- Protecting Families: Standards for LGBT Families
- What Can You Do About This?
- The Laws Do Not Always Protect Our Families
- The Standards

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## Protecting Families: Standards for LGBT Families

We are incredibly proud of our community’s successes in creating families with children and doing the loving, joyful and challenging work of parenting. Bringing children into a family is a transformative experience and integrates us into the larger community. However, our children are vulnerable to being separated from their parents because the law does not always fully recognize our families.

There are steps you can—and should—take to protect your child’s relationship with his or her parents to prevent that devastation:

- DO obtain legal recognition of your parent-child relationships and make it a top priority! Being busy is not an excuse.
- DO work together to come to an agreement if your relationship ends, especially when you have children. Do not begin by fighting in court. Litigation can bankrupt you, deprive your child of one of his or her parents, and make law that will hurt others for years to come.

There is so much at stake for your children, for you, and for our larger community—PLEASE read on and consider this message.

### Failure to Legally Protect Your Parental Relationships Could Result in Losing Those Relationships.

You cannot fully protect your legal relationship to your children unless you take affirmative steps. The good news is that there are affirmative steps you can take in almost every state. Failure to take advantage of these steps creates the significant risk that your child will be unprotected because one of you is not seen as a “parent.” Imagine your child at the hospital and the non-biological or non-adoptive parent shows up first and is denied access to the child needing comfort or medical decision-making. In an emergency, do you want to rely on the mercies of others who may be homophobic or transphobic? If one of you dies, do you want the child placed with extended family members or with the state while the survivor launches a court battle to maintain custody of your own child? You can avoid these outcomes!

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