* In the United States, where reproductive technology is almost completely unregulated, courts improvise as they are forced to decide who a child's parents are, among all the adults, married and unmarried, involved in its planning, conception, birth, and rearing. Increasingly, we see situations like this: "In Erie County, Pennsylvania, a judge recently had to decide parentage in a case in which a surrogate mother carried triplets for a 62-year-old man and his 60-year-old girlfriend. When the couple failed to pick up the infants, the hospital initiated steps to put them in foster care. In response, and eventually with the judge's approval, the surrogate mother took the children home and began raising them as her own. But the commissioning couple continues to fight for access to the children (and the 62-year-old man has been ordered to pay child support), while the college student who contributed her eggs for their conception is asserting her parental rights as well."
weeklystandard.com |
