On August 9, 2024, Governor Maura Healey signed An Act to Ensure Legal Parentage Equality, or the Massachusetts Parenting Act (MPA), marking the first update to Massachusetts parentage laws in 40 years. Effective as of January 1, 2025, the MPA will modernize the language in the Commonwealth’s laws on parentage to make provisions more inclusive – such as replacing “paternity” with “parentage” and “child born out of wedlock” with “nonmarital child.” These changes recognize and protect parents using surrogacy, in-vitro fertilization, and other methods of assisted reproduction, as well as LGBTQ+ parents, by affording them with the same rights as heterosexual parents, including around issues of medical and educational decision-making.
Despite being the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, Massachusetts is the last state in New England to update its parentage laws to include more comprehensive protections, such as clear standards to establish parentage through surrogacy, guidance to the Probate and Family Courts to resolve presumptions of parentage and competing claims for parentage, and granting LGBTQ+ community members the ability to establish parentage through administrative methods such as a voluntary acknowledgement of parentage (VAP), as well as allowing for more than two people to sign a VAP as legal parents. The Act also clarifies VAP language to include the federal requirement that a VAP is the equivalent of a judgment of legal parentage, and that Massachusetts courts should give full faith and credit to valid VAPs from other states.
The Act also codifies parentage precedents from the Supreme Judicial Court, such as the 1999 court-created status of de facto parentage to ensure a higher standard (clear and convincing evidence of 7 factors) and provides notice and the opportunity to be heard to existing parents, adds safeguards against abuse, together with protections for domestic violence survivors and military parents.
The legislative updates afforded by the MPA will provide essential clarity and guidance to parents, attorneys, and judges, and protect and recognize non-traditional families throughout the Commonwealth.