A fertility clinic is raffling a human egg in London to promote its new “baby profiling” service, which circumvents British IVF (in vitro fertilisation) laws.

The winner will be able to pick the egg donor by racial background, upbringing and education. Payment for profit is illegal in Britain, but the £13,000 of free IVF treatment will be provided in America.

The raffle, to be held on Wednesday, is to promote a tie-up between the Bridge Centre, a fertility clinic in London, and the Genetics and IVF Institute (GIVF) in Fairfax, Virginia. ...

In Britain, donors have to agree to be identified and contacted by any resulting offspring when they reach the age of 18.

Payments are restricted to a maximum fee of £250 for expenses, and as a result donors are in extremely short supply.

One of the first Britons to use the US service is Celia, a 38-year-old married businesswoman from the Midlands, who received two donor eggs in America at Christmas. Last week the prospective mother underwent a three-month scan that confirmed the twin pregnancy, which has cost her a total of £13,000, is progressing normally.

Her donor was a 27-year-old, whose eggs have produced four babies and three pregnancies, including Celia’s twins.

“I wanted someone who looked a bit like me as an adult, but the main consideration was the quality of her eggs,” said Celia. “This woman produces 30 at a time, and they were split between me and another woman, otherwise the cost of donation would have been double the £9,000 we actually paid.”

“I don’t want anyone to know these babies are not mine. Not my family or any of my friends. We don’t intend to tell the children, either.”

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, donor conception, United Kingdom, Virginia

posted by Eve at 4:00 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Baroness Deech, the chairman of the Bar Standards Board, claims that traditional Christian image of a lifelong union of man and woman is no longer accurate because of the changing nature of relationships and the introduction of legal rights for same-sex couples.

She believes human rights law may soon rule that it is discriminatory to ban homosexuals from marrying in the same way that heterosexual couples do.

However Lady Deech adds that some differences between civil partnerships and marriages should be preserved, and criticises recent Labour laws that allow same-sex couples to be named on birth certificates with no mention of a father. ...

But she will conclude that “civil partnerships do still differ from marriage a little, and this is an area where the difference ought to be preserved with justification”.

This is because she disagrees with provisions of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, which allow same-sex couples to be named as parents on birth certificates with no reference to a father.

Labels: civil unions, donor conception, Fathers, gay marriage, gay parenting, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 3:51 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

When Donor 3066 signed up with the California Cryobank, he offered some basic information about himself on a piece of paper: that he had a BA in theater; that his mother was a nurse and his father was in the Baseball Hall of Fame; that his birthday was Sept. 18, 1968. He made it clear that he didn't want to be found by signing a waiver of anonymity.

The sperm bank protected his anonymity, just as it promised. But that did not mean he couldn't be found. In an age of sophisticated genetic testing, the concept of anonymity is rapidly fading. With some clever sleuthing—tests that can track down ancestral origins, donor numbers, and bits of biographical information—parents and offspring can find out the donors. "With DNA testing and Google, there's no such thing as anonymity anymore," says Wendy Kramer, the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry. "Donors are choosing anonymity because they're not educated," adds Kramer. "If they were properly educated on the consequences, then many would choose not to donate." ...

Stories like Jorgenson's are profound on several levels. Sperm banks are not bound by the FDA to do genetic testing of donors, but if they were, these new tests could offer a way for donor offspring to learn not only about their ancestry but about origins of specific genetic traits that could be linked to disease.

They also challenge the long-cherished idea of donor privacy. Most sperm banks now offer identity-release sperm, which means that donors have agreed to let their offspring contact their donor when they turn 18. But the great majority of donors still prefer anonymity, and profits hinge on ensuring it. College students are lured by the promise of easy money for doing what they would do for free. Few banks advertise—or even counsel their donors—that one day this easy money could result in dozens of children who might be curious about their genetics and ancestral routes, and a genetic family that could rival the size of one on Big Love. ...

Some sperm banks are changing their policies for fear that anonymous donors might withdraw from the program and hurt their bottom line. Cryos International, a sperm bank based in Copenhagen, Denmark, that claims to be the largest bank in the world, has started to offer a new program that it's dubbing "Invisible Donors." It's a system where donors can offer very few registered characteristics so they will be more difficult to track, and the bank keeps track of them by fingerprints instead of donor number.

"I'm fully aware of the future child's needs, and I fully understand and support children who will search for their donor [and] half-siblings, but the fact is that it is wrong to search for a donor who claimed anonymity," says Ole Schou, the director of Cryos International.

Labels: donor conception

posted by Eve at 2:05 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It was the perfect, joyous advert for a Government-backed scheme linking the children of sperm donors – two daughters of the same man meeting for the first time.

But in a terrible mistake that casts new doubt on DNA profiling, it turns out they weren’t related at all...

The embrace was as heart-warming as it was remarkable. Two women from opposite ends of the globe became the first British children of an anonymous sperm donor to meet face-to-face.

Keeley Hall, from Perth, Western Australia, and Elizabeth Howard, from Cambridge, had been among the first to register with UK Donor Link, a Government-funded database set up in 2004.

They had been told that their DNA was one of the organisation’s first ‘matches’: they were half-sisters. Overjoyed, they told of the many resemblances between them – their similar eyes and hair, their shared love of languages – and how they already felt like sisters.

But The Mail on Sunday can now reveal that the two women are almost certainly not related at all. In a terrible and distressing mistake, UKDL brought two entirely unrelated women together and told them they were sisters.

Labels: donor conception, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 4:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Today, Lambda Legal argued before the New York State Court of Appeals on behalf of a non-biological mother after an intermediate appeals court denied her right to seek custody and visitation with, and provide financial support to the child she has parented with her former same-sex partner. ...

Lambda Legal represents Debra H. in her effort to continue to parent the son she and her former partner, Janice R., planned together. The couple agreed they would raise a family together in a two-parent household and conceived their son using in vitro fertilization. Janice promised that Debra would formally adopt their child, and they met with an adoption lawyer prior to their son's birth. In 2003, before he was born, they entered into a civil union in Vermont, which at that time was the most legally significant relationship available to same-sex couples under U.S. law. Debra was by Janice's side throughout labor and delivery and cut their son's umbilical cord; her last name was included in their son's name on his birth certificate. In the years that followed Debra gave him the day and night love, nurture and care of a mother. When it came time for the second-parent adoption, Janice, an attorney, advised Debra "as a lawyer" that they didn't need to get the courts involved and Debra would always be the boy's parent. When the couple's relationship ended in 2006, Debra continued actively to parent her son, who moved with Janice into an apartment only a block away. Debra and her son were together daily, and she often put him to bed.

In May of 2008, when the child was 4 ½ years old, Janice abruptly refused Debra any further contact with him. Debra immediately filed for emergency joint custody and restoration of parental access.

Labels: custody, de facto parenting, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 2:08 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening team up in "The Kids Are All Right" in which they play a long-term lesbian couple whose lives are turned upside down when their two teenage children contact their biological father. ...

Jules (Moore) and Nic (Bening) are trying to be good parents. The wealthy couple are proud of their daughter Joni's academic achievements and struggle to keep an open mind when they think their son Laser may be gay.

When they inadvertently discover Laser has contacted his biological father, the women feel threatened, but gradually warm to the handsome, laid-back epitome of California cool variously referred to as "the donor" and "the spermster."

Things turn sour, however, when Jules starts to fall for Paul (Mark Ruffalo) and control freak Nic begins to suspect.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Fathers, gay parenting

posted by Eve at 12:28 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

An image from a TV ad for gay marriage, reproduced in the January 18 New Yorker, provides a Rorschach test for reactions to America’s ongoing revolution in family structure. Two men in black suits stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a group of people, looking into each other’s eyes. In their arms are two newborns in white baby clothes and blankets. Though it’s not immediately apparent from the photo, the men are at a baptism for their infants. The ad, still being test-marketed, is called “Family Values,” and is intended to emphasize the “conventionality of gay couples,” explains The New Yorker.

If your reaction to the image is: “Where’s the mother(s)?” you may not yet be fully on board the “conventionality” bandwagon. If your reaction to the foregoing question, however, is: “Why does it matter?” then you are keeping pace with the revolution. “Why does it matter?” may ultimately prove the more appropriate response, but no one should pretend that it represents anything other than a radical revision of the traditional relationship between parents and children — one whose consequences no one can predict.

Every time a homosexual couple conceives a child, there is another parent offstage somewhere whose sperm or egg has allowed conception to occur (and, in the case of male homosexuals, whose womb has allowed gestation to occur). In some homosexual families, that parent will be involved in his child’s life; in others, he will remain completely anonymous and unknown. Parental identity and responsibility for children in a homosexual family do not flow from biology; they result from choice and intent. To the extent that a gay couple wants to retain the traditional number of parents in the home, it must exclude one biological parent from inclusion in the family unit. To the extent that a gay couple wants to preserve the traditional connection between that biological parent and his offspring, however, the adult side of the family becomes more of a non-traditional threesome. ...

These are not easy questions. The deprivation to gays from not being able to put the official, public stamp of legitimacy on their love is large. If one were confident that gay marriage would have at most a negligible effect on the ongoing dissolution of the traditional family, I would see no reason to oppose it. And fertility technology is hardly the only source of stress on families; heterosexual adults have been wreaking havoc on the two-parent family for the last five decades in their quest for maximal freedom and choice. The self-interested assumption behind that havoc has been that what’s good for adults must be good for children: If adults want flexibility in their living arrangements, then children will benefit from it, as well. Perhaps children are as infinitely malleable as it would be convenient for them to be. But if it turns out that they thrive best with stability in their lives and that the traditional family evolved to provide that stability, then our breezy jettisoning of child-rearing traditions may not be such a boon for children.

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them. Equally specious is the central theme in attorney Theodore Olson’s legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8: that only religious belief or animus towards gays could explain someone’s hesitation regarding gay marriage. Anyone with the slightest appreciation for the Burkean understanding of tradition will feel the disquieting burden of his ignorance in this massive act of social reengineering, even if he ultimately decides that the benefits to gays from gay marriage outweigh the risks of the unknown.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, donor conception, gay marriage, gay parenting, single parenting

posted by Eve at 12:27 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In a case that could have far-reaching implications for gay rights, a Santa Cruz woman is seeking to maintain joint custody of 10-month-old twins that she and her former partner, the biological mother of the children, had agreed to raise.

As court battles over the rights of non-biological gay parents garner national attention, the Santa Cruz case contains a complicated wrinkle: The biological mother is now involved in a romantic relationship with the sperm donor, who has joined her in seeking full custody of the boys.

"It's the first case I'm aware of where a lesbian couple in a committed relationship has brought a child into the world, then after breaking up, the biological mother has tried to sub in the biological father," said Deborah Wald, a family law attorney who, along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, represents the non-biological mother.

"If they won, we would consider it a very dangerous precedent for lesbian couples having children with the assistance of known sperm donors," Wald said.

The biological parents, Maggie Quale and Shawn Wallace, who now live together, say they should be allowed to fully parent their twins, Max and Levi, without a court order allowing even partial custody to Quale's former partner, Kim T. Smith. They say the civil lawsuit filed by Smith, who declined to comment, has put them in the painful position of asserting their rights while still appearing to support the growing effort to protect the rights of gay parents.

Labels: custody, de facto parenting, donor conception, Fathers

posted by Eve at 10:30 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

When a lesbian couple from Terrace, B.C., decided they wanted a child of their own, they were overjoyed that a good friend agreed to donate his sperm.

They were going to have a family.

Before the child was born in October 2006, the donor signed an agreement stating that the female couple would be the parents and that he would consent to an adoption of the child. But since the child's birth, things haven't gone according to plan. The donor began making frequent visits to the female couple's home and referring to the child as "his son" in the community. He also allowed his family to send him congratulations and gifts on the birth of the child.

These are the allegations set out in a statement of claim filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The lesbian couple is now suing the donor for willful infliction of mental suffering and breach of contract, and is asking the court for a restraining order against their former friend. The couple and the sperm donor cannot be named to protect the identity of the child. The parties in the lawsuit declined to be interviewed.

The case has raised questions about the rights of sperm donors across the country and whether adults should have the power to contract away the rights of children before they are born. ...

Another element adding to the confusion is the six-year-old Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which makes paying for sperm illegal. As a result, couples are increasingly turning to friends and acquaintances to act as donors, creating a legal and ethical quagmire, says Saskatoon fertility specialist Dr. Roger Pierson, spokesman for the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society.

Labels: Canada, donor conception

posted by Eve at 5:46 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A New Jersey judge has ruled that a gestational surrogate who gave birth to twin girls is their legal mother, even though she is not genetically related to them.

The ruling gives the woman, who carried the babies in an arrangement with her brother and his male spouse, the right to seek primary custody of the children at a trial in the spring.

The case illustrates the legal complexities of gestational surrogacy, in which a woman carries unrelated embryos created in a petri dish. A gestational surrogate in Michigan recently obtained custody of twins she carried, but courts in several other states have upheld the rights of people who contracted with gestational surrogates. ...

In the New Jersey case, the surrogate, Angelia G. Robinson, agreed to have the children in 2006 for her brother, Donald Robinson Hollingsworth, an accountant in Manhattan, and his spouse, Sean Hollingsworth. The embryos were created from anonymous donor eggs and fertilized with sperm from Sean Hollingsworth.

The girls were born in October 2006 and went to live with the Hollingsworths at their home in Jersey City. But in March 2007 Ms. Robinson filed a lawsuit seeking custody, alleging that she had been coerced into the arrangement.

Judge Francis B. Schultz of Superior Court, who ruled in the case in Hudson County, N.J., relied heavily on the precedent established by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1988 in the case of Baby M. The surrogate in that case, Mary Beth Whitehead, carried her own genetic child for another couple after artificial insemination with the man’s sperm. After Ms. Whitehead decided that she wanted to keep the baby, the court ruled that her maternal rights could not be terminated against her will.

“The surrogacy contract,” the Baby M court found, “is based on principles that are directly contrary to the objectives of our laws. It guarantees the separation of a child from its mother; it looks to adoption regardless of suitability; it totally ignores the child; it takes the child from the mother regardless of her wishes and maternal fitness.” ...

Since 2007, the twins have shuttled back and forth between the Hollingsworths’ home and Ms. Robinson, who has three parenting days a week. A final decision on custody is expected after the trial this spring.

Labels: donor conception, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 11:42 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Unable to have a baby of her own, Amy Kehoe became her own general contractor to manufacture one. For Ms. Kehoe and her husband, Scott, the idea seemed like their best hope after years of infertility.

Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor, a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. From the Web site of California Cryobank, she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.

On another Web site, surromomsonline.com, Ms. Kehoe found a gestational carrier who would deliver her baby. ...

On July 28, the Kehoes announced the arrival of twins, Ethan and Bridget, at University Hospital in Ann Arbor. Overjoyed, they took the babies home on Aug. 3 and prepared for a welcoming by their large extended family.

A month later, a police officer supervised as the Kehoes relinquished the swaddled infants in the driveway.

Bridget and Ethan are now in the custody of the surrogate who gave birth to them, Laschell Baker of Ypsilanti, Mich. Ms. Baker had obtained a court order to retrieve them after learning that Ms. Kehoe was being treated for mental illness.

“I couldn’t see living the rest of my life worrying and wondering what had happened, or what if she hadn’t taken her medicine, or what if she relapsed,” said Ms. Baker, who has four children of her own.

Now, she and her husband, Paul, plan to raise the twins.

The creation of Ethan and Bridget tested the boundaries of the field known as third-party reproduction, in which more than two people collaborate to have a baby. Five parties were involved: the egg donor, the sperm donor, Ms. Baker and the Kehoes. And two separate middlemen brokered the egg and sperm.

About 750 babies are born each year in this country through gestational surrogacy, and twice that many surrogacies are attempted. Most are less complicated than the arrangement that resulted in the birth of Ethan and Bridget.

But as the dispute over the Michigan twins reveals, surrogacy arrangements that go badly can have profound implications, particularly for the children. Surrogacy is largely without regulation, with no authority deciding who may obtain babies through surrogacy or who may serve as a surrogate, according to interviews and court records.

Labels: donor conception, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 11:31 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The Irish Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a gay man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple should be permitted to see his 3-year-old son regularly -- in part because Ireland's constitution doesn't recognize the lesbians as a valid family unit. ...

In her written judgment, Supreme Court Justice Susan Denham said the lesbian couple provide a loving, stable home for their son - but that the constitution defines parents as a married man and woman, and gays are not permitted to marry in Ireland.

She said Irish law does identify the sperm donor as the father, and he therefore had a right to have a relationship with his son.

"There is benefit to a child, in general, to have the society of his father," Denham wrote. "I am satisfied that the learned High Court judge gave insufficient weight to this factor."

Labels: donor conception, Fathers, gay parenting, Ireland

posted by Eve at 11:06 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

There comes a point in every man's life when he realizes he is going to spend the rest of it alone unless he is willing to compromise. Most of these compromises are benign. A man should come to accept, for example, that striped shirts and plaid pants don't match, and that covering a wall with Star Trek posters gets you on Queer Eye, not The Bachelor. In my case, The Compromise was major: My girlfriend refused to become my wife unless I agreed to have a child. ...

As a crime reporter for a tabloid newspaper, I am often called upon to interview the wives, friends, and relatives of people who have just died under horrendous circumstances. For the purposes of accuracy (and sanity), I have developed an unemotional approach to all human tragedy. And even as one was unfolding around me, I couldn't help but view the situation as I view other people's miseries: Man, this is a great story! The guy who never wanted a child - but then agreed to have one to please the woman he loves - turns out to be infertile. Stop the presses! This is the front page!

My wife saw our situation a little differently: She cried for three days. When she emerged, she became an Internet junkie and discovered that we had only two options: cutting open my testicles in the often-fruitless search for a few stray sperm cells, or having a child with donor sperm. I preferred the second option. See, while many men feel impotent when told that they are sterile, I actually felt empowered. Fact is, I'm not so enamored of my genes. I'm fat. I'm nearsighted. I had scoliosis as a kid and had to wear a socially paralyzing back brace. And I'm endowed like a Chihuahua. Finally, my genetic material had failed the ultimate test of genetic material, namely, the ability to replicate. But my wife didn't see it that way. "I want to have a baby with you!" she said.

I assured her that I could be every bit as loving a father as I would have been had Mother Nature been our midwife. But in moments of honest reflection, I wondered how I would feel watching my son accept his first Pulitzer Prize or my daughter hit a home run deep into left field. Would I feel a swell of parental pride, or would I sit there thinking that my children were able to achieve these things because I was not, in fact, their father? Who would be the Dad of Record: the sperm cells or me?

Choosing my child's father
These questions only grew more urgent after we made the decision to go ahead with donor sperm - and began diving into the profiles of our would-be donors. I had been telling my wife that "nurture" trumped "nature," but I was scouring the donor profiles just in case the opposite was true. Why not take out a genetic insurance policy by finding a donor who looked like me (only without the "fat gene," thank you very much), yet was my superior in math, athletics, handiness, patience, and career achievement?

The thing is, you could make yourself crazy trying to find the "perfect father." And that's exactly what we did.

Only after weeks of this paper chase did I come to see that the quest itself was distancing me from my future child. If genes were all that mattered, then why would I have to be around at all? And, worse, if I actually believed that, was I setting up my kid to see me as little more than "that guy who's always here even though I'm not his kid"?

Labels: donor conception, Fathers

posted by Eve at 12:08 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

After lobbying from a wide range of groups, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed into law a bill requiring that advertisements offering cash to egg "donors" describe the health risks posed by the procedure. According to Biopolitical Times, this is the first law of its kind in the US.

Labels: California, donor conception, women

posted by Imapp Staff at 2:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A HOMOSEXUAL couple has been granted leave to appear before the Family Court in a bid to gain access to a girl who isn't biologically related to either of them.

The men, who cannot be named, have successfully argued that they are important people in the life of the three-year-old.

The girl, who likewise cannot be named, was not conceived with sperm from either of the men. But her mother was, until last year, in a same-sex relationship with another woman who does have a child conceived with one of the men's sperm. ...

The magistrate accepted the mother's argument that she was "less committed to the non-traditional family arrangement enthusiastically embraced by her former partner". However, she said the mother had encouraged the men to have a relationship with her child while she was with the other woman.

She said the men were "publicly acknowledged as father figures" during the life of the relationship, while both women were the established "mother figures".

Those roles were acknowledged at a naming ceremony, where all four adults affirmed their commitment as "parents" of the child.

The men told the court they were involved in the parenting of both children. They attended the mother's 12-week pregnancy scan, and visited the hospital on the day of the child's birth. All four adults also attended annual gay pride parades, marching in the "family" section.

The men were introduced as "daddy" to friends and family, and were listed as emergency contacts at the child's daycare centre. ...

The child has been living with the four adults in three separate households since March.

Labels: Australia, de facto parenting, donor conception, gay parenting, motherhood

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:29 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...There are a number of different tests you might use to determine who the parents of a child are. Each has strengths and weaknesses, which are discussed elsewhere on the blog. Part of the challenge is that the question arises in so many different situations. ART in particular gives us a whole range of new complications, but there are plenty even without that. ...

Now if you go back over the blog, I think you’ll find instances in which every one of these tests has been deployed. And of course, you can mix and match them. Some people have multiple factors going for them–they intend to have children, they are genetically related to children they give birth to and they act as the children’s parents. Those tend to be easy cases.

The hard cases come when you have competing contestants, or where one person wants to cut another out, as in the new Montana case. One person claims one basis for parenthood, and someone else claims a different one. Or there are cases when no one wants to claim parenthood and we need to find someone. (Not long ago I wrote about a case where a man who had functioned as a father for 13 years sought to sever his relationship with the child by asserting that it turned out he lacked the genetic connection something he apparently knew all along, but never mind that.) How to decide these?

Cases like this seem to me to suggest we have some sort of hierarchy. So, for example, to reach the result the court did in the case I just mentioned (he’s still the father) it had to say that function (and the relationships constructed based on that function) trump biology (by which test he was not the father.) Again, you can look back and find many instances in which one test seems to overcome another.

And I guess this is my present question. Is there some hierarchy and if so, what is it? Actually, I suppose I really mean should there be a hierarchy and if so, what should it be? After all, I’m more concerned with what the law ought to be than with what it is in any particular place (it varies so very widely.)

Labels: adoption, Artificial Reproductive Technology, de facto parenting, donor conception, Julie Shapiro, parenting

posted by Eve at 4:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In an exclusive, emotional statement to the Herald, the desperate mother of twins suing to learn the identity and medical history of the sperm donor who fathered her children claims her daughters have “potentially fatal health issues” and deserve to know their dad.

“I would like the Massachusetts court to recognize that donor-conceived children are as much real people with the same fundamental needs as any other children, and that their interests should be regarded as just as important,” the woman called Jane Doe said in the statement.

Doe, who said she is single and 35, became pregnant with the twins in 2000 after she was artificially inseminated with the sperm of an anonymous medical student dubbed D237, which was sold to the New England Cryogenic Center in Newton in the early 1990s.

In her painfully candid statement, Doe claims:

NECC “explicitly assured” her the twins would be able to have contact with their donor daddy - a prerequisite she insisted upon in her search for a sperm bank - and that she sent D237 letters about and pictures of the girls through NECC.

She spent “thousands of dollars” on “triple the amount” of D237’s sperm she planned to buy in exchange for his future relationship with the children.

In order to confront “the depression that was overwhelming me,” she briefly surrendered the twins to the state to be placed with a foster family capable of addressing their medical needs.

“I also took on this litigation to fight for the rights of other donated children, because I don’t think it right that any person should be forbidden from knowing their fathers’ identities or family health information,” she explained. ...

Scott Brown, spokesman for California Cryobank, a sperm bank with offices in Cambridge, said, “My confident assumption is (Doe) will not prevail. You can’t compel somebody to make their medical records public. It’s against the law.”

Massachusetts does not have any laws defining what a sperm donor’s relationship,
moral obligation or potential financial responsibility is to his future non-household offspring. The absence of any laws on the subject has rattled even the state Appeals Court.

Labels: donor conception, Massachusetts

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A California-based fertility company is offering prospective parents a range of celebrity 'look-a-like' sperm donors. Cryobank, which is also planning to offer services in New York, allows customers to search through a database according to characteristics such as ethinicity and eye colour without revealing donors' photographs. In addition, the company has now added features that resemble celebrities such as David Beckham and David Blaine. ...

Scott Browne, a spokesman for Cryobank said that 'the intention is not to suggest the child will look like one of the celebrities. It's just to personalise the donor. I think in their heads they know the medical history is most important, but ultimately we're all interested in what someone looks like. It's what we do when we're dating or meet someone. I didn't ask my wife her medical history before I decided to marry her.'

Labels: culture, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

: My last post, which was quite modest, really, sparked a discussion about anonymous gamete (that’s sperm and egg) donors. Reading the comments made me think about the topic again. It’s come up in comments from time to time before and
there are a few posts on the subject back there as well.

I think it is time to revisit the topic and lay out my thinking on it a bit more clearly. I know, of course, that plenty of people will disagree with me. And I’ll start by stating an underlying assumption that is critical to what follows: I do not believe gamete donors are or should be seen as parents.

That’s something I have discussed at length on many occasions. (Here’s one link, but if you just nose around under the “sperm donor” tag you’ll find plenty of others.) I think of all the parents–and perhaps particularly all the fathers–I know who work so hard to create and sustain their families, and it frankly offends me to place someone who does nothing more than give up some sperm in the same
category. ...

There’s actually also a substantial irony here. I find it much easier to consider provisions that would strongly encourage, if not require, some form of donor identification if we are very clear that donors are not parents. In other words, the insistence that donors are parents actually creates obstacles to the desired end–the abolition of gamete donor anonymity.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Suppose a single woman wants to raise a child. If a
donor is not a parent, then perhaps she would agree to using a donor who could be identified in the future. The donor could not threaten the integrity of her family (the mother/child unit) or her autonomy (she’d still be the only parent.) On the other hand, if you tell her that the donor will be a parent, then she has reason to seek an unknown and unknowable donor, because that is the only way she can protect herself from having the donor intrude into her life.

Labels: children, donor conception, single parenting

posted by Imapp Staff at 8:28 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I failed to note in my last post an unusual and important aspect of Delaware's new statute creating parentage in a person who qualifies as a "de facto" parent:
This is a statute that explicitly authorizes three parents (or more) for a child.

The statutory interpretation is easy. A "de facto" parent must satisfy the criteria (check my last post for these). The first criterion is "has had the support and consent of the child's parent or parents..." So a child can already have two parents. Both those parents must consent to and foster a parental relationship between the child and another person. That person then satisfies the remaining statutory criteria, and, voila, the child has three legal parents.

The entire subject of more-than-two parents is severely untheorized, and the law in this area is profoundly underdeveloped. When you consider the number of children whose parents divorce and then couple with other partners, there are many, many children with more than two parental figures. The standard course, however, is that for a step-parent to become a legal parent that person must adopt the child and for that to happen the noncustodial parent must consent to termination of his/her parental rights.

There are a handful of court decisions allocating the rights and responsibilities of parentage among more than two parents, including a few states in which trial courts have granted third parent adoption decrees to the partner of the biological mother when the semen donor is also a functional (and legal) parent. But those are the exception.

When I was in Australia earlier this year, I spent some time with a family of four parents...the bio mom, her partner, the semen donor/bio dad, and his partner. The women are the primary parents. The men are secondary parents. The child is seven years old, and the relationships have been stable throughout his life. Australia's parentage reforms of the past year do not allow for even three parents, let alone four. ...

Of course the Delaware statute isn't just for same-sex couples and our families. And since there are way more heterosexual families, I wouldn't be surprised if the first three-legal-parents family in Delaware is a divorced couple and a step-parent -- all by consent. After the stepparent has a bonded parental relationship with the child for a sufficient period of time, and with the agreement of both the child's legal parents, a court should issue a parentage order to the step-parent. It does happen that post-divorce family configurations actually work well enough for such an arrangement to be appropriate --- to be the matching of legal parentage to all the child's emotional parental relationships.

Labels: beyond marriage, de facto parenting, Delaware, donor conception, Nancy Polikoff

posted by Eve at 1:20 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Two dads face off against two moms. It's perhaps the most unique custody battle in recent Florida history and maybe the most radical verdict. Katherine Alicea and her eight-year partner, Ana Sobrino, decided to have a baby about a half-decade ago. Again and again, they tried using sperm from anonymous donors. But Katherine — a driven real estate agent then in her late 30s — couldn't get pregnant.

Enter their close friend, Ray Janssen, a handsome, gay Air Force veteran.

After some casual negotiation, he donated and Katherine conceived. In August 2006, a sweet and burbling baby whom we'll call Austin was born. Katherine put Ray's name on the birth certificate because she wanted the child to know his dad's identity.

That was a big mistake.

The baby was raised mostly by Katherine and Ana at their NE 24th Street home, a block from Biscayne Bay. But Ray and his partner Craig also spent time with the boy. "[Ray] made it clear he wanted to be involved in the child's life," counselor Sherrie Lewis-Thomas later wrote. He took Austin to baby music lessons. Sometimes the child would sleep over at his "da-da's" Miami Beach apartment overlooking a canal.

Then, last fall, the mothers decided to move to California, and things got ugly.

Ray sued Katherine in November 2008. The case tells the story of two sets of gay parents — all of them loving and active in the child's life — vying for custody. "Responsibility for the child should be awarded to the mother and father equally," Ray demanded in the suit. "[I am] the natural father."

After considering arguments from both sides, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Leon Firtel on June 3 found Ray was nothing more than a sperm donor. Because there was no contract before birth, he had "no rights."

Labels: donor conception, Fathers

posted by Eve at 10:26 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Please pardon this long post. The case, Shineovich v. Kemp, is important enough to merit it. (And I'm a parentage law geek....Just skim the parts that seem too geeky....Or leave me a question in a comment).

When the District of Columbia parentage law I've worked on for two years takes effect next week, lesbian couples having children here will have the greatest protection available anywhere for the families they plan. More on that when the time comes.

But today an opinion from the Oregon Court of Appeals produces the right result for the children of lesbian couples conceived through donor insemination there. If the biological mom's partner consents to the insemination, she is also the parent of the resulting child. (This is the result we'll have in DC under the new statute, but, again, more on that next week.) There may be a catch...but that comes later in this post.

Labels: donor conception, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:17 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

With the birth last month of twin girls for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, surrogate pregnancy once again assumed center stage. After years of infertility following the birth of their son in 2002, the couple chose to have another woman gestate the embryos they created.

Much has changed in surrogacy in the two decades since the high-profile Baby M case, in which the surrogate was the baby’s biological mother and unsuccessfully sought custody after the birth.

The legal proceedings in that case helped affirm the validity of surrogacy contracts, which are now standard. Some states have laws that protect the commissioning parents in surrogate pregnancies. And in a vast majority of surrogate pregnancies today, the surrogate has no genetic link to the baby.

Still, surrogate pregnancy is illegal in some states, including New York, and it remains fraught with controversy despite the fact that thousands of American couples — most of them not celebrities or especially wealthy — are happily bringing up children they could not produce on their own.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, donor conception, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 3:25 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: committed relationships, divorce, donor conception, family structure, gay marriage, parenting, remarriage

posted by Eve at 2:58 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Theresa Erikson asks "who is the one to decide who can have a child and who cannot?" This is not like asking "who can own a firearm?" or "who can hold a licence to drive a car?" The object of the Theresa's question is a person, not something to be "had" or "not had". Once the debate has moved on to the question of "who can have [another person]?", in this case a child, it has gone too far. No-one has the right to another person so no-one has the right to a child. And in particular, no-one has the right to someone else's child. What one does in the case of one's childlessness, whether this is due to physiological limitations or choice of sexual orientation, is up to each person's conscience and I don't presume to judge for them. All I ask is that they recognise that they are making hugely significant choices for another person who has no say in the matter and this is a very weighty moral burden.

The focus should not be on the person who may or may not "have" a child, but on the potential child.

Labels: donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 7:01 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Two dads face off against two moms. It's perhaps the most unique custody battle in recent Florida history and maybe the most radical verdict. Katherine Alicea and her eight-year partner, Ana Sobrino, decided to have a baby about a half-decade ago. Again and again, they tried using sperm from anonymous donors. But Katherine — a driven real estate agent then in her late 30s — couldn't get pregnant.

Enter their close friend, Ray Janssen, a handsome, gay Air Force veteran.

After some casual negotiation, he donated and Katherine conceived. In August 2006, a sweet and burbling baby whom we'll call Austin was born. Katherine put Ray's name on the birth certificate because she wanted the child to know his dad's identity.

That was a big mistake.

The baby was raised mostly by Katherine and Ana at their NE 24th Street home, a block from Biscayne Bay. But Ray and his partner Craig also spent time with the boy. "[Ray] made it clear he wanted to be involved in the child's life," counselor Sherrie Lewis-Thomas later wrote. He took Austin to baby music lessons. Sometimes the child would sleep over at his "da-da's" Miami Beach apartment overlooking a canal.

Then, last fall, the mothers decided to move to California, and things got ugly.

Ray sued Katherine in November 2008. The case tells the story of two sets of gay parents — all of them loving and active in the child's life — vying for custody. "Responsibility for the child should be awarded to the mother and father equally," Ray demanded in the suit. "[I am] the natural father."

After considering arguments from both sides, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge
Leon Firtel on June 3 found Ray was nothing more than a sperm donor. Because there was no contract before birth, he had "no rights."

Labels: donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 5:17 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

... I do wonder though if they feel as confused over their 'donor/surrogate' conception as I and many other 'donor' conceived feel? Do they wonder who their genetic father/ mother/ grandparents/ siblings/ cousins/ ancestry/ heritage are? Do they feel a loss?

Now that their dad is gone, will they feel more open to explore what their 'donor' conception/surrogacy means to them? Will it take having children of their own to fully explore their feelings and how it relates to their own children to search for more information?

I advocate for the end of anonymity in relation to 'sperm/egg' donation/vending and surrogacy, but I also do not think that just knowing a name is enough. I believe everyone does have a responsibility for their own sperm/egg when combined to create a new (out of the womb) life (including 'sperm/egg donors' and 'surrogates') that includes more than just identity disclosure – and nothing less than open doors and open hearts.

Michael Jackson's children are not abandoned by any means but are they genetic orphans? I hope not. No doubt, there are many people willing to be involved and supportive in their lives but is that enough? I hope and pray that their genetic father/mother/grandparents and extended family have also kept their doors wide open to these children. Love might make a family but we can't just write off genetics and the importance of genetic/biological family. They all matter.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:53 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Donor 188, where are you?

It's a question Rob Hunter has been pushing to answer for more than a year, a chance to connect with his biological father.

"It would make me feel more alive to know where I come from," the Waterloo man said yesterday.

But Hunter has hit a brick wall in his quest for information on the man who donated sperm for his conception at the University Hospital fertility clinic in London 24 years ago.

It took the clinic from April to August last year to provide him with the sparse information that the sperm donor was No. 188, he said. ....

This week, after dozens of phone calls, the fertility clinic provided more details. The sperm donor was six feet tall, 180 pounds, with brown eyes, had a history of hypertension on the father's side, and was between 20 and 25 years old.

The clinic has said that's all Hunter will get, citing patient confidentiality and the original agreement with the donor to protect his identity.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:48 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Diane Diamond appeared on MSNBC minutes ago discussing the fate of Michael Jackson's children. She said that she does not think that anyone in Michael's family will end up with custody of the three children as no one in the Jackson family is biologically related to them. What?

Even though Michael maintained that his sperm was used to conceive his children, Diane Diamond is contending that that is not the case. She gave indication that she knows the identity of the man who is the sperm donor though she is not prepared to share that information. She does suspect, however, that he will be making himself known. To support her contention, she pointed out the fact that the children are light skinned and blue eyed. ...

Also, there was speculation as to whether the surrogate mother of the third child, known as Blanket, would come forward at this time.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:40 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: donor conception, Fathers

posted by Eve at 8:22 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A woman whose same-sex partner gave birth to a child does not have standing to assert parental rights after the couple broke up, a New York state appeals panel ruled Thursday in an unsigned, unanimous opinion.

The Appellate Division, 1st Department, ruling, Debra H. v. Janice R., 106569/08, reversed a decision by now-retired Justice Harold B. Beeler ordering a hearing to determine if Debra H.'s emotional and financial relationship with the 5-year-old boy, M.R., was tantamount to that of a parent.

Beeler had rejected the contention of the biological mother, Janice R., that the case was controlled by the Court of Appeal's 1991 ruling in Allison D. v. Virginia M., 77 NY2d 651, where former Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye had been the sole dissenter.

In Allison D., the majority had narrowly construed a state law allowing "parents" to assert custodial or visitation rights as being limited to either biological or adoptive parents. ...

The panel found that the record "indicates" that Debra H. had a "loving and caring" parental relationship with the child during the 2 1/2 years the couple lived together after Janice R. gave birth to M.R.

Nonetheless, without having adopted him, the panel concluded that Debra H., as the nonbiological parent, lacked standing to sue for custody and visitation.

Debra H., a management consultant, and Janice R., a solo practicing attorney, began an intimate relationship in early 2002 and started living together about a year later. Through artificial insemination, Janice R. gave birth to a baby boy, M.R., on Dec. 8, 2003.

The couple had registered in New York City as domestic partners and entered into a civil union in Vermont.

Labels: de facto parenting, donor conception

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:17 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A judge has granted a mother's request to have someone harvest sperm from her dead son's body, so she can have the option of carrying out his wish to have children.

Nikolas Colton Evans, 21, died Sunday at a Brackenridge hospital after being punched and falling outside an Austin bar March 27.

His mother, Marissa Evans, told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper that he wanted to have three sons someday and had even picked out their names: Hunter, Tod and Van.

"I want him to live on. I want to keep a piece of him," she told the newspaper. ...

University of Texas law professor John Robertson, who specializes in bioethics, said state law gives parents control over a child's body for organ and tissue donations but its use for sperm "is very unclear."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, donor conception, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 3:32 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

If you're angry about the AIG scandal or Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, check out what's happening to the infertile couples and surrogate mothers involved in a California womb brokerage. It's a familiar tale of vanishing funds and defaulted obligations. But this time, the potential loss is bigger than property. It's pregnancy.

Whose pregnancies are at stake? That's a tricky question. Through in vitro fertilization, a fetus can have two mothers: a genetic one and a gestational one. Last week, for example, we looked at a Japanese case in which a doctor mistakenly put one woman's embryo in another woman's uterus. Weeks later, the second woman was told of the error and aborted the pregnancy. The first woman wasn't told about anything for two and a half months.

That's what can happen when you separate pregnancy into two stages. One woman can abort another's offspring.

And that's not the only way it can happen. Thousands of women have hired themselves out as gestational surrogates. If you're the child's genetic mother, you can put a clause in the contract stipulating under what circumstances the surrogate can abort the pregnancy. But no court will enforce that clause, because you aren't the one who's pregnant. The surrogate is. She can choose abortion unilaterally. All you can do is stop paying her for carrying the child.

But what if it's the other way around? What if you stop paying her first? If you had hired her to sew booties for your kid, she could respond to your nonpayment by halting work on the booties. But her job wasn't to deliver booties. It was to deliver the kid. If she responds by halting work on the thing you've stopped paying for, that thing is your child.

Presumably, if you care enough about the baby to have hired a surrogate, you'll pay what you promised. But what if you don't control the payments? What if you delivered the money to a broker, and the broker lost, stole, or squandered it? You did your part, but the surrogate is no longer being paid. And she has every legal right to end the pregnancy.

That's the scenario unfolding in California.

Labels: abortion, donor conception, poverty, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 1:29 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It was inevitable that the trainwreck that is "octomom" Nadya Suleman would spur calls to regulate reproductive technology — and offer plenty of chances for politicians to grandstand on a headine-grabbing issue.

Georgia state Sen. Ralph Hudgens (R-Of Course) was one of the first to get in on the action, introducing legislation to create limits on the number of embryos that can be transferred to two for a woman under 40 and three for a woman over 40. The across-the-board cap has been widely criticized by infertility specialists, who argue that decisions on how many embryos to transfer must be made on an invidual basis that considers the quality of the embryos, the mother's health and specific fertility problems, and other issues.

But Hudgens' SB 169, which faced a committee hearing this morning, would go much further than simply attempting to keep possibly unstable, unemployed women with six children from having eight more at the same time while living on the public dole. ...

First, the bill would eliminate all forms of payment for gamete (i.e. egg and sperm) donation. No payment for anonymous egg and sperm donors means drastically fewer anonymous donors. Many lesbians use anonymous sperm donors, and many gay men use anonymous egg donors and a surrogate, not only because they may not have someone in their lives to ask to donate, but also because those donors automatically give up parental rights to any children born as a result of their donation.

Using gametes donated by known donors would mean many lesbian and gay parents would have to then ask a court to sever the donor's parental rights — cumbersome and costly for prospective parents who already have to pay out of pocket for either insemination or in vitro fertilization, since these procedures are not covered by health insurance.

But added costs and more difficulty finding donors may be the least of the concerns of lesbian and gay parents should Hudgens' bill pass. Note this important section: "The creation of an in vitro human embryo shall be solely for the purpose of initiating a human pregnancy by means of transfer to the uterus of a human female for the treatment of human infertility." [emphasis added]

Ostensibly this section would forbid the creation of embryos for cloning or stem cell research. But who gets to decide what constitutes "human infertility"? Is the mere absence of having a partner with whom you want or are able to create an embryo enough?

Labels: donor conception, fertility treatment

posted by Eve at 12:35 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...To that mix, here's one that's equally controversial: Is it time for federal and state governments to consider legal rules and boundaries for the fertility industry? A new research-based report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, "Old Lessons for a New World," suggests that the answer may finally be "yes."

The report points out that adoption and assisted reproductive technology have much in common as "nontraditional" means of forming families, and that adoption's far-longer history of research, experience and evidence-informed policies therefore could help to improve practices in the world of assisted reproduction.

The report's recommendations include such applicable adoption issues as the problematic effects of secrecy, the need for a child-centered focus and the impact of market forces. Most pointedly, the Donaldson Institute suggests that the legal and regulatory framework for adoption provides a model that assisted reproductive technology could utilize. Thoughtful guidelines on a broad range of activities in assisted reproductive technology - how many embryos should be implanted, how much egg donors should be paid, etc. - already have been promulgated, and there is every reason to believe most clinics try to adhere to these identified "best practices." ...

The organizations working to promote good practices deserve credit for their efforts and their successes. But their guidelines are not mandatory, and as the evidence before our eyes clearly shows, not everyone in any industry - including adoption - follows voluntary standards.

Labels: adoption, donor conception, fertility treatment

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...On first thought, Americans seem really keen on fathers. We fret about the emotional impact of father absence and insist "that responsibility does not end at conception," as then-candidate Barack Obama put it in a memorable speech last Father's Day. We excoriate "deadbeat dads" who fail to pay their share of their children's upbringing; in fact, the stimulus bill adds $1 billion to child-support enforcement. Married fathers who don't step up and share the burdens of diapers and pediatrician appointments are condemned, in the words of one much-discussed book of essays, as "bastards on the couch." After all, the argument goes, a father is just as much a parent as a mother.

Except when we decide he's not, as did Ms. Suleman and her medical enablers. According to media reports, the male friend who provided the sperm for all of Suleman's 14 children had begged her to stop after the first six -- to no avail. Having consented to the use of his sperm, he would have been expected to give up control over the future children created with them. More commonly, sperm banks offer young men who will remain anonymous $200 for a little R&R that they would happily engage in without remuneration; as the Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia has advertised: "Why not do it for money?" Donors -- or, more precisely, sellers -- sign contracts that assure them, contrary to Father's Day rhetoric, that responsibility really does end at conception.

Sperm banks and fertility doctors hardly bear sole responsibility for defining fathers down to chromosome factories. Clearly, donors themselves happily agree to their downgraded status. Their nonchalance is in line with the widespread assumption that we should expand the rubric of "a woman's right to choose" to include not just abortion -- where a woman's decision understandably carries more moral weight than a man's -- to the care of and responsibility for actual children, where it's not at all clear why that should be the case.

Labels: donor conception, Fathers

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:50 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Just about the time that eight babies began growing inside a California woman's womb, some nationwide policies about fertility treatment were being codified. In June, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) issued updated "Guidelines on Number of Embryos Transferred." Women under age 35 — the octuplets' mom is reportedly 33 — should attempt to transfer no more than two, and preferably only one, fertilized embryo at a time. Women over age 40 should attempt no more than five. (See pictures of multiple births.)

How the California woman, apparently a single mother who already has six young children, including a set of twins, got pregnant is the subject of rampant speculation. But regardless of whether the octuplets are the result of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or fertility drugs — the latter has historically been available on the cheap in Mexico — there is little doubt that from a medical and ethical perspective, something went very wrong. And fertility specialists now find themselves on the defensive, trying to fend off the perception that theirs is an undisciplined, irresponsible profession. ...

Physicians may advise a patient to transfer only one or two embryos, but the patient may insist on double the number — or more. "Doctors' attorneys are advising them, 'You have to do it,' " says Sean Tipton, spokesman for the ASRM. "The courts have made clear that decisions about what to do with embryos are in the hands of patients, not in the hands of physicians."

A doctor, after all, is not the same as a judge.

If women who already have a bunch of kids were to approach Stillman for help conceiving more, he says he'd be obligated to help. "As a parent of two kids, I may think they're crazy, but I'd tell them what I always tell patients: our goal here is as many children as you want, but preferably one at a time."

Labels: donor conception, fertility treatment, medical ethics

posted by Eve at 6:51 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT