baby feet

News on the Fertility Fraud Front: Mortimer v. Rowlette Raises Possibility of Punitive Damages

By Jody Lyneé Madeira

Since families and doctor-conceived children first began to file lawsuits against physicians and clinics alleging “fertility fraud,” a term for illicit physician insemination, each subsequent court order has presented much-needed information about how courts could address these allegations. Mortimer v. Rowlette, pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, was one of the first filed, and has provided considerable insight into how these novel claims could be resolved.

Read More

A Professional In Vitro Fertilisation Laboratory Microscope Closeup - Image

Professor: The Law Has No Straight Answer for Our High-Tech Baby Boom

This is an excerpt of an article by Alaina Lancaster that originally appeared on Law.com. Read the full interview here. 

After thousands of dollars of in vitro fertilization treatments and nine months of pregnancy, a New York couple was forced to give up the twins they birthed. It turns out CHA Fertility Center, the Los Angeles clinic where the couple sought IVF treatment, mixed up the embryos of three patients, resulting in two of the couples having to give up children to their genetic parents. Now, those parents are suing.

Dov Fox, professor of law at the University of San Diego and the director of the school’s Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics, said the law has not caught up with reproductive technology and victims of this type of medical malpractice aren’t left with many legal options. Yet, legal frameworks are out there, Fox said. Judges and lawmakers just might need to look outside the U.S.

Read the full interview here.

Prohibitions on Egg and Sperm Donor Anonymity and the Impact on Surrogacy

By: Gaia Bernstein

[cross-posted from Concurring Opinions]

Egg and sperm donations are an integral part of the infertility industry. The donors are usually young men and women who donate relying on the promise of anonymity. This is the norm in the United States. But, internationally things are changing. A growing number of countries have prohibited egg and sperm donor anonymity. This usually means that when the child who was conceived by egg or sperm donation reaches the age of eighteen he can receive the identifying information of the donor and meet his genetic parent.

An expanding movement of commentators is advocating a shift in the United States to an open identity model, which will prohibit anonymity. In fact, last year, Washington state adopted the first modified open identity statute in the United States. Faced by calls for the removal of anonymity, an obvious cause for concern is how would prohibitions on anonymity affect people’s willingness to donate egg and sperm. Supporters of prohibitions on anonymity argue that they only cause short-term shortages in egg and sperm supplies. However, in a study I published in 2010, I showed that unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. My study examined three jurisdictions, which prohibited donor gamete anonymity: Sweden, Victoria (an Australian state) and the United Kingdom. It showed that all these jurisdictions share dire shortages in donor gametes accompanied by long wait-lists. The study concluded that although prohibitions on anonymity were not the sole cause of the shortages, these prohibitions definitely played a role in their creation.

In a new article, titled “Unintended Consequences: Prohibitions on Gamete Donor Anonymity and the Fragile Practice of Surrogacy,” I examine the potential effect of the adoption of prohibitions on anonymity in the United States on the practice of surrogacy. Surrogacy has not been part of the international debate on donor gamete anonymity. But the situation in the United States is different. Unlike most foreign jurisdictions that adopted prohibitions on anonymity, the practice of surrogacy in the United States is particularly reliant on donor eggs because of the unique legal regime governing surrogacy here.  Generally, there are two types of surrogacy arrangements: traditional surrogacy and gestational surrogacy. In a traditional surrogacy arrangement the surrogate’s eggs are used and she is the genetic mother of the child, while in gestational surrogacy the intended mother’s eggs or a donor’s eggs are used and the surrogate is not the genetic mother of the conceived child. Most U.S. states that expressly allow surrogacy provide legal certainty only to gestational surrogacy, which relies heavily on donor eggs, while leaving traditional surrogacy in a legal limbo. Without legal certainty, the intended parents may not be the legal parents of the conceived child, and instead the surrogate and even her husband may become the legal parents. Infertility practitioners endorse the legal preference for gestational surrogacy also for psychological reasons, believing that a surrogate who is not genetically related to the baby is less likely to change her mind and refuse to hand over the baby.

Read More