Jan 13, 2006  |  By: LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN  | COMMENTS     

A month ago this week, my family got an early Christmas present.

With our two little girls bundled into tights and dresses, my partner, Donna, and I stood before a Superior Court judge who finalized Donna’s adoption of 7-month-old Carter.

As we explained to Dylan, who at age 4 seemed to grasp the solemnity of the occasion if not quite the meaning, the judge’s signature means Donna will always legally be Carter’s mother, just like me.

In many ways, it was merely a technicality.

Donna didn’t become Carter’s mother when the judge signed the papers making the baby that grew in my belly just as much her child as mine, any more than she became Dylan’s mother when we stood before a different judge back in 2001.

Donna was there when our little girls were conceived, there for their births. She’s changed diapers, bandaged boo-boos, soothed bad dreams.

She’s Mama, no matter what.

But the reality for families like mine seems increasingly lost on lawmakers around the country, who appear to have little better to do than try to legislate us out of existence.

I already knew that there are people in the world, including some notoriously anti-gay state legislators here in Georgia, who would like to stop my partner from adopting our daughters.

Now, in what may be the next wave of attacks on gay families, it appears some lawmakers would stop them from being born at all.

EVEN IF DONNA were banned from being our children’s legal parent, she would still be their mother in every practical sense.

The adoption just gives the kids the added security of knowing they would stay with her if something happened to me, and added support like Social Security benefits if something should happen to her. Rights like these are important, critically so, but without them, my family would still exist.

Bans on gay adoptions hurt us, but they are really designed to target gay parents who are adopting children who were not born to them. And of course, the people the bans hurt the most are those children, who languish in foster care while good potential parents who are gay pine for kids to love.

Adoption only made my family more secure, but donor insemination created it. So I am particularly horrified by a bill introduced in the Virginia legislature last week that would prevent lesbians like me from having children through what is often known as “assisted reproduction.”

Rep. Robert Marshall (R-Manassas) sponsored the measure that would forbid medical professionals from providing to unmarried women “certain intervening medical technology” that “completely or partially replaces sexual intercourse as the means of conception.” The bill provides a list of medical procedures, including “artificial insemination by donor” and invitro fertilization.

Equality Virginia, the state’s gay political group, accurately denounced the measure as a “direct attack” on gay families. But unfortunately, it isn’t a novel idea.

A similar, even more extensive measure was introduced in the Indiana state legislature last year by state Sen. Patricia Miller (R-Indianapolis). Her bill would have required all “intended parents” using assisted reproduction to be married, and also to go through a complicated assessment process conducted by agencies that normally place children for adoption.

In addition to information such as education and employment, the assessment would have included data on subjective issues like the “family lifestyle” of the parents and their participation in religious activities.

Needless to say, gay rights advocates were outraged. So were many heterosexual women — unmarried and married — who turned to fertility doctors when they were unable to conceive with their male partners. They argued that their medical problems shouldn’t force them to jump through additional hoops not required of anyone else who wants to have a baby.

Surprised by the level of criticism the bill generated, Miller withdrew it in October.

By narrowing the scope of the Virginia bill to focus only on whether women using assisted reproduction are married, Marshall may have hoped to avoid some of that controversy. But while his bill is less intrusive, it is also more obvious in its bias.

At least by requiring assessments — however fraught they might have been with the potential for discrimination based on education, religion or otherwise — Miller’s bill acknowledged that some married straight people won’t be good parents.

According to Marshall, married women are automatically deserving of having children, and the rest of us automatically aren’t.

ON FIRST GLANCE, the Indiana and Virginia bills seem blatantly unconstitutional. In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court held that the right to privacy includes a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy with the help of her ...