In Maryland, ‘for the kids’ is an evolution in the campaign for same-sex marriage

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/in-maryland-for-the-kids-is-an-evolution-in-campaign-for-same-sex-marriage/2012/10/13/f532e392-0eb5-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html?hpid=z2

There had been little time to dwell on the uncertainty until now, as she entered the quiet courtroom.

For Rachel Dabney, the right to be legally called a mother would be decided in Docket No. 24-A-12-000043. Whether she would be deemed “fit and proper” to raise the children whose diapers she had been changing for more than a year now rested in the hands of a judge, an inch-thick case file and exhibits A through O.

Since Dabney and Amy Rice spent hours talking on their first date at Hamburger Mary’s in 2003, the two New Jersey transplants had moved from the District to the suburbs, bought a home, saved for fertility treatments and shared in the awe of childbirth. But when they left a delivery room in Montgomery County last year, after Rice had given birth to twin boys, they quickly fell into the legal bog of every lesbian couple with a child in Maryland. Because Rice was the one to give birth, she was, in the eyes of the state at least, the twins’ mother. Dabney was a legal stranger, her name not on the children’s birth certificates.

In the 14 months since the twins were born, the legal limbo had hung over their lives. Dabney had quit her job as a home decorator to care for the boys. She was the one who built the pirate-themed nursery and painted a mural of sea creatures.