Seven gay couples would renew the lawsuits they filed to legally adopt their children to raise public awareness about the issue, rights campaigners and parents associated with the Taiwan LGBT Family Rights Advocacy Association said yesterday.
“We want to make more people see that these families do exist and there is a need for both partners to be named as their children’s parents,” association spokeswoman Tseng Yan-jung (曾嬿融) said.
Weng Kuo-yan (翁國彥), one of the couples’ lawyers, said that a court had rejected a previous lawsuit on grounds that homosexual couples do not meet the Civil Code’s definition of marriage.
“We really do need the guarantees of the Civil Code,” Tseng said. “Some parents do not have the right to sign documents for their children and have to rely on the kindness of strangers.”
Association members cited a range of problems from only one partner having the authority to sign children’s insurance forms to worries over guardianship of the children if the “legal parent” in the couple unexpectedly passed away.
“Because my partner does not have any legal relationship with our children, when I was in hospital after giving birth, I had to sign all of the documents myself, and she ran into difficulties when she came to see the children, as I was not capable of going myself,” said a woman who asked be referred to as Chieh-li (潔麗).
Tseng also reiterated the association’s opposition to the passage of a “partnership law” to give adoption and other legal rights to gay couples without revising the Civil Code — an alternative proposed by people opposed to amending the Civil Code.
“Amending the Civil Code is the only fundamental way to address this” she said, calling the partnership law a “stalling tactic” and “false issue,” because it would still be discriminatory as long as same-sex couples were denied legal marriage rights.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching