Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog wants to initiate a revolution for single-sex couples when it comes to adoption: According to the new policy Herzog has decided to promote, homosexual and lesbian couples will be able to legally adopt third-party children – meaning those children who are not the biological offspring of either of the couple’s members. This constitutes a breakthrough in the legal attitude toward the desire of same-sex couples to adopt. Until now, the legal precedent related only to situations in which one partner wanted to adopt the biological child of his/her partner, and to the Population Registry recognizing such an adoption carried out abroad.In recent months, four requests have been sent to the Social Affairs Ministry by same-sex couples who want the Children’s Welfare Service to find a child they can adopt. In addition, the same-sex couples have asked to be put on the list for adoption through government institutions. Following internal discussion in the ministry about the matter’s legal aspects, opinions have been prepared both by the Social Affairs Ministry’s legal adviser, attorney Batya Artman, and by the Justice Ministry. Last week, these legal opinions were sent to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz; they are currently awaiting his decision. Although the Justice Ministry does not consider the attention generated by the subject as a basic solution to the overall issue – it considers it as a specific solution to the couples in question – Herzog plans to treat these cases as precedents that will dictate the future work procedures for adoption by homosexuals and lesbians.
In recent years, there have been two significant legal precedents regarding the adoption of children by same-sex couples. In 2000, the High Court of Justice accepted the petition of Ruti and Nicole Brenner-Kaddish, after receiving an adoption order for the biological daughter of one of the women in California, and ordered the Interior Ministry to register the adoption as valid in the Population Registry. In 2005, the High Court decided that Tal and Avital Jarus-Hakak could be granted mutual adoption in Israel, allowing each of them to adopt the biological children of the other. Since then, about 80 similar requests have been made for “mutual adoption” within the family, and of the procedures that have been concluded, 25 resulted in an adoption order being issued. The procedures are very drawn out, since every such request must be investigated by a social welfare inspector, and these inspections take a long time because of a shortage of manpower.
The High Court, in an expanded panel of nine justices, last week dealt with a petition submitted by the state, for an additional discussion of the decision in the Brenner-Kaddish case. During the discussion the prosecution promised the court that the Interior Ministry would treat the 2000 decision as binding from now on, and would therefore register the adoption of children by single-sex families in the Population Registry, if the adoption order was received abroad. The justices recommended that the state retract its petition, and the state is supposed to give its decision within a week.The Social Affairs Ministry says Herzog is trying to exploit the momentum created in the wake of the High Court proceedings to advance the handling of homosexual and lesbian couples and to equate their status with that of heterosexual couples. This although the Social Affairs Ministry has for years related only to heterosexual families as “normative families.”
“We have to work in the spirit of the Brenner-Kaddish and Jarus-Hakak decisions,” Herzog told Haaretz, “and to allow same-sex couples who meet the full criteria for parenthood to get on the list for adoption. The modern viewpoint, that there are varied family structures, means that the state must also adapt itself to such possibilities. In an advanced country there is no choice but to recognize this and to examine whether these parents are capable of raising a child with love and affection, according to the accepted criteria. I’ve passed on this instruction to professional groups and I hope that the attorney general will support it.”
A bill in favor of amending the Child Adoption Law is currently pending in the Knesset; its aim is to solve the problem of recognizing adoption orders issued abroad. In addition, in the past two years, in the wake of the affair of the “contested baby” – a battle between the biological parents of a baby and his potential adoptive parents, in which the High Court decided in favor of the adoptive parents – a committee headed by retired judge Shalom Brenner has examined the amendments in the Child Adoption Law, in part because of the changes that have occurred in Israeli society regarding the definition of family. Brenner recently resigned from the committee and Herzog and Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann have signed an appointment order for retired judge Yehoshua Gross, who will be the committee’s new head.
According to the Justice Ministry, “The requests submitted recently relate to situations that have not been discussed in court decisions to date, and therefore have given rise to new questions of interpretation of the articles of the Child Adoption Law. The attorney general has not received a recommendation for an overall and fundamental solution that grants same-sex couples the opportunity to adopt children through the Children’s Welfare Service the same way heterosexual couples do. But he was presented with questions regarding the interpretation of the existing law, stemming from several concrete requests.”
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