GALVESTON — What makes a parent? The Texas Supreme Court could provide an answer to that question.

The state’s top civil court has agreed to hear the case of an estranged lesbian couple’s dispute about whether a woman who gave birth in 1998 can void her ex-partner’s 2001 adoption of the child.

AP

The adoption of the girl, now 9, by Kathleen Van Stavern has been upheld by three judges, but attorneys for biological mother Julie Anne Hobbs continue to claim Van Stavern’s adoption was void from the time it was approved.

Hobbs and Van Stavern were a couple in 1998, residing in Galveston County, when the girl was born to Hobbs, who had been artificially inseminated.

In November 2001, Van Stavern became the child’s other parent, after successfully filing for adoption.

In March 2004, Hobbs and Van Stavern broke off their eight-year relationship and Van Stavern started making monthly child-support payments to Hobbs.

Hobbs, however, fought Van Stavern’s legal efforts to gain joint custody of the child, claiming the adoption was void because the state family code then required an adoptive parent to be a spouse of the biological parent.

The case appears to pit two portions of the state’s family-law code against each other. One provision requires an adoptive parent of a child with another custodial parent to be a stepparent of the child, which is possible only through marriage. Texas law does not recognize marriage between same-sex couples.

Under a potentially conflicting provision, the legal deadline to contest the adoption passed more than two years before Hobbs mounted her legal challenge.

Attorneys for both sides must submit briefs to the high court and then argue their cases in a hearing that had not yet been scheduled Friday.