2 mom's battle has legal issues

Keri Lynn Jones says she doesn't want to be a poster model for gay rights, she just wants to be a parent.

In her west-side home, she looks at the empty room of the 4-year-old girl she's known and helped care for since birth — the daughter of her former partner.

"This is a princess room; she's a princess," Jones said, pointing out the pastel room adorned with various costumes and a canopied bed. In the hallway, there are pictures of the smiling little girl taking a bath and playing.

However, the girl's mother, Cheryl Pike Barlow, says as the biological mother, she has a right to keep her daughter away from a life that she has since abandoned.

It is a story of two women, who despite their love shared over a smiling little girl, are divided over how she should be reared and who should be in her life.

Tomorrow, the Utah Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that has the potential to explode beyond the courtroom and into a full-blown political battle over everything from gay rights to parental rights.

But the issue before the state's higher court has been narrowed to one issue: Can a judge order a parental relationship between a non-biological adult and a child against the wish of a biological parent?

It's an issue that will test common law court rulings in Utah that in the past have allowed visitation by divorced step-parents. Yet those who support Barlow point to U.S. Supreme Court rulings that establish a biological parent's right to hold the ultimate decision if they are deemed a fit parent.

The two women met in early 2000. "Probably after we were dating six months maybe, we decided we wanted to have a baby in the next year so we spent a lot of time talking to our attorney," Jones said.

Jones contends they both intended to rear this child together, even setting up a revolving power of attorney every six months for Jones and the baby, because Utah law prevents Jones from adopting. Jones also placed the child on her work's health insurance policy.

After the birth, Jones said they set up co-guardianship and legal wills. The girl's name was legally established as Jones-Barlow, which was later changed by the mother to just Barlow.

"We went through the process of picking out a sperm donor to look just like me, or my brother," Jones said.

At the beginning both women shared in the joy of the birth, but that didn't last. Barlow said she discovered Jones was having an affair with another woman and left the relationship.

"Even after she moved out we still had planned on having joint 'something,' but I was still seeing (the child) on the weekends," Jones said.

"I did enter into this relationship thinking she and I could have a life together," Barlow said. "I was dead wrong."