3 Principles for Proceeding with IVF & Surrogacy Parenting

 

Minnesota’s legislature is introducing a robust Uniform Parent Act, or UPA this week that will be focused on surrogacy rights and duties in that state.

In training my law students in this area of law I tend to focus on three principles that seem to be important guides for both policy, and client surrogacy or in vitro fertilization (IVF) decisions:

      1. State policy and legal guidance should help every client take personal responsibility for the children they conceive/create.  This intention helps to limit the options of destruction of or research on embryos, and causes serious reflection for creation and donation, as this decision and action is really when parenthood and parental rights begin.

      2. Therefore, only conceive/create those you are willing to parent.  This courageously challenges medical standards while empowering the intended parents to understand their role as parents from the outset.

      3. Ultimately these principles protect the child's interests above those of the adults in every case. The law will follow these principles as the legal standard for any case involving children is to always protect the best interests of the children.

These principles are even more important in light of the recent Alabama ruling, LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc., that loss of an embryo can present a claim for wrongful death. So if any new version of the UPA can work to enhance personal responsibility for parents that is a huge plus.  This does not deal with specifics, but helps a lawyer and his or her clients get their thoughts and objectives in order from the beginning of the process.

An article that may be of some help is A Hitchhiker's Guide to ART: Implementing Self-Governed Personally Responsible Decision-Making in the Context of Artificial Reproductive Technology, 39 Capital U. L. Rev. 413 (2011). It deals with a terrible malpractice action and it focuses on Ohio law and Virginia law as a comparative, but regardless of what the law allowed, all the potential parents involved had to make some challenging decisions - and those that stem from personal responsibility proved to be the most formidable, and what truly placed the child's interests above those of all the adults.

 

Family restoration and strengthening is possible with sound intentions.

Note: Thanks to True North Legal's Renee Carlson for the MN information in this post.