WTE: The lunacy in Texas calls for sound family law

The 255th Family District Court in Dallas, Texas became national news last week. Denial of parental rights, divorce, in vitro fertilization (IVF), family court and transgender ideology all came together in a toxic stew. What unfolded there holds powerful lessons for Wyoming policymakers.

It started when Jeff Younger and Anna Georgulas used an IVF clinic and donor eggs to purchase two male embryos. The twin boys, James and Jude, were born in 2012. By 2015 Georgulas changed her mind about marriage to Younger. That same year, she started teaching three-year old James that he was a girl named Luna.

If a parent gaslighted her child on any other fact of life, courts would call it mental abuse. But on October 21, a Dallas jury ruled that James’ father should be denied his right to protect his son from the abuse for not going along with it.

The jury wanted to give Georgulas the power to force James’ father, and everyone else, to participate in the gaslighting. The trial suddenly became national news. Judge Kim Cooks took the unusual step of taking a three-day recess before pronouncing the final verdict.

Texas Governor, Greg Abbot, asked his Attorney General and the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate. Other elected officials called for laws protecting children from irreversible chemical and surgical transitioning prior to the age of consent.

On October 24, 2019, Cooks set aside the jury’s conclusion. She assigned Younger and Georgulas 50/50 joint conservatorship with a “parenting coordinator” to resolve disputes. James will be spared chemical castration unless the parenting coordinator sides with Georgulas. There is also a gag order on both parents.

All this spotlights the travesty of family courts. How did we ever get to the place where a judge is the sole deciding factor between a boy and his bodily integrity? Had Cooks ruled the other way, all the legal power in Texas would have helped Georgulas indoctrinate her son in an impossible fiction. She might have even been able to inject a healthy, male minor with life-altering chemicals.

No-fault divorce laws gave us family courts. Plumbers are legally held to their contracts more rigidly than parents are held to sacred marriage vows. Courts that cannot even determine who is at fault for wrecking the home, are somehow expected to determine every other detail of the rest of the child’s life. They police everything from how parents can cut their children’s hair to what can be said around the kitchen table.

IVF also looms large in this story. James and Jude were not conceived in the marriage bed but in a laboratory dish. The eggs were bought from someone who was willing to let her body be exploited for money. The boys are neither the biological offspring of Georgulas nor adopted. What effect the procurement of sex-select embryos has on parental bonding has never been studied.

Nevertheless, we have legislators and lobbyists right here in Wyoming who want to rewrite family law to legalize “eggsploitation” and surrogacy. Last January HB 289 “Codification of marital rights” was introduced into the Wyoming legislature. This was nearly identical to previous year’s HB 109 “Codification of parental rights.”

Neither bill was about preserving the natural rights of parents. Rather, they rewrite family law to deny the rights of natural parents and transfer them to “adjudicated parents” who have no biological or adoptive ties to the children. Both bills died without a hearing. But the same special interests that made this lunacy possible in Texas will keep trying in Wyoming.

IVF technology commodifies babies. Vast sums of money changes hands. Customers are given unrealistic promises. Designer babies that disappoint become unwanted.

When embryos are sold or discarded based on gender and other traits, personhood itself is a casualty. After all, if girls can be discarded as embryos, why should the sex of a toddler be any more valuable?

Children are not products to be sold. They are gifts to be received. Every child has a mother and a father. He deserves to know them. He deserves to be loved by them. If Wyoming wants to be a just society, all family law should be directed toward that goal.

One day James will be an adult male. He will still be dealing with the trauma of this lunacy. One day both James and Jude will want to know their genetic mother. Even if records of her existence are destroyed, genetic testing will likely enable them to find her.

We can no more erase a person’s genetic makeup than we can erase parentage. Nor can we erase a person’s natural longing to know one’s self and one’s family. It is irresponsible to live today as though we could.