RAISE Children
Legal security for families is critical, especially now. While New York has made significant strides towards protecting the myriad of family structures that exist in our state, there’s always more work to do!
The Rights Act Initiating Security and Equality for Children, known as RAISE Children, aims to protect all New York families by creating and codifying clearer, more streamlined paths to parental recognition. If enacted, RAISE Children would:
- Create a streamlined adoption process for people who are already parents under New York law (“Confirmatory Adoption“)
- Permit courts to grant multi-parent adoption petitions
- Establish clear criteria for various presumptions of parentage, and
- Codify a New York court’s ability recognize that children sometimes have more than two parents.
RAISE Children (S.4555/A.4880) is sponsored by Senator Hoylman-Sigal and Assemblymember González-Rojas and was introduced on Thursday, February 6, 2025. For more information, watch our legislative briefing from February 13, 2025.
Frequently asked questions
The Rights Act Initiating Security and Equality for Children, or RAISE Children, is a piece of legislation that creates and codifies clearer, more streamlined paths to parental recognition. It provides another path to LGBTQ+ family security, updates New York’s laws to recognize the many ways families form, creates clear frameworks for presuming and adjudicating parentage, and aligns custody and child support laws accordingly.
RAISE Children is sponsored by Senator Hoylman-Sigal and Assemblymember González-Rojas.
RAISE Children aims to protect all New York families by creating and codifying clearer, more streamlined paths to parental recognition. If enacted, RAISE Children would:
- Create a streamlined adoption process for people who are already parents under New York law (“Confirmatory Adoption”)
- Permit courts to grant multi-parent adoption petitions
- Establish clear criteria for various presumptions of parentage, and
- Codify a New York court’s ability to recognize that children sometimes have more than two parents
The legal relationship between parent and child is essential to a child’s wellbeing. Without legal recognition secured by court order, families may face discrimination based on the circumstances of a child’s birth, the identities of their parents, or the compositions of their families. As a result, children are left vulnerable. RAISE Children addresses this inequity by making adoption and parentage judgments more accessible for all New York families, including families created through assisted reproduction, LGBTQ+ families, families in which a parent and child do not share a genetic connection, and families with more than two parents.
Parentage is the legal relationship between a parent and child. From parentage, many rights and responsibilities flow, from mundane activities like school pickup and doctor’s appointments to more urgent needs like emergency medical care, custody and visitation if parents separate, and inheritance rights in the event of a parent’s death.
Confirmatory adoption is a widely supported, accessible, and efficient way to protect families. In New York today, completing an adoption requires an expensive and intrusive process, including a background check and a home inspection. This is true even when a parent is adopting their own child.
Confirmatory adoption is a more streamlined process that would protect certain families formed through assisted reproduction. Eight other states already have a streamlined confirmatory adoption process, and many others are considering similar legislation in the upcoming session.
A presumption of parentage is one of the ways in which states recognize parentage. It is an inference that someone is a legal parent based on certain facts. For example, all states have a marital presumption of parentage. In other words, when a married person gives birth to a child, their spouse is presumed to be the child’s legal parent.
RAISE Children codifies the preservation of child-parent relationships through multi-parent recognition, when such recognition is in a child’s best interests. Many children have more than two parents, both within and outside of the LGBTQ+ community. Take, for example, a family touched by death or divorce, where stepparents have played a significant role in a child’s life. These children love each of their parents, and failure to recognize these relationships legally can cause significant trauma and harm to a child.
Obtaining a second parent adoption, although it ended up being fairly straightforward, was time consuming, expensive, and demoralizing.
A social worker had to do a home visit and asked intrusive questions about both of our childhoods, histories, and lives. We had to get friends and acquaintances to write letters of recommendations, and then had to go before a judge who looked into our entire lives and had to make a determination about whether I was fit to be the parent of my own children. It filled me with fear and trepidation. We were fortunate that the actual court proceeding was short and worked out in our favor.
Have you ever worried about being recognized as your child’s legal parent? Did you, like Allie, have to jump through hoops to obtain a second parent adoption? Maybe, you’re navigating a family structure with more than two parents. No matter the background, we want to hear from you! Sharing your story helps us illustrate why this legislation is so important.
RAISE Children Coalition members
