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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.
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?
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.
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.
http://www.rolereboot.org/sex-...
It isn't a fantasy... it is just rarely reported. Men don't run to the cops when they get coerced or forced into sex. At least usually not.
The reasons for this are many but it is still rape. And the fact of the matter is that under the law, if she gets pregnant, he's as responsible for the child as if it were not rape.
That's about as fucked up as forcing a woman to marry a man that rapes her. It is the same situation with reversed gender roles.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.