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Two Mothers in Law and Fact

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Abstract

What is the proper balance between legislative and judicial innovation and between formal and functional family recognition once legislatures have addressed gay men’s and lesbians’ families? In the civil-law jurisdiction of Quebec, legislative reforms allow two women to register as a child’s mothers. But judges have recognized a second mother ‘in fact’ by orders sharing custody where the parties had not used the new legislative channels. Such judicial creativity is reconcilable with the civil law and comparative scholars should flag it as a valuable resource. But it risks undermining legislative choices about family recognition. Perhaps the option to give a child a second mother includes the choice for a lesbian birth mother not to do so. Once two women become thinkable as spouses and mothers, judges risk inappropriately pressing a rich range of queer kinship possibilities into standard models.

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Notes

  1. [‘dérangeante’].

  2. Art 599 CCQ.

  3. An Act to amend the Civil Code and other legislative provisions as regards adoption and parental authority, Bill 81, Quebec, 39th Legislature, 2nd Session, First Reading 13 June 2012, clause 60, would provide that a ‘father or mother who is de facto or de jure the sole parent to exercise parental authority may, with the authorization of the court, share the exercise of parental authority with his or her spouse provided the spouse has been living with the child for at least one year’.

  4. Arts 521.1ff CCQ.

  5. Art 538.2 para 1 CCQ.

  6. Art 114 para 1 CCQ.

  7. Art 538.3 para 1 CCQ.

  8. [1987] 2 SCR 244; see since 1994 art 605 CCQ.

  9. 2007 QCCA 1640, [2008] RJQ 49.

  10. While Quebec law now allows same-sex couples to adopt, countries of origin continue to forbid inter-country adoptions by two persons of the same sex: Roy 2010, [25] [151].

  11. Supra n 9 [11] [‘projet commun’].

  12. 2010 QCCA 1561, [2010] RJQ 1904.

  13. Droit de la famille—092011 2009 QCCS 3782, [2009] RDF 587 [85].

  14. Supra n 13 [31]-[34].

  15. The Court of Appeal in the birth-mother case did not address this distinction from the adoption case. Strictly speaking, such silence regarding the presence or absence of a shared ‘parental project’ may be attributable to the disputes’ turning on custody, not filiation: legal identification as a ‘mother’ occurs under the rubric of filiation.

  16. On the irrelevance of the biological tie in residence matters, Re B [2009] UKSC 5, [2009] 1 WLR 2496, ‘explaining’ and correcting misinterpretations of Re G [2006] UKHL 43, [2006] 1 WLR 2305.

  17. Space does not allow full consideration of the moral and legal claims which gestation and childbirth might generate in the contexts of different- and same-sex partners. The substantial involvement typical of the birth mother’s female partner—prior to conception, during pregnancy, and in day-to-day child care—distances her from a genetic father whose chief participation occurred during conception. But recall that the birth-mother case was not an instance of mutually ‘planned lesbian parenthood’ (see generally Kelly 2011).

  18. Art 598 CCQ.

  19. [‘les fils de la parenté et du mariage … dessinent le parcours de l’affection présumée’].

  20. For the adoption case, Droit de la famille—072895 supra n 9 [15] [43] [48] [66] [72] [81]; for the birth-mother case, at trial, Droit de la famille—092011 supra n 13 [85].

  21. Droit de la famille—102247 supra n 12 [10], quoting from Droit de la famille—092011 supra n 13 [116].

  22. Droit de la famille—092011 supra n 13 [50] [‘parfaitement impensables à l’époque. Celui que l’on présente comme un “tiers n’est pas toujours un véritable “tiers face à la cellule familiale.’], quoted by the Court of Appeal in Droit de la famille—102247 supra n 12 [17].

  23. Droit de la famille—102247 supra n 12 [45] [‘Selon le droit, il n’a qu’une mère. Dans les faits, il en a deux.’].

  24. [‘la sapience du juge consiste à savoir capter ses faits’]. But on the French civilian judge’s incorporation of religion through ‘the prism of fact’ [‘le prisme de fait’], see Landheer-Cieslak 2007, 626.

  25. For a promising sign from France—a general judicial delegation of parental authority to the lesbian PaCS partner of the children’s mother, on their joint request, justified by the children’s interests—see J v D, TGI Bayonne, 26 oct. 2011, no 11/00950 : JurisData : 2011-023498.

  26. [‘en attendant d’hypothétiques réformes législatives, tout repose sur la jurisprudence’].

  27. See the conferral of parental status on a third parent, in an exercise of the court’s parens patriae jurisdiction, where the genetic father, birth mother, and her partner all wished to be parents, and where all wished to avoid the severance of ties that would follow adoption of the child by the second woman in substitution for the father: AA v BB 2007 ONCA 2, 83 OR (3d) 561, leave to appeal to SCC refused, (sub nom) Alliance for Marriage and Family v AA 2007 SCC 40, [2007] 3 SCR 124. Legislative amendments in favour of lesbian parents which provide a voluntary means for a couple to register as a child’s parents but no presumption attaching parental status to the birth mother’s partner, should she not declare parentage, are consistent with the intuition that untraditional family forms might be better recognized by consensus than by compulsion.

  28. The troubling exception applies to a donor who delivers his gift by sexual intercourse: the Civil Code contemplates that a bond of filiation may be established between such a donor and the child during the year after the child’s birth. That new bond of filiation will trump the parental status of the birth mother’s spouse, even if already established by birth registration. Art 538.2 para 2 CCQ. This provision commands a place in any large-scale study of law’s reluctance to relinquish the idea of Father.

  29. See the initial agreement by the lesbian couple and the donor that he should be an ‘uncle’ and the ‘disastrous situation’ that ensued when ‘the strong emotional effect on the father of having a son’ made him unable to keep to the agreement: F v M & C [2006] EWHC 1783 [171], [2007] 1 FLR 333 (Fam).

  30. eg Re P & L (Minors) [2011] EWHC 3431 [9] (Fam); TJ v CV & Ors [2007] EWHC 1952 [18] (Fam).

  31. Droit de la famille—111729 2011 QCCA 1180, leave to appeal to SCC refused, (sub nom LB v GN), 1 March 2012, File No 34441. The Court of Appeal did not directly undermine the single-parent avenue in the Code, concluding instead that the evidence failed to show that the deceased birth mother had concluded a parental project with the man’s consent to be a genetic donor. For refusal, as a matter of law, to accept a declaration that a woman’s cohabiting partner would not assume a parental role towards the child she had conceived via donated sperm, see from a common-law province Doe v Alberta 2007 ABCA 50, 404 AR 153, leave to appeal to SCC refused, (sub nom Doe v The Queen) [2007] SCR vi.

  32. It will be worth watching whether the legislative avenue for granting parental status to a couple and a known donor in British Columbia, by written agreement before conception, has effects outside its direct application, for example respecting custody. Family Law Act SBC 2011 c 25 s 30.

  33. Re P & L (Minors) (n 30) [5].

  34. A v B & C [2012] EWCA Civ 285 [30].

  35. A v B & C (n 34) [39]. She also expressed reservation about the term ‘donor’ as opposed to ‘father’ [48].

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Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the generous financial assistance of the Wainwright Fund of McGill University and of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and thank Alexander Steinhouse for his excellent research assistance. For their comments on earlier versions, I am grateful to Susan Boyd, Angela Campbell, Justina Di Fazio, Pascale Fournier, Amanda Gibeault, Patrick Glenn, Daniel Monk, Alexandra Popovici, Priyanka Timblo, Régine Tremblay, Shauna Van Praagh, and Wanda Wiegers. Earlier versions were presented at the Third International Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists, Jerusalem; in the series ‘What “Doing Comparative Law” Means’, Institute of Comparative Law, McGill University; at the College of Law, University of Saskatchewan; and at the XIXe Congrès international des sociologues de langue française, Rabat.

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  1. Faculty of Law and Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, McGill University, 3644 Peel Street, Montreal, QC, H3A 1W9, Canada

    Robert Leckey

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Leckey, R. Two Mothers in Law and Fact. Fem Leg Stud 21, 1–19 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9206-9

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