Her pregnant wife filed for divorce. The lawsuit changed who gets to be a parent in Pa.

Nicole Junior and Chanel Glover were ready to be mothers, so the same month as their wedding, they began pursuing IVF.

The two decided early on that Glover would be the one to become pregnant. Junior didn’t care about having a genetic connection — either way, she figured, the baby would be theirs. Still, she was unexpectedly thrilled when she and her wife were able to find a sperm donor who shared some of her features.

“We felt like we would be able to see my face in our child,” Junior, now 43, said. She and the donor both traced their ancestry to Benin and he was even a Sagittarius, like her.

The ensuing fertility tests, medications, and procedures cost upward of $30,000, and the couple split the bills down the middle. Once Glover became pregnant, they chose a name and began planning a baby shower.

Then their marriage fell apart.

Their painstaking efforts to conceive a child, detailed later in hundreds of pages of court documents, ultimately resulted in a healthy baby boy. But it has also resulted in a pitched battle between the two women with repercussions beyond their family, impacting the growing number of people in Pennsylvania who conceive using assisted reproductive technology. That encompasses everything from in vitro fertilization to donor eggs to surrogacy.

Courts will now take into account all the decisions and actions leading up to a successful birth, said Helen Casale, a fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who filed an amicus brief in Glover v. Junior.

“How did they come to this determination to plan this family together? Did they go to doctors appointments? Did they make decisions related to the type of person who’s going to be the sperm donor?” Casale said.

At the root, Junior and Glover were effectively fighting over a basic question, and in doing so changed how the law answers it: In Pennsylvania, in modern times, what makes a parent?

Pennsylvania has no law on the books defining parenthood, which means the courts have long had to decide the disputed bounds of family. For generations, judges relied primarily on biology and marriage to make that determination.

But now, when many more people are having children with the help of technology, and many more LGBTQ families are conceiving, biology and marriage don’t cover as much ground. Many families are raising children where one or both parents don’t share a genetic connection to the child.

Glover and Junior became a test case for the rights of such families. That was partly because for them, the process of becoming pregnant left behind a trail of contracts and promises that could later be scrutinized in court. They are also both highly educated former attorneys; there was a considerable amount of evidence for the courts to examine.

Their journey to motherhood required fortitude and patience. First, the two went through a battery of tests and consultations at their local fertility clinic. Once they signed up for IVF, Junior injected hormones into Glover’s abdomen every day for two weeks, alternating between the left and right sides, to prepare her wife for her egg retrieval. She waited in the parking lot with Glover’s mother during the surgical procedure.

After Glover became pregnant, Junior injected her wife with progesterone shots every morning for three months, to help prevent miscarriage, rubbing her muscles afterward to dissipate any buildup. They continued to visit their fertility clinic for blood work every week, until they transferred to an ob-gyn at Jefferson.

Along the way, the two signed a series of contracts: one at the fertility clinic and one at the sperm bank, where Junior was listed as “co-intended parent,” one with a doula, and another with a law firm in Philadelphia to establish a “second parent adoption,” to ensure that Junior would be recognized as the legal parent of their child, no matter where in the country they chose to live.

“Chanel and I are excited to share that WE’RE PREGNANT!” the couple wrote to their friends and family in early January 2022.

But at the same time, their marriage was crumbling. They wrote to therapists asking for help setting up “a healthy coparenting plan” if they ended up getting divorced, according to court papers.

Glover later said in court testimony that Junior was emotionally abusive, impulsive, and volatile. Junior disputed that. Emotional abuse is something that would be litigated in a custody hearing, but would not have a bearing on parental rights, Casale said.

Then, when Glover was four and a half months pregnant, Junior moved out of their shared bedroom and a month later left for two writing residencies on the West Coast.

By that point, Glover had already stopped working on the second-parent adoption paperwork. She called her wife across the country and explained that she had decided not to go forward with co-parenting. In her view, Junior was not now, and would not be, the parent of her child.

“My only concern was having a safe birth and being able to give birth to a healthy child,” Glover, now 41, said. “I hung up the phone, relieved.”

In Seattle, Junior sat at the kitchen counter of a rented house, in shock. She knew her relationship was over. But she had still believed she and her ex would raise their child together.

Soon after, Glover filed for divorce. Junior filed a petition as part of the divorce case, asking the court to recognize her as a parent to the baby who was yet to be born.

At the couple’s first Family Court hearing in May 2022, Glover was nine months pregnant. The testimony among the estranged couple and their lawyers was contentious.

Daniel Sulman, the Family Court judge assigned to the case, was vocally skeptical of Glover’s claim that she was effectively a single parent. He grasped at the counterfactuals.

“Can my wife say, ‘I’m rejecting you as the father?’” Sulman asked during the hearing. “I’m in a heterosexual relationship. [I’m] married to my spouse. My spouse gets naturally pregnant, and at some point during the pregnancy, she decides that I’m no longer her spouse. … Are you saying that she could then say, ‘I’m no longer a parent,’ when that child is eventually born?”

The judge seemed fixated on the fact that this was not about a child conceived during a one-night stand. Like in many LGBTQ relationships, intention and planning necessarily came before conception.

“In a heterosexual situation, you could say, well, ‘Oh, it was an accident. I didn’t intend to — we didn’t intend to become pregnant,” Sulman said during the hearing. “In this case … it’s a lot more deliberate.”

Sulman ruled that Junior was a legal parent to the child and should be listed on the child’s birth certificate and have access to him after birth. Glover appealed the decision. At the end of May, she had an emergency C-section.

“I, of course, don’t want to disenfranchise other queer families,” Glover said. “I just don’t want my case, specifically my son, to be an agenda. And that’s what it’s becoming.”

In early June, Junior’s doorbell rang. When she opened the door, there were flowers on the stoop. Glover’s colleagues had sent them, along with a card congratulating the couple. That’s how Junior found out their son had been born.

In August 2023, after a series of appeals, the Pennsylvania Superior Court agreed to hear the case “en banc,” a rare kind of session reserved for especially significant and complex cases, where nine judges are present.

It was a sign that this was “a very hot issue,” Casale said.

Months went by. Then, in December, the Superior Court ruled unanimously. They affirmed the lower court’s decision that Junior was indeed a parent — for multiple reasons.

The court noted that Junior had both a financial and a “shared emotional role” in the conception of the child, in part because she had administered daily hormone injections and accompanied Glover to some of her medical appointments.

Most significantly, the majority determined that Junior was also a parent because she and Glover intended her to be one. The majority called this “intent-based parentage,” setting a precedent for all future cases in Pennsylvania. The decision means that both parties’ expressed intentions for someone to be a parent, even in lieu of a marriage or a genetic relationship to a child, matters now legally.

“The couple not only evidenced their mutual intent to conceive and raise the child, but they also participated jointly in the process of creating a new life,” the decision said.

Legal observers who focus on LGBTQ clients heralded the decision as a major victory.

“This is a multigenerational legal battle to confirm civil rights in the LGBTQ community,” said Mark A. Momjian, an attorney who filed an amicus brief for Philadelphia Family Pride, a nonprofit LGBTQ advocacy group, in support of Junior’s position. Casale, of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, also praised the decision, and said it has had an immediate impact on clients she represents.

Glover is now asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear the case. If the Supreme Court does not agree to hear it, then the Superior Court decision will stand and the couple will head to a custody hearing.

By now, the experience has caused rippling anguish and heartbreak for everyone involved.

“To say that someone can give some money towards IVF and administer some shots is enough to show intent — my mom can make a claim,” Glover said, her voice low and near breaking. “My mom was at the majority of my doctors appointments, majority of my son’s pediatrician appointments. My mom has done more.”

Despite the court’s decision, the only photo Junior has ever seen of her son is a sonogram. She dreams of holding him, counting his teeth, smelling his neck. But she has already missed many of the first moments in the child’s life, the kinds of moments that bond a child to his mother.

“I want him to know that he was intentional,” Junior said recently, between sobs. “He was intended. We wanted him. We both did.”