“To the gestating parent who carried me and the non-gestating parent who, per the record, contributed, on this the festival of obligatory affection…”
Link to Bill S 9316 (6/2/2026)
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S9316
We were somewhere around section 36 when the genius took hold. There it was, alone on the page, no argument, no body, no apology. “Section 562 of the family court act is REPEALED.” A clean kill. They put a whole numbered section of the bill to the task of deleting one paragraph and then walked away whistling. I read it four times. I may have wept. You do not see craftsmanship like this in nature.
Understand the stakes. They passed it. The Democratic Assembly knocked it loose back in March and the Senate finished the job on June 2, and now Senate Bill 9316 sits on Kathy Hochul’s desk like a fat envelope nobody wants to open. She has 10 days. If she signs, it goes live November 1, and the State of New York will have completed the single most ambitious word-replacement operation since some lunatic invented Find and Replace. Except they did this one by hand. Seventy-two times. Brackets and all.
Look at the scope and try not to swoon. Seventy-two sections. Ten separate bodies of law conscripted into one campaign. The family court act, the vehicle code, the liquor authority, the education law, the social services swamp, all of them rounded up at gunpoint for a single purpose, which is to remove the word “paternity” and bolt in the word “parentage.” That is the whole show. “Filiation,” that ancient mossy courtroom word, gets dragged behind the barn and shot. “Mother” becomes “gestating parent.” “Father” becomes “non-gestating parent.” The “putative father,” once merely suspected, is now the “alleged parent,” which makes every dad in the Bronx sound like a perp in a lineup.
And here is the part that broke me. It changes nothing. No rights. No obligations. Nothing a single judge does on a single afternoon. They moved ten thousand pounds of statute to swap a noun and the machine grinds on exactly as it ground before. That is not failure. That is ART. That is the New York legislature building a cathedral to house a paperclip, and they feel like they accomplished something great.
Now consider the casualties, because there are casualties, and they are sitting in the greeting card aisle. This bill is a wrecking ball aimed straight at the holiday salutation. You cannot wish a happy Father’s Day to an alleged parent. You cannot raise a glass to your gestating parent without sounding like you are reading a livestock report. The cards will get longer. They have to. The whole filial greeting, that tidy little two-word affair, is about to balloon into something you need a permit to mail. “To the gestating parent who carried me and the non-gestating parent who, per the record, contributed, on this the festival of obligatory affection.” Try fitting that on a card with a watercolor duck on it. You can’t. The duck has to go. The duck is a refugee now.
The engraving costs alone will bankrupt a small county. Thanksgiving toasts will run four sentences longer, minimum, each one notarized. Somewhere a Hallmark executive is doing the math on extra card stock. The poet laureate of New York should be sweating through his shirt. Rhyme “non-gestating parent” with anything. Go ahead. I dare you. The word does not bend. It just sits there, four syllables of pure administrative concrete, daring the language to love it.
The opposition, naturally, is howling. Republicans are calling it a war on families, which is what they call most things before lunch. The sponsor, a senator out of the Bronx, says he is only matching the statute to the families already standing in the courtroom, the same-sex couples and the surrogates and the adoptive parents who never fit the old words to begin with. He can’t help himself. He had to do it, bringing great joy to politicians from across the United States who will talk about this until November.
Both camps are absolutely certain. Both camps are screaming. And the bill, magnificent and deaf, just keeps swapping the noun, page after page, indifferent as a glacier.
So sign it, Governor. Sign the beautiful monster. Let November 1 come. And when the holiday cards finally arrive, three lines longer and twice as expensive and vaguely worded enough to survive a deposition, remember who gave them their heroic new length. Albany did this. Seventy-two sections of stone-cold word surgery, and not one fishing license safe from it. It might be the finest thing they have ever done.