Source Family Law
The number of people choosing surrogacy as a way to parenthood is increasing. Whilst it is difficult to know exactly how many surrogacy cases there have been in recent years, the number of applications for parental orders, which is the order required to recognise intended parents as a child’s legal parents, is growing. With this growth have come calls for reform to surrogacy laws, which many say are outdated and do not reflect current attitudes and lifestyles.
Source WCRZ
Tammy and Jordan Myers are facing an uphill climb. The Michigan couple is fighting to adopt their own biological twin babies which were born via surrogate.
This isn’t a plot on a daytime soap opera. The Grand Rapids couple finds themselves up against Michigan’s Surrogate Parenting Act. The 1988 law makes compensated surrogacy illegal in our state and says that even if a surrogacy isn’t compensated, any agreement made between parties won’t be recognized in court.
Source Extra.ie
Former radio presenter Georgie Crawford has opened up about the challenges of surrogacy amid reports that the Government will delay legislation on the issue due to legal difficulties.
In an emotional Instagram post, the Good Glow podcaster called on the Government to change the surrogacy laws and provide ‘a pathway to parenthood’.
Ms Crawford pursued surrogacy after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and placed on tamoxifen medication, which reduces the chance of cancer recurring. However, the medication is not recommended for use during pregnancy due to unknown effects on the unborn child.
Source Legal Futures
This week is an important time for surrogacy as it marks ‘National Surrogacy Week’ and Anne-Marie Hamer at Spencer West LLP; Member of IDR focuses on how the area of Surrogacy law is there to shape the future, and what ‘the future holds for surrogacy around the world’.
The future of family law will most certainly see changes in the coming years, to bring it in line with the various changes in society and around the world, but to also ensure that it recognises the needs of people in the 21st century. Within the ambit of family law is the area of Surrogacy and Fertility Law, and this is a specialist area which is recognised around the world, to assist families/couples and intended single parents fulfil their dream of having a family.
Source Times Union
Legalization of commercial surrogacy, with appropriate safeguards, is good public policy. Unfortunately, New York failed in its attempt to restructure and finally pass the Child-Parent Security Act.
The latest version, approved as part of the budget in March, was supposed to be debated vigorously. It was not brought to a floor vote last year because its opponents called for more discussion and understanding. But this year there was no debate whatsoever. The act was shoved into the budget and voted into law while no one was paying much attention to anything unrelated to COVID-19 coming out of Albany. It seems as if only now, as people are realizing what transpired, is debate occurring.
Source NY Post
Gov. Cuomo is proposing a new law that will lift the ban on surrogacy contracts — enabling New Yorkers for the first time to pay a woman to have a baby for them through in-vitro fertilization.
The ban has been in place since 1992.
“New York’s antiquated laws frankly are discriminatory against all couples struggling with fertility, same sex or otherwise” Cuomo said in a statement to The Post.
“This measure rights this wrong and creates a new and long-overdue path for them to start families and also provide important legal protections for the parents-to-be and the women who decide to become surrogates.”
The move comes after Cuomo and the Democratic-run state Legislature last month approved a law updating and expanding New York’s abortion rights law, angering Timothy Cardinal Dolan and the Catholic Church.
The church also opposes the legalization of commercial surrogacy as “human trafficking.”
Source Khmer Times
Interior Minister Sar Kheng is monitoring the progress of a draft law aimed at addressing the problem of surrogacy in the Kingdom, which is now being debated at the inter-ministerial level.
Mr Kheng on Tuesday evening briefed Donica Pottie, Canada’s Ambassador to the Kingdom, on the draft laws progress, ministry spokesman Phat Sophanith said on Tuesday.
“Currently, Cambodia is working on the draft surrogacy law and I will look into it closely, although now the bill is yet to be adopted,” Mr Kheng said during the meeting. “We will try to solve the problem since the surrogate business is now a very complex issue with regards to human rights and other issues.”
Source The Times
Fertility laws remain “opaque and confused” as ministers stubbornly refuse to bring forward reform, specialist lawyers claimed yesterday.
The ban on commercial surrogacy in the UK was out of step with modern society, they said.
They said the results of a straw poll conducted over the weekend showed that the biggest concern among experts was over surrogacy laws. More than 35 per cent of respondents at the “Fertility Show” in London said that surrogacy law reform should be a government priority.
That was followed by calls for reform of laws covering egg and sperm donation, with 28 per cent of attendees saying that should be top of ministerial agendas.
Source BioEdge
Bioethics in American politics. Donald Trump’s vow to remove the right to citizenship to babies born in the United States to immigrants and non-citizens has an unexpected bioethical angle. As Australian surrogacy lawyer Stephen Page points out, this could put a dent in the booming US surrogacy market.
At the moment, a baby born in the US to a surrogate mother automatically bcomes a US citizen under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This makes commercial surrogacy in the US a popular market with wealthy foreigners, especially Chinese. “There is rarely a surrogacy law conference I go to in the US where the subject of the 14th Amendment is brought up in conference presentations or discussions amongst delegates,” says Page.
The 14th Amendment was introduced in the Reconstruction Era to protect slaves. In 1857, before the Civil War, they had been deemed not to be citizens by the US Supreme Court – “they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” according to Chief Justice Roger Taney.
As Page points out, if Trump carries through with his threat, the consequences for the surrogacy industry will be dire:
Source Des Moines Register
The United States Supreme Court has denied a request to review an Iowa case involving whether a Cedar Rapids man who paid a surrogate to birth a baby is the child’s legal parent.
The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in February that surrogacy contracts are enforceable in the state. The losing party filed a petition in May asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case.
The Iowa case was one of several dozen distributed for consideration by the justices at a Sept. 24 conference. On Monday, the court issued a list of orders showing it had denied certiorari, or declined to take up the case.
That means that the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision in the case will stand, at least until the U.S. Supreme Court has another opportunity to hear a case involving surrogacy
Source National
Four years ago, Kenya first confronted the issue of surrogacy and the legal gaps that surround a science that has been around for ages. It came in the form of a landmark case that began in hospital.
After giving birth at a private hospital in Nairobi, a surrogate mother declined to put her name on the birth notification, saying that the intended parents for whom she had carried the pregnancy would sign it.
Source The Conversation
Surrogacy may have become a popular way for many couples in the limelight to have children – notably Kim and Kanye, Elton John and David Furnish, as well as Sarah Jessica Parker and her husband Matthew Broderick. But it isn’t just a service for the rich and famous.
People may choose to use a surrogate for all sorts of reasons – fertility issues being the obvious one – but people with health problems or complications with previous pregnancies as well as same-sex couples or single people looking to start a family, are all also common clients.
Source CBS New York
TRENTON, N.J. (CBSNewYork) — There’s a big change in New Jersey State law that’s making it easier to start a family for couples who are having trouble conceiving.
It involves a gestational carrier, which is a woman who’s carrying a baby that isn’t genetically related to her. That’s very different that a surrogate mother, who is related to the child.
The developing fetus in the gestational carrier’s womb came from someone else’s egg and sperm. It had been all-but-impossible in New Jersey until now.
By all appearances the Goldstein family is a normal, happy family. What makes them unique is that 9-year-old Russell and 6-year-old Jonah were both born from gestational carriers. After a number of miscarriages, the Goldsteins thought their chances for a family had hit a dead end.
Source AP News
DES MOINES, IOWA
An Iowa woman is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider striking down surrogacy contracts as a violation of the constitutional rights of mothers and their babies.
In an appeal of a February Iowa Supreme Court ruling, a Muscatine woman is asking the nation’s highest court to take the case and hear arguments and then find that a surrogate mother does not waive her constitutional rights and those of her future child when she signs an agreement to have a baby for another couple.
The woman, identified in court documents only as T.B., is challenging a ruling that concluded for the first time in Iowa that gestational surrogacy agreements are enforceable. The Iowa court said banning such arrangements would deprive infertile couples of perhaps the only way to raise their own biological children. The court ruling meant the woman was legally not the parent of the now-23-month-old girl to whom she gave birth.
Source Times of Malta
Thankfully it seems like common sense has prevailed regarding the amendments to the Embryo Protection Act. There are three main fundamental improvements to the original Bill.
The first is that a child born as a result of gamete donation will have a right to know the identity of his biological mother and father at the age of 18.
The second is that the parents of frozen embryos will be given an additional IVF cycle, free of charge, to give all embryos the chance to be brought to term. This is certainly an improvement over the original Bill; however this should be further strengthened with a legal obligation to do so within a two-year period unless a medical condition precludes this. This will significantly reduce the number of embryos that will be ‘up for adoption’, which should only be exceptional cases – preferably none at all.
The third amendment is that the regulation of altruistic surrogacy is going to be discussed in a separate Act of Parliament, rather than through a legal notice subsidiary to the Embryo Protection Act. The surrogate mother will be given all the support she needs while respecting the rights of the biological gamete owners.
Source Verdict Justia
For the third time, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill to legalize gestational surrogacy. Two previous times, in 2012 and 2015, bills approved by the legislature were vetoed by then-Governor Chris Christie. Both times, Christie expressed concern that the legislature had not sufficiently considered or responded to the potential harms of surrogacy. But Christie was replaced by Democrat Phil Murphy in 2016, and Murphy signed the most recent bill into law. The bill had been approved by the legislature along party lines. Surrogacy is not obviously a partisan issue—many of its critics are liberal feminists—but Republicans in New Jersey all voted against the bill or abstained.
Source Catholic News Agency
Washington D.C., Jun 2, 2018 / 06:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A proposal introduced earlier this year aims to expand the practice of surrogacy within the U.S. in an effort to include same-sex couples as surrogate parents and to loosen state supervision over surrogacy contracts.
The measure was proposed by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) with the goal of updating the Uniform Parentage Act, which provides the current model legislation for the legal rights of surrogacy practices within the U.S.
Source NorthJersey.com
New Jerseysans hoping to become parents but struggling to conceive children are now allowed to enter legally binding agreements with “gestational carriers” under a law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy.
In a flurry of activity this week, Murphy, a Democrat, also signed about a dozen other measures, including one to protect the Obama-era insurance mandate, and conditionally vetoed a handful more.
The measure authorizing gestational carrier agreements had twice been vetoed by Murphy’s predecessor, Republican Chris Christie, who worried about the “profound change” the practice could bring to how families are started.
Source NJ.com
New Jersey state law caught up to medical science Wednesday, when Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill that provides legal protection to New Jersey couples struggling with infertility and sign a contract with a woman willing to carry their child.
The New Jersey Gestational Carrier Act clarifies the law as it applies to women who, unlike surrogates, have no biological link to the fetus because the egg belongs to another woman.
Source CTV News
A new private member’s bill aims to remove the prospect of criminal charges for those who pay for and receive donated sperm and eggs, as well as surrogacy services.
Anthony Housefather, a Liberal MP representing the Montreal riding of Mount Royal, tabled the bill Tuesday, saying “criminalization is meant to eradicate societal evils. The desire to have a child or to help someone have a child is not evil.”
He said the criminal law should be changed and it should be left up to the provinces to regulate assisted human reproduction services. Provinces could choose to continue to prohibit compensation beyond expenses, set a cap on payouts, or leave it up to the free market, he said
