Imagine waiting anxiously on the day your child is born. Minutes tick past into hours. You wonder what the child will look like; you hope it will be healthy and happy; you know it will be loved. Then, the child is here, and your new life begins! For the rest of your days, you are a parent.

Except for some parents, it’s not that simple. For same-sex or transgender parents, although you are your child’s parent, outside of Connecticut you are at the mercy of other state’s laws. And although those states have to recognize your marriage as valid, they don’t have to recognize that marriage makes you the legal parent of a child who is not related biologically to you. In some states, they don’t even have to recognize you as your gender. Imagine not being able to be there with your child, making decisions about their well-being, because some other state inexplicably decided that you did not have a legal parental relationship with your child.