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Who Owns Pre-Embryos?
An anonymous reader writes: Scientifically and legally, frozen embryos are not the same as a living child. Nevertheless, they can inspire legal battles that resemble custody disputes. This article follows a case between a couple who had been dating for five months when the woman received a cancer diagnosis. Before beginning chemotherapy, she and her boyfriend of five months decided to harvest and set aside some fertilized eggs, just in case. (If the treatment saved her but destroyed her ability to have kids, and the couple stayed together and decided they wanted kids, the pre-embryos would preserve that option.) She survived, but their relationship didn't. With no explicit contract in place, the disposition/custody of the pre-embryos is now hotly contested. "[R]eading over the case, one gets the sense that there's a fundamental lack of language to describe what's at stake. There may be an emerging field of law and legal precedent, but the terms at hand don't adequately capture the nature of the dispute."
Each 'contributor' owns 50%. No decision regarding the subject pre-embryo may be be made without a majority. Case closed.
So, what? You want to divide it in two and give each party one half? The problem you are missing is that one party may want to dispose of the pre-embryo while the other party may want to (eventually) birth and raise it. Those are mutually exclusive options.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Instead of the law trying to pick a winner on this one just make the law that the disposition of the embryos must be contracted before the service can be provided. Then have a very steep fine for any clinic that doesn't obtain and properly store that contract. Then mandate that there is a maintained copy of a "suggested" set of common contracts that are continually updated to reflect any edge cases that end up in the courts such as one of the partners become mentally incompetent etc.
This way some morality police lawmakers can't step in and turn this in to an abortion/anti-abortion debate where the actual consumer of these services then lose.
The woman apparently has said that she will not be demanding any support or anything more from the father.
Except that her agreeing to this now means nothing if circumstances change. If she falls on hard times in the future, the state may then go after the father for child support no matter what the couple agreed to previously.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Who Owns Pre-Embryos?
From a scientist: What the fuck is a pre-embryo.
the disposition/custody of the pre-embryos is now hotly contested.
No, it isnt. you're just substituting a made-up term for a real word and hoping it lends greater importance to the click bait. Eggs, Sperm, and Embryos are all components of human and mammalian reproduction. pre-embryos are some neoconservative evangelical dry-hump term used to justify strange ballot measures like outlawing masturbation or criminalizing miscarriage. in the interest of science lets clear this up. follow along at home with sed/grep/awk in TFA.
If the biomatter belongs to a specific person, then it is their biomatter. If you spit on a judge, your biomatter has incriminated you in the act of contempt. If you rape, then your vaginal secretion/sperm is accounted for by the prosecution during your trial as evidence and considered during sentencing. If you froze eggs, they're yours. At best the whole complaint here is a mysoginists tantrum.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"He cannot force her to give them up any more than he could force her to abort the fetus or give the child up for adoption"
So can she not force him to pay child support if it's her decision to keep them?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Should sperm not be seen as part of a man's body then? And what if the situation was reversed? What if the man began a new relationship with a woman who couldn't have children. Should the man then be given rights to have the eggs he fertilized with girlfriend 1 transferred to girlfriend 2's uterus?
If she keeps those eggs on ice for ages and then randomly decides to defrost them and germinate a few in her magic garden... then the guy is responsible child support.
No really.
Child support laws basically assume that birth control and the last 100 years of medical science didn't happen. The concept of them is that if she got pregnant in any fashion by your porn star energy drink... then you've apparently consented to be a daddy.
You go on a one night stand with a girl at a bar... use a condom... she says she's on the pill... she calls you six months 9 months later to tell you that you're a father... Congrats, you're playing child support.
Here some lackwit is going to say I'm not being a chivalrous gentleman. That's because chivalry is dead. Look, responsibilities and rights go hand in hand. When men were responsible for everything they had all the rights. And women didn't have any options. If they got knocked up they couldn't really do anything about it. And the culture of the time put great significance on being "chaste". If she already had some other dude's baby then it was a lot harder for her to get a husband which was a serious problem.
Today none of that applies but the child support laws don't care.
There was a dude that was literally drugged, woke up tied to a bed with a girl on top of him, he ejaculated in her because men really don't have any control over that if you're bouncing on top of them, he told the police about it immediately, the police did nothing, she got pregnant, gave birth, filed for child support, and the courts made him pay for her rape baby.
Yep.
So, the issue with those eggs set aside is child support. If she signs something to the effect that he's not on the hook for any of the child support... I'd see no reason for him to care one way or the other.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That's like saying you can rape your wife because, at one point, she gave consent. It's completely idiotic.
Sorry, but by the time they've split up, he has withdrawn consent, and if she wishes to have a child he has the right to say "not with my sperm you don't". What's that, you now can't have children unless they're mine? Too damned bad.
This is very different from forcing her to abort a fetus, because it's outside of her body and frozen -- which means it's a tissue sample until someone goes to fairly extraordinary lengths to put it back.
I don't think this is nearly as cut and dry as people think. You can't just say "it's her egg, and he's already knocked her up" ... because she isn't pregnant, and this isn't about what she can do with her own body.
Is her ex legally required to have a child with her now that they've split up? Because it's not like in most cases you knock up your ex long after the breakup.
Suddenly a tissue sample in cold storage comes down to "can she force him to have a child with her now"? Because since it's not in her body, it's not like that is the deciding factor.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
When it comes to abortion no one seems to care about the father's opinion or feelings on the matter even though without him there'd be no fetus. It's all about a "woman's choice" while utterly ignoring the other side of the equation. Western society in general seems to value females more than males. So I'm guessing this will end up the same way.
the state steps in and forces support for the benefit of the child
Humans respond to incentives. What the State actually accomplishes is encouraging mothers to get rid of the father because she'll get his money anyway (in the vast majority of the cases) without having to deal with him. While this outcome is predictable, empirical evidence has borne it out too. Broken households don't benefit the child, in the vast majority of cases (the empirical evidence bears this out too).
Besides, parents are the holders-in-trust of the child's rights, not the State. The State is a legal fiction and as such cannot hold any natural rights, so it's a non-sequitor. Yeah, they can send the boys in blue to enforce any arbitrary rule, but that's not sound moral reasoning.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've just been through this process and signed the appropriate contracts (in Norway).
When freezing embryos here, both parents sign an agreement that the embryos will be frozen for a maximum of five years, and that the explicit consent of both persons needs to be given before they are removed from the freezer, either for destruction or implantation. After five years they are destroyed anyway.
Problem solved.
If you'd say "until actual incubation of the egg in the woman's body" I'd agree. When the fertilised egg is implanted in her, either the natural way or via IVF or other artificial method, it's hers to decide whether to keep it or have it aborted or whatever. Do keep in mind that the implantation is not necessarily in the egg donor's body.
When fertilisation takes place outside of her body, as long as the egg/embryo remains outside of her body, both partners should be equally involved in what happens next. That's just sensible. If you claim the egg cell is the mother's and the mother's only, this should equally apply to the sperms being the man's and the man's only. Logic extension of this means that the combination of the two, a fertilised egg, belongs to both.
The moment the egg is implanted in a woman's body, things change: the woman who has the egg in her body should then be called the owner. Even if she's not the egg donor. I believe this part is already pretty well established when it comes to surrogate motherhood.
Worse: in Texas at least, you can be married, and gets pregnant via an affair. Now the biological father is a deadbeat; always has been. The husband files for devorce and the court slaps him with child support; out of the interest of the child of course.
Life is not for the lazy.