Supreme Court blocks Alabama court order in adoption case

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday granted an Alabama woman’s request to temporarily reinstate her legal adoption of the her former partner’s children, while the high court considers whether it will review the ruling in its entirety.

In an unsigned order, the court said the case would be put on hold while the woman, named in court papers as V.L., files a formal appeal of the September ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court.

The woman, only identified as V.L., adopted the children after deciding with her former partner to use artificial insemination. To ensure that both had secure parental rights, V.L., the non-biological mother, adopted the couples’ three children in Georgia in 2007, with E.L.’s support and written consent.

V.L., in her emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court, noted that the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision is unprecedented. Should the petition for a writ of certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. If cert is granted, the stay will remain in place until the final mandate from the U.S. Supreme Court is issued.

“I’m overjoyed that my children and I will be able to be together again”, the mother says in a statement. They estimated that hundreds of thousands of such adoptions now exist; the most recent statistics from the Williams Institute at UCLA indicate an estimated 65,000 adopted children live with a lesbian or gay parent. “Notably, the guardian ad litem – the representative of the children’s interests in the litigation – also weighed in at the U.S. Supreme Court, siding with V.L. and also asking for a stay”. “This awful Alabama decision has hurt my family and will hurt so many other families if it is not corrected”, V.L. added. Before this ruling, no state supreme court has refused to recognize a same-sex parent’s adoption from another state-or any out-of-state adoption-based on a disagreement with how the court issuing the adoption interpreted its own adoption laws. Her lawyers argued that “the Georgia court had no authority under Georgia law to award such an adoption, which is therefore void and not entitled to full faith and credit”. The biological mom, with whom V.L., had been in a long-term relationship, had not relinquished her parental rights. The couple split in 2011 and disagreed over custody arrangements. The case was then appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court. Florida, for example, bars all lesbian and gay adoptions.