How Alberta pioneered gay adoption

 

Interesting report on how Alberta in Canada pioneered Gay Adoption appears in today’s Calgary Herald.

While the provincial tories were fighting same-sex marriage, their privatization zeal was opening the door to a new kind of adoption that has put alberta at the forefront of same-sex parenting

Katelyn Kerik was 17 years old when she found out she was pregnant.

"The nurse came in, sat down and said, 'It's positive.' I started to cry," Kerik says, recalling the day nearly two years ago she found out she would be having her first child well before graduating high school.

Kerik grew up in smalltown Alberta and now lives in Red Deer. While she currently has a good relationship with her mother, she was in and out of foster care as a child. Stress began to overcome the teen during her pregnancy as she worried that, without a highschool diploma, no source of income and little support from the birth father, she wouldn't be able to raise her child.

 

"I went home and told my mom and stepdad that I wanted to keep my baby. I didn't know how it was going to work out. All I knew was that I really wanted to be a mom," she says.

As her pregnancy progressed, however, worstcase scenarios began to flood her mind. What if her baby was taken away and put into foster care? Would she be strong enough emotionally to raise a child? Could she afford it? Or was the same difficult childhood Kerik had experienced in the cards for her baby? It was that vicious circle of family strife that Kerik wanted to avoid with her baby girl, whom she planned to call Abigail.

Soon after, a social worker alerted Kerik to an Alberta-based agency called Adoption Options that encourages so-called open adoption. In that, birth mothers choose adoptive parents and maintain relationships with the baby and its new family.

Kerik began to think this could be the answer she was searching for.

There were several things the teen was looking for in parents. An artistic and creative environment was at the top of the list. She was also determined to pick educated people who could provide for the child financially.

"I wanted people who would raise her with a very open-minded outlook on life," Kerik says.

When she came to the file of a couple with all of these qualities, Kerik knew she had found the perfect parents for her baby.

That couple was Dennis Garnhum, artistic director of Theatre Calgary, and Bruce Sellery, a journalist and author specializing in financial planning advice.

Kerik's mother and grandparents supported her decision regarding adoption. But when the teen explained her intention to hand her child over to two gay men living in the heart of Calgary, eyebrows raised.

"They were expecting a traditional family," Kerik explains. "My mom and the rest of my family wanted me to reconsider and look into finding a straight couple."

But the teen mom was adamant Garnhum and Sellery were the best choice.

Today, as Garnhum, 43, and Sellery, 40, watch their adopted one-year-old Abby toddle over to her toys, letting out enthusiastic gurgles as she plays, they recall their adoption application back in 2007. The couple was expecting to have to jump through plenty of hoops to qualify.

"Adoption, marriage . . . These were things that would never be an option to me in my mind growing up," Garnhum says. "I didn't think about it because I knew it would never happen for me."

Despite their fears, however, the couple was pleasantly surprised to find out that gay and lesbian parent placements had been happening in Alberta since at least 1999, seemingly with little fuss or backlash. As more gay couples move toward adoption, Alberta has emerged as a pioneer, thanks to some unlikely, and perhaps unwilling, champions: former Tory premiers Don Getty and Ralph Klein.

Yes, Klein, the same former premier who threatened to invoke the notwithstanding clause so Alberta could opt out of allowing same-sex marriages when the federal government legalized the unions in 2005. Even as Alberta's Tories fought same-sex advancements, their privatization philosophy was paving the way toward open adoptions. That, in turn, has made Alberta a groundbreaking jurisdiction in same-sex adoptions.

The roots of open adoption in Alberta stretch back to the 1980s, when the provincial government began to rewrite the Child Welfare Act (now called The Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act).

Marilyn Shinyei, who co-founded Adoption Options in 1985, says one of the reasons the government was keen to overhaul the legislation was that both Getty and Klein were eager to keep stress off the public system by allowing private adoption.

By 1989, the province had formalized rules for adoption without government involvement. The regulations required all private agencies be licensed, and staff members to have a university degree in social work. What emerged was a push by adoption agencies like Shinyei's toward open adoptions.

 

Read the full article here -

How Alberta pioneered gay adoption