down B.C.'s Adoption Act as being unconstitutional.

Olivia Pratten filed the lawsuit — the first of its kind in North America — to try to get the same rights for offspring born as a result of anonymous sperm, egg and embryo donors as adopted children have to learn about their complete genetic makeup when they come of age. ...

The judge also granted a permanent injunction to prohibit the destruction and disposal of the records of gamete donors, which includes anonymous donors of sperm, eggs and embryos. One of the important consequences of the ruling is that anonymous gamete donation will no longer be permitted in B.C.

The court's ruling will not be retroactive, meaning those who made anonymous sperm donations in the past will not have their records revealed to their offspring without consent of the donor. ...

Pratten's mother, Shirley Pratten, said earlier that the provincial and federal governments have failed to preserve the medical records of children born through gamete donors, creating a lost generation of kids.

She has made submissions to House of Commons and Senate committees since 1985, trying to win for her daughter the same rights as offspring who are adopted.

A study from the Commission on Parenthood's Future found children conceived by sperm donation are more likely to suffer from isolation and depression, and are roughly twice as likely as biological children to struggle with substance abuse.

Labels: adoption, Canada, donor conception, Fathers

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After a spate of tweets in support of a hockey agent's stand against gay marriage, Rogers Sportsnet moved Wednesday to fire on-air host Damian Goddard.

Sportsnet suggested in a release that their problems with Goddard did not start with his decision to share his political views online. ...

“In terms of what I said, I stand by it,” Goddard told the Star's Allison Cross at the door to his Oakville home on Wednesday evening.

“I'm a devout Roman Catholic. It's not about hate at all.”

Asked if his dismissal was the result of a misunderstanding, Goddard said, “The truth will come out.”

Goddard tweeted Tuesday in support of Burlington hockey agent Todd Reynolds. Reynolds made waves after he called out New York Ranger player Sean Avery for filming a TV ad in support of gay marriage, describing the player's position as “very sad” and “wrong.” Reynolds was raked online for his position.

“I completely and wholeheartedly support Todd Reynolds and his support for the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage,” Goddard nevertheless tweeted a day after the fact. He also invoked the name of Peter Vidmar, the former U.S. Olympic chief of mission who was forced to resign after his own stand against gay marriage was revealed.

Labels: Canada, Catholic Church, gay marriage, religion

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The B.C. Civil Liberties Association is calling for Canada's polygamy law that bans multiple marriages to be found unconstitutional and "relegated to the scrap heap of history."

In written submissions filed Thursday, the association urged B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman to find that the law offends fundamental freedoms.

The parties in favour of upholding the law have argued that there are numerous social harms associated with polygamy.

The association says that while harms can occur in plural relationships, there is no evidence that there are harms specific to polygamy.

Suspected criminal activity involving child abuse and sexual interference should be investigated and prosecuted but only using the applicable criminal laws, it says.

"For more than 40 years, Canadians have recognized that the state does not belong in the bedrooms of the nation," said the association's submissions filed in court. "It is now also time to recognize that the state has no role overseeing how many adults sleep in the bed, nor how many beds are in the room."

Labels: Canada, law, polygamy

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Canada’s six-year-old ban on commercial trade in human sperm and eggs is all but unworkable without major change, suggests a report commissioned by the federal agency that is supposed to enforce the criminal prohibition.

So long as men are not paid for sperm donations, the supply is likely to fall well short of the demand from fertility clinics, especially for single women and same-sex couples, indicates the analysis headed by a Hamilton, Ont., doctor.

The study for Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC) estimates a probable pool of 60 “altruistic” donors, with a demand from 5,500 patients.

But Dr. Edward Hughes, the report’s lead author, said Monday he believes Canada can still meet sperm and egg demand without paying people — if the federal government comes up with the hefty resources to launch a public-education and recruitment campaign, and a screening system to sift through potential donors. ...

Since its inception in 2004, the ban has been criticized by many in the fertility industry, who blame it for the fact that the supply of sperm has virtually disappeared in Canada now that donors cannot be paid fees. Patients here obtain more than 90% of semen from the United States, and the federal government appears to turn a blind eye to the fact they buy it from mostly for-profit sperm banks — a criminal offence in this country. ...

The report used evidence from previous studies to develop a mathematical model of demand and supply for sperm. It concluded that there was a need for more than 5,500 donor sperm inseminations, including 3,029 for same-sex couples, 1,287 for single women and 1,201 for heterosexual couples.

Labels: Canada, donor conception

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After pressure from homosexual activists, a committee of the Halton Catholic District School Board voted Tuesday night to recommend the scrapping of a policy that required schools to be faithful to Church teaching in the area of homosexuality. ...

The mainstream media, Marai, and other homosexual activists have focused discussion on the board’s decision to ban gay-straight alliances (GSAs), a policy that was instituted based on a directive from the Ontario bishops; but the targeted policy does much more than that.

It includes explicit wording to prevent instruction that undermines Catholic teaching. It also requires that teachers consult the Catholic Catechism’s teaching on homosexuality (paragraphs 2357-2358) when they address the topic, makes no mention of “sexual orientation,” and notably inserts “unjust discrimination” where the template policy had merely condemned “discrimination.” The policy also emphasizes that “equity” and “inclusion” must be interpreted in accordance with Catholic teaching, and are not acceptable unless they do.

The Catholic template policy that would replace the existing one, on the other hand, has drawn sharp criticism in part because it recognizes “sexual orientation” as a prohibited ground for discrimination, in direct opposition to a Vatican directive.

The Halton policy’s fate is expected to be determined by a vote at the board’s next meeting, January 18th, though there are hints that it could be delayed to February. ...

Chris D’Souza, a former equity officer for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board, and one of the major advocates of the equity strategy in the Catholic schools, claimed in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen that the public should not confuse Catholic teaching with the mandate of the government-funded Catholic school system. D’Souza, who has delivered over 1,400 workshops across Ontario in the last eight years, with presentations in over a dozen Catholic boards, has made it a key point in his presentations to Catholics that “equity” involves accepting the homosexual lifestyle itself.

Labels: Canada, Catholic Church, homosexuality, religion, schools

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Marriage rates are declining – we’re tying the knot later, if at all – and yet we remain a culture obsessed: witness the slate of wedding-related reality TV populating the airwaves.

This contradiction has not gone unnoticed by Sue Ridout, a Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker who became interested in exploring marriage in modern times when she came across what she found to be some surprising statistics coming out of the 2006 census.

For the first time in Canadian history, she learned, there are more single than married people in this country.

“It just seemed like a really interesting tipping point,” Ridout said this week. “It raises all kinds of questions.”

For her documentary Thoroughly Modern Marriage, which airs on CBC-TV’s Doc Zone on Thursday, Ridout profiled couples in some non-traditional situations: an interracial couple for whom race appears to be a non-issue as they prepare for their $100,000 wedding (they won it at a wedding fair); a 45-year-old bride overcoming her fears about divorce; lesbian wives with a young child; an older couple living in separate apartments in the same house; a young couple who regularly (and separately) engage in sex outside their marriage; and the Quebec parents of two children who have no plans to marry. ...

Married for 26 years and the mother of two grown daughters, Ridout bristles at the notion she should be congratulated for accomplishing marital longevity. “It makes me uncomfortable when people say that, because everybody’s different, because people divorce for all kinds of different reasons and people stay together for all kinds of different reasons. Because I don’t like to imply that something is a success as opposed to a failure.”

As for her documentary, she wants to make it clear: This is an investigation, not a celebration.

“The last thing I want to do is come across as some kind of marriage booster.”

Labels: Canada, cohabitation, divorce, gay marriage, Marriage, parenting

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The good ol' tradition of marriage is not extinct, but the numbers certainly are dropping.

Moving up the relationship ranks is the very modern - and considerably cheaper - option of living together, sans the 'I dos'.

"It's the first time in Canada there are more unmarried people than married people," explains Gemini-award winning documentary filmmaker Sue Ridout, producer and director of the new hour-long doc entitled, "Thoroughly Modern Marriage" (Dreamfilm Productions).

But, despite the popularity of common law and even the high rates of divorce, the institution is still likely to survive, Ridout believes. ...

According to Statistics Canada, in the past 25 years, common-law unions in Canada have more than tripled. ..

Regardless though, even pairs who sign on the dotted line are holding off longer than ever.

At the end of the '70s, the average marrying age for women was 23 and 25 for men. That number has jumped significantly, to 28 for women and 30 for men.

"People are seeing marriage as a capstone to their relationship - perhaps they've purchased a condo, maybe had a child ... and later on they're turning to each other and saying, 'hey, maybe we should get married.'"

Labels: Canada, committed relationships, common-law, Marriage

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Canada's fertility laws are driving infertile couples who are desperate for babies into the black market or abroad and need to be reformed, critics say.

The 6-year-old law prohibiting payment for sperm, eggs or surrogacy services has Canadians seeking paid surrogates in India. They're travelling to the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Romania and the Czech Republic for in vitro fertilization using donor eggs. Some are buying fresh sperm over the Internet.

Only days ago, Health Canada issued an advisory warning about the dangers to mothers and their future children of using fresh donor semen for assisted conception. Message boards, Facebook groups, ads and websites are offering free sperm for willing recipients.

Labels: Canada, donor conception, economics, surrogate motherhood, women

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