A Message To The

LGBTQI Community

Since we opened our doors, my office has always viewed our clients as individuals or couples who wish to create or build or enlarge their families. It did not matter when we opened and today close to four and a half decades later, it still does not matter whether a client is married or single, gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual or questioning their sexual identity. People are people. Every person has the right, regardless of their sexual orientation, to build their family, to make their home and to enjoy the pleasures and challenges that parenting a child or children in a loving, embracing and happy family promises.

My office is unwilling to draw a distinction between a married heterosexual couple and a married or committed LGBTQI couple. Nor do we discriminate and deny single individuals access to our programs. On the contrary, we welcome single parents to work with our firm. It’s just that plain and simple as it should be. After all, especially for our LGBTQI clients who have already created their nuclear families or “families of choice,” you have done the essential and challenging groundwork. You come from communities where building families of choice has been the mandate for decades and the families you have created are embracing, passionate sand secure indeed.

LGBTQI families, built by choice and sometimes out of necessity and always on profound love and mutual respect, can weather any storm and flourish with attentive care. So we are here to assist you, like every one of our clients in our Assisted Reproduction Technology law, surrogacy and adoption practice, in enlarging your families and building upon the foundation you have already lovingly and carefully established.

My office helped its first LGBTQI clients back in the 1980’s and we have built on that success repeatedly since. The hallmark of our practice is a blending of our core values– love, respect, integrity, compassion and competence. We work with committed couples, or single individuals. Some of our greatest success stories involve single adoptive and intended parents. We are proud of our longstanding support of organizations in and supportive of the LGBTQI community. Long before marriage of LGBTQI couples was a reality, we successfully represented LGBTQI clients and helped them enlarge their families though the legal path at that time was far more complex with obstacles strewn in our path by state and local governmental agencies and potentially uncertain for them. We persevered and succeeded as did our clients.

For all of these reasons I do not offer distinct services for LGBTQI community members nor do I treat our LGBTQI clientele differently from my other clients. I see no reason to treat clients differently based upon their sexual orientation–it is disrespectful and demeaning to do so. All clients, regardless of their sexual orientation and their marital status are entitled to be treated the same and they are when you engage my services. I take tremendous pride in the fact that I work equally hard for every client. I recognize that in so doing there may be some situations during the family formation process when greater or additional sensitivity for LGBTQI individuals and couples is required. I address those situations on an individualized a basis in a thoughtful, caring and holistic manner.

As the song says, “Home is not a place we merely come to or we leave. Home is anywhere that love is shared and new families are made. It’s in the hearts of those who love us and whose arms surround us every day. ”