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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."
I guess I'm confused as to why they chose to froze her fertilized eggs instead of the eggs alone. Is there a scientific reason for choosing to freeze a fertilized egg over a non-fertilized egg? Since she was only with her boyfriend for five months and she was the one going through chemo, they should have had no reason to think his sperm would need to be preserved. I won't judge them though as I can imagine a cancer diagnosis can impact judgement, but I'm curious if one option was better than the other.
If a majority decision can't be reached than the status-quo basically gets maintained, the things sits frozen.
Just like if you die intestate and have two children and no spouse. Lets say you owned your house strait out for the sake of simplicity. Essentially both kids will have to reach an agreement on how to to dispose the property.
If they can't it will be pretty easy for either heir to ask the court require the thing simply be maintained, taxes paid etc out of the estates other funds, while a judge decides how to parcel out the estate fairly and what should be done. Same thing would probably happen here.
More interesting questions exist though. Lets say you and wife have some embryo's frozen as part of some assisted fertility process. It does not work, but their are left overs. You later get divorced, presently childless. She decides to try again and the implantation is successful. Can she come back for child support? Are you a dead beat dad if you want nothing to do with it?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Embryos seem just ripe for moral debates. Here's another one I've been thinking about recently.
The current most realistic way for humans to get to another star system is via a generation ship; it's the only way out there that doesn't require some sort of revolution in other technologies, such as long-term cryogenic hibernation or relativistic travel. Minimizing mass is of course absolutely critical. The most practical implementation would be to have a crew of three young, short-statured women with a family history of good fertility, a large embryo bank onboard, and appropriate facilities for implantation, with the embryos chosen for implantation in-transit also being female and from family histories of short stature and good fertility. One would try to maintain it so that there's always at least (but ideally not much more than) three people at or younger than a reasonably fertile age, so that there's a few chances to compensate should one woman prove infertile, die, or not wish to take part in furthering the population of the generation ship. Upbringing would be handled by the older generation, with the main focus of education being on medicine and repair skills. If a successful colony could be established on the other end then could a broader range of embryos be used to increase the genetic diversity, including males and people of larger stature and higher caloric consumption.
Now, best would be to start out with a staggered age for the initial crew of the generation ship and keep a staggered age throughout the transit. But here we start to get a problem. No ethics review board is going to approve the decision to, say, lock a six year old girl on a tiny, highly risky spacecraft for the rest of her life and give her a future responsibility to bear other peoples' children and then die in space. She's too young to give informed consent to such a monumental decision. Even if she were to travel with her mother, most ethics review panels would find that morally equivalent to a mother locking her child in a bunker for the rest of her life and refuse it. An infant is even worse - she couldn't even give uninformed consent, let alone informed. But the solution of only starting out the crew with informed consenting adults only postpones the issue. For each child they carry en-route is born without a choice in the matter, into a small, highly dangerous, probably uncomfortable craft with few to no peers, limited opportunities for enrichment, and no ability to leave the situation except death. Is that morally any better than sending young, non-consenting children to begin with?
"...but Republicans plan to come back with a new plan, where they just slash the tires on all the ambulances."
As with any business contract, party B would be free to buy party A out of their half of the contract. Presumably, this would absolve party A of owing any sort of child support later down the road.
Don't overcomplicate things. That's a good part of why our legal system is so corrupt.
You can't contract out of child support, much like you can't contract into slavery. You can write the contract, sure, but no court will enforce it. The only way to (currently) do so is to donate sperm to a state-endorsed sperm bank. If you simply just donate sperm you will still be on the hook for child support - this has already been tested in courts.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Yes, she can and she will. At least, you produced the sperm while still her husband and would-be father of her children.
If a sperm-donor can be hit for child-support, you would have not a chance. And not just in Kansas, Illinois too only makes exceptions for sperm donated "through medical channels involving a doctor".
It may work the other way too — a donor may get parental rights after an artificial insemination.
Presumably, with the rights comes a child support obligation as well — the two better be inseparable.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
The support is to provide for the needs of the child, not the mother. The right of child support belongs with the child, and not the mother. The mother is the custodian of the support. The mother can claim that she will never request child support, but the state can garnish money from the father whether the mother likes it or not. If the mother ever goes on welfare, WIC, or the child on medicare, the state will seek repayment for its expenses from the father regardless of the mother's thoughts on the matter.